I don’t want to turn this into yet another health care debate, so I’m not going to respond to everything. Almost any option you’d pick would be “socialized medicine” to some people. Going to an NHS model would be very disruptive, but a Canadian model wouldn’t be.
And part of ACA is pushing for more evidence based medicine. Clearly the private option is not working at reducing costs. Insurance companies don’t want to reduce costs to you beyond what is needed to keep you in the system. They want to maximize their average profit by reducing what they pay to providers, but on the other hand support more volume. I haven’t seen a lot of push by insurance companies for evidence based medicine, and the recent surveys have shown vast differences between treatment costs for hospitals in the same cities. In a normal market that would push them all to the lowest costs - in ours due to reasons we have discussed here before it doesn’t work. Openness from government studies can help.
But that’s not the problem. The problem is that MRIs are considered an absolute necessity for any hospital which wants to stay competitive - even if the volume of users is not enough to make it profitable. Therefore doctors are going to feel pressure to have patients use the MRI “just in case” - which raises costs.
Cite? I assume your are talking about single payers systems that work through insurance companies versus NHS systems. If you mean our system versus single payer systems, no cite needed.
Do you have examples of insurance companies (versus doctors and hospitals and universities) driving new coverage methods?
Don’t you think they can offer lower prices outside the US because they get to rip us off? I’m okay with my health dollars subsidizing third world countries, but Canada and Norway? Not so much.
If we had a single payer system, maybe those doing insurance could get retrained and switch to more direct patient support, which has a lot more added value. Anyone who can navigate through our insurance system is plenty smart enough! Given how many people are underserved now, making health care more affordable will be a big job creator. Insurance companies are kind of legal high class bookies. Our economy would be better with these resources devoted to more useful things.
There is a story in one of the Frog and Toad books called “Cookies.” Someone - I think Toad, baked some delicious cookies and the friends can’t keep themselves from having just one more. Put them in a box? They can open the box. Put them on a high shelf? They can get a ladder bring the cookies down, and eat more.
Anything they do they can undo. It’s one of the best metaphors for mandated budget balancing I’ve ever seen.
Or even controlled deficit spending. I’m not a balanced budget hawk by any means, but a big flaw in the system was revealed during our recent economic unpleasantness. While spending was programmed into the system there was no flexibility that could deal with the sudden drop in revenues. We ran huge deficits not primarily because the spending was growing hugely - though it grew quickly - but because we have a system that assumes growth in spending even when income collapses.
Putting a system into place that accounts for that and allows for deficit spending where explicitly voted by Congress could be useful as a control and to cease the assumption of growth regardless of economic circumstances.
It’s not a problem of bankruptcy. It’s a problem of interest.
If you finance government spending by taxation, you collect the amount of taxes you need to pay for your spending. If you finance government by borrowing, you have to at some point collect the amount of taxes to pay for what you spent plus additional taxes to pay for the interest on the money you borrowed. It’s a system that makes everything the government spends money on cost more than its actual price.
Eliminate deficit spending and you can either have the same amount of government services for less taxes or a higher amount of government services for the same amount of taxes. Either way we come out ahead of how our current system works.
What I’m not seeing in these responses is who would benefit by a balanced budget. Balance it today and the unemployment rate would skyrocket. Conservatives act like government spending is equivalent to taking a match to a pile of currency. That money gets paid to people and corporations, who in turn patronize other people and corporations, who in turn pay taxes. The biggest problem facing the economy is unemployment, balancing the budget and doing silly things like killing the estate tax (the fairest tax of all) wouldn’t do anything positive to address it and would actually make it worse. So conservatives seem adept at proposing solutions that don’t work to problems that don’t exist.
I support a consumption tax not a sales tax. No one buys apple stock because they like playing with stock certificates. They do it to fund consumption later. That is an investment and investments should not be taxed.
Food inspections, prescription drug regulation, child labor laws, the center for disease control, college loans, scientific research of all types, weather forecasting, the census, and patents?
What on Earth are you talking about? How does the deficit keep employment rates up?
As I said, if you eliminated deficit spending, you could have the same amount of government services (with whatever employment benefit you get from that) but paid for with less taxes (which some argue also give you higher employment).
You’d also get another benefit. Eliminating deficit spending would eliminate government debt as an investment opportunity. So investment capital would instead have to find non-government opportunities.
There tends to be a relationship between populist economics and greater deficit spending as a ratio of GDP (e.g. California), so as expansive programs are created like universal health care, social security, etc. the danger of suffering something like Greece rises. Better to prevent a crisis than to solve one, I’d think.
Reagan is the best since he cut taxes by the most and spending was the lowest. Obama is the worst since spending is the highest under his administration.
I am aware of that, but it is a meaningless statistic since non-military discretionary federal spending is only 17% of the budget and GDP has never been higher. That is like saying if you ignore their top three players the Miami Heat were not a good basketball team last year. Aside from that one iceberg the Titanic did a really good job at sailing across the sea. Furthermore discretionary is a meaningless term in this context since the government can raise or lower spending in any category any time it wants to.
Here (pdf) is an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives arguing that moving from the current system to a mixed system would increase returns without having to increase taxes, increase the labor force participation rates, lessen the deadweight loss of taxation, and give a better return to the poor.
Confusion. One thing you say here that makes sense is that lower taxes can increase employment. But reducing government deficits is the opposite of cutting taxes. Lowering taxes increases the deficit. Government spending (paying salaries to soldiers, teachers, government contractors; and bailouts to keep GM and bank employees employed) also ***increases ***employment.
You’re conflating debt and deficit. Obviously they’re related, but deficits reflect present economic policy, while the debt is the cumulative sum of the past deficits caused by the economic liberals – Reagan and Bush Junior – in their pursuit of a Starve-the-Beast agenda.
I’ll ask again for other “economic conservatives” to answer my questions. Many self-styled “economic conservatives” support the Starve-the-Beast agenda, no?
Indeed, and for that reason I have trouble referring to them as economic conservatives. It becomes more ‘economic ideologues’ instead.
Now, I’m on record as being a lefty, true blue democrat and good on me. But I’m also fairly conservative on economic issues. But - while wandering close to ‘no true scotsman’ - I’d consider tax-and-spend far more conservative that ‘no-tax-and-spend’ which is what we’ve gotten out the conservative movement of late.
While a hard and fast balanced budget process isn’t useful - it lacks the flexibility inherently needed for a world-leading economy - some exercise of discipline and control and the limiting of debt and deficits are - to my mind - a good thing.
The Grover Norquist followers call themselves conservatives and are blindly devoted to tax cuts. I’m not that kind of conservative.
As I wrote above, I’d raise taxes in order to pay off the debt. And then when the debt’s paid off, I’d want a balance between taxes and spending with a goal of no deficit spending.
There are several issues on which I think he was wrong, but Goldwater was right when he opposed the Kennedy tax cuts. So I guess on this issue, I’m a Goldwater conservative.
Reagan did vastly increase spending but even so spending at the end of his term was lower than it has been any year since. Not the record of a real economic conservative but rather the best of a bad lot.