Do you? You’d be another straight, white, probably Christian, certainly male then:
Actual amount spent on healthcare – including out-of-pocket payments, Medicare, Medicaid, VA, private health insurance, etc. – in 2014 was $3 trillion, but the breakdownis this:
Of that $3 trillion:
[ul]
[li]73% of monies spent came from health insurance.[/li][/ul]
Of that 73%:
[ul]
[li]33% of the health insurance was private insurance; [/li][li]10% of was Medicaid (federal payments); [/li][li]20% was Medicare;[/li][li]4% was VA, DoD, and CHIP;[/li][li]6% was Medicaid state and local.[/li][/ul]
Government programs as a percentage of overall healthcare spending are fairly low on the list.
Don’t you read blogs? 
The portion of income siphoned off by the top 1% is much greater today than it was throughout the middle of the 20th century. It’s a left-wing talking point that the funds once used for public purposes now feed the consumption of the super-rich … but, political talking-point or not, it is a true point.
This familiar reasoning pattern lets the tail wag the dog. Social Security is a self-financing pension program; relating it to the rest of the federal budget is ignorant.
Medicare is not self-financing, but its high costs reflect the high costs of healthcare in this country. As I tried to suggest in the post before yours, but without fully connecting the dots, those costs must be assumed by either the private or public sector unless we reduce health-care coverage or lower its costs.
Figuring out how to reduce health-care costs is very important but beyond the scope of this thread (beyond noting that the GOP-led bonanza for Big Pharma is not part of a solution). But it’s very misleading to blame the government-paid portion of those high costs on government, or to suggest that such transfer payments must be offset by reductions in public works.
[quote=“up_the_junction, post:21, topic:747700”]
Do you? You’d be another straight, white, probably Christian, certainly male then:
[/QUOTE]The country was 85% white in 1960. That means that ANYTHING that was for the benefit of everyone was predominantly for the benefit of white people. And the numbers have changed, but white people are still a majority.
And ultimately, when it was a golden age for 85% of the population, that’s hard to argue that it wasn’t a golden age. Even the other “golden ages” in history have had their small groups of people for whom it was at best, a pot metal age.
Hoover Dam - $750 million in current dollars
Gateway Arch - $180 million in current dollars
Central artery/Tunnel Project AKA “Boston Big Dig” - $24.3 billion
One World Trade Center AKA “Freedom Tower” AKA “Tallest building in North America” - $3.9 billion
Dulles Transit Extension, Washington DC - $6.2 billion
Otay Mesa East land port, San Diego, CA - $716 million
Chicago O’Hare Modernization - $8 billion
Crescent Rail Corridor Expansion - $9 billion
Phillips 66 LPG Export Facility - $1 billion
Manhattan Hudson Yards development - $20 billion
New NY Bridge (Tappan Zee Bridge replacement) - $3.9 billion
National September 11 Memorial & Museum - about $500 million (I think)
18 million people in 1960 said otherwise. Have you heard the phrase representative democracy.
The great problem is if you don’t deal with inequality in the good times it comes back ten fold in the hard. And right now, you have an almighty fuck up of a dysfunctional, institutionally racist, non-society.
I think there’s less inclination to have to deal with those issues during the “good times” because even for the marginalized groups, things aren’t so bad.
It’s later when you start having wars and economic downturns that the marginalized groups start to feel the effects of inequality more acutely.
I don’t get it- women only made up 15% of the population back then?
Awesome. You’re just gonna ignore any cite that disagrees with your view. I suppose you think the Golden Age is better without healthcare. What was the interest payments in the 50’s for debt piled up during WW II?
I just read a fascinating book, “The Road Taken” by Henry Petroski. The US infrastructure is deteriorating and no one has any plans to do much about it. It is not quite true that no provision was made for maintenance of the Interstate system; it was assumed that things like gasoline taxes would go up with inflation and they haven’t. And taxes in general are held down. Maybe something will be done if a few more bridges fall down or there is a major dam disaster.
And taxes are much lower today. Yes revenues are up but so is the population. In 1960, the highest marginal rate of income tax was 91%. And the amount of money going to defense is obscene. And counter-productive. Except for Gulf I and Grenada, the US has not won a war since WWII. Viet Nam was a disaster. Korea was a semi-success. All the rest have ended no better than they started, often much worse.
I wonder how much some of the older projects would cost if built today. I haven’t found a good apples/apples comparison. I expect some differences in labor costs and environmental review, but I’m not sure how much, or what else factors in.
Yeah, right. The Golden Age when girls and coloreds were kept from the top, when there were no homosexuals, when wife and child beating and rape were de facto legal, and most of all, when there was no such concept as “environmentalism.” The planet was damn near made hostile to people, but heh, things were better then.
Did you not see that the first two “older projects” were listed with costs in current dollars?
But yeah, per Annie-Xmas, deny decent jobs to women and minorities, and it will be a golden age for White Men as they rush to fill all the jobs that are “freed up” for them.
$1.3 Trillion spent so far on the F-35 fighter jet. Think how many roads and bridges that money could improve. We’re not spending less, we just have fucked up priorities.
Do you not understand the difference between “current dollars” but still built 50+ years ago and actually building it today?
Like using modern technology?
Well, I suppose we could look at China’s Three Gorges Dam as a comparison. It cost an estimated $26 billion US, compared to $750 million in current US for the Hoover Dam. But three Gorges is something like six times the size of the Hoover Dam and generates eleven times as much power. Plus I think there were some additional costs to relocate 1.5 million Chinese people.
But in the US, the main limiting factor is that there aren’t a whole lot of places to put Hoover Dam sized dams anymore.
Modern technology, modern environmental regulations, labor rules, infrastructure, etc. I expect some of those to make things cheaper, and some to make things more expensive.
I thought of nuclear power plants. The oldest operational reactor that I know of is at Nine Mile Point in NY. That 600 MW reactor cost $800MM in 2007 dollars and started commercial operation in 1969. But the second unit started commercial operation 20 years later and cost 10x as much (inflation adjusted) for only twice the capacity.
Now these aren’t the same design. I don’t know how much of the cost difference is from the newer GE BWR or other factors.
Recall that we typically look at a consumer basket of goods for a deflator, but other prices can vary wildly.
I’m guessing you haven’t been to the Lincoln and MLK memorials.
Would you like to explain what your point is? BobLibDem said that building of new memorials is rare today. He was wrong. Four large memorials have been built in DC in the past generation: Korean War Memorial, National WWII Memorial, FDR and MLK Memorials. Who knows how many small memorials have built in DC, let alone the whole country?
It is simply not the case that government is smaller now than in the ‘Golden Age’, or is collecting less tax money, or is spending less. Rather, it is the case that certain things are vacuuming up a large share of government money, leaving less money for repairing interstates and unsexy things like that. Health care, Social Security, public schools, the military, and pensions for government employees are vacuum up enormous amounts of money that are growing every year. As they take up more, there’s less money left over for everything else, even though taxes are higher now than in 1950.