Bernie Tax Calculator
bernietax.com
bernietax.com
I find it amusing you think there is a free market for healthcare in the US.
Bernie's main idea is to destroy all forms of monopoly in various industries in the US - banks,healthcare. It's no different than state capitalism ( in USSR ).
Bernie is not against the free market. He wants single payer to leverage the free market in healthcare which is dominated by big players on the supply side.
You as an individual are free to afford whatever you want. But the govt's concern is improve the standard of living for the average citizen. And all of the world it has been proven time and again that single payer is the best system - empirically. So any arguments you make without any data but on some notion of "choice" will not be as convincing - sorry.
Without that bargaining power, he'll just push the entire health care industry private. That's already happening with Obamacare now (reference all of the health insurance companies stating they are considering withdrawing from the exchanges).
Of course, it's still dire for the health insurers because their customer base shrinks massively when private health insurance becomes a luxury to get people more expensive and faster specialist treatment as opposed to the only way to be able to afford to not die from expensively treatable ailments. But there's no reason to assume that some/most wouldn't continue to provide the option of more expensive and more exclusive healthcare for those that don't trust the publicly funded system or want to beat the queue.
>>You as an individual are free to afford whatever you want.
That is not actually true. I'm spent the afternoon searching for health insurance for my wife, who is pregnant, and trying to immigrate to the U.S. Thanks to the 2,000 pages of ACA regulation, there is no clause or loophole that allows us to purchase insurance for her. Your argument using 'data' is not sympathetic nor persuasive to me.
Government jobs are available. You can't really complain about something being "managed so poorly" unless you're one of the people in that organization trying to make it better.
Currently the U.S. has a system where doctors' offices need SEVERAL full time staff just to deal with insurance companies, which is insane and nothing like what I have seen elsewhere.
The problem is, with a government program, we're all forced to pay into it, no matter how good or bad the program actually is. When you are forced to pay for services from an organization, you have every right to complain about how poor those services are if you suffer because of them. If you expect that a government program will be great because Bernie hires the right people, what about the next President, and the President after that? The capabilities of individuals is government statistically by a bell curve and normal distribution. Even if you can select the very best person to manage that program for 4 years, the law of regression to the mean dictates that some future hire will be less capable. So how to we prevent mediocre people from eventually filling these positions, and thus wasting the money we are forced to pay in taxes to fund them?
Every single job or project has the risk of eventually being taken over by less competent people (or at least, people who didn't understand the entire original vision). Every taxpayer has to live with the fact that he or she won't agree with everything the government does with money. I would have personally loved to have contributed no tax money at all on the military wastes of the last decade, for example. Taxpayers don't really get to choose at a low granularity, otherwise everyone would find some way to cherry-pick to the point that nothing big could get done.
The way to fix it is to put skin in the game personally. Quit your job and apply to work for the government; or, write to a congressman and really press on them that you consider this important; or better yet, tell 50 of your friends and get some network effects; or join some larger group that petitions for change (as so many other groups do).
Consider that many other countries, mainly in Europe, have managed to put in place a single-payer healthcare system over the last 20-30 years. In the time span of governments and the legal system, this is the blink of an eye. Again, consider statistically that eventually someone incompetent is going to be put in place running one of these systems. This happens in government, and it happens in the private sector (how many firms are in the S&P 500 from 20 years ago?). The difference in the private sector is, when failure happens, individuals are free to choose a competing option, and are not forced to continue to pay for the failing one. I'm sure you've heard the lines about how competition in free markets (truly free, not highly regulated insurance) drive down prices too.
Consider also that no benefit system has lasted longer than a generation and been successfully managed by a federal-level government. The closest we have is Social Security, which is well on it's way to bankruptcy here in the U.S.
Furthermore, the great majority of what are considered good single-payer healthcare systems have been implemented in countries with Parliamentary Style Governments. What this means is when the party in power is no longer doing it's job, the citizens or opposing party can vote them out, more or less ASAP. The difference with this and our Constitutional Style Government is that if we elect the wrong person, or they put the wrong person in charge of our healthcare, we have very little power to change the situation for 4 years. In this sense, those Parliamentary Style Governments operate closer to what an actual free-market operates, giving their Citizens much more power over who runs and manages their single-payer healthcare system than we could.
The reason we haven't tried our own version of it is, because once it is implemented, it is very, very hard to change or roll back. Furthermore, as is with all the data coming out about Obamacare, it is very hard to actually judge whether such a program is actually successful.
Are you saying that the ACA is the reason your wife can't purchase health insurance?
The average voter does not have enough income to have an actual choice. The way it goes is that you pick your GP from a list (so you have a little bit of choice there), and when you have a significant issue, your GP works with a specialist and your insurance company to decide if you qualify for any further care. You can get it without the insurance helping you, but you are risking bankruptcy doing such.
As it stands, other countries spend less on health care with better outcomes. So we can definitely improve the system.
That being said, I'll support privatized healthcare if we can get the same done for police care and CPS. If you don't like the people protecting you, then you can get seek out new ones.
1. Eliminate incentives for employer-based insurance. Give legal protection to insurance cooperatives, where individual people could come together to buy insurance as a group.
2. Eliminate restrictions on buying insurance across state lines. This will take care of state-level regulations that drive costs up.
3. Eliminate artificial caps on the number of seats in medical schools, currently set by the AMA with government backing.
4. Loosen other requirements for medical licensure, like four years of undergraduate study in a totally unrelated program. Why are the people of America paying for Doctors' underwater basket-weaving courses? This and the previous point are a political minefield, so you can accomplish mostly the same by letting Nurses or Physicians Assistants to do most or all of a doctor's job. People can still choose to spend more on AMA-approved doctors, but it should be their own prerogative with their own money.
5. Institute an (at least initially) government-backed catastrophic insurance program for when people have ridiculous amounts of medical bills that they can't afford. This is probably what the market would have produced over the last century if not for government meddling.
6. High-deductible plans + health savings accounts are actually a pretty good idea. It puts people directly on the hook for their routine medical expenses, so they shop around and find lower prices.
Milton Friedman wrote a great piece with some of these ideas in 2001: http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2001winter/article...
Eliminate Certificate of Need programs for the establishment of new hospitals.
Along with your #3, you could work to increase the number of fellowships that doctors use to restrict the supply of doctors ready to replace them.
Make HSA dollars be giftable, and/or don't allow them to be use it or lose it.
Make all medical spending be tax-free.
Many have no healthcare providers.
> It's not just about how much in taxes you would pay; it's about the risk of you actually getting quality care for what you are forced to pay in taxes.
Americans face the same risk now. Many Americans have no effective access to health care, and, for example, hospital error is a leading cause of death (as of a few years ago, at least).
The rest of the rich world manages to implement national health care systems, pay (very roughly) half of what Americans pay, and get the same results - much better because all of their citizens receive health care. It seems unbelievable to me to suggest that the U.S. couldn't do the same.
Why would anyone insist on paying twice as much for a worse product? It is really a choice of dogmatic ideology over rationality.
And prescription drugs are too expensive, and currently Obama is trying to make that a reality all over the world, not just in the US, thanks to TPP and TTIP. Obama was also the one who banned Americans from buying cheaper meds from Canada to maintain Big Pharma's monopoly in the US.
Not sure I understand about going to a different healthcare provider. You can still go to a different hospital if one is too full.
Also the brackets don't match up with this analysis[2], though I have no idea who's right. That analysis also suggests Sanders' plan adds another employer-paid payroll tax of 6.2%! I'm not sure how that overlaps with the "Medicare for All" tax. Let's assume they're not cumulative. The result is still something like a real 60% marginal rate on a household with two $150,000 earners. Before state and local taxes, of course.
EDIT: No, of course, the 2.2% employee and 6.2% employer taxes are cumulative! It's disingenuous to imply that your wages aren't being taxed if your employer pays the tax instead of you.
[1] http://taxfoundation.org/article/details-and-analysis-senato...
[2] https://berniesanders.com/issues/strengthen-and-expand-socia...
https://berniesanders.com/issues/how-bernie-pays-for-his-pro...
The "more accurate" calculator linked from github is similarly limited.
What's interesting to me is that there's not yet a product-comparison-like table where you enter your income and relevant financial information (stocks, etc) and it would tell you how this candidate's tax idea would affect you. This calculator for Sander's idea is amazing, and I hope to see more of these for other candidates!
Uh, it's a tax calculator from a presidential candidate. How on Earth can you discuss that apolitically?
Personally between this calculator and the more in-depth calculator it links to, I'm not going to vote for any candidate that promise to cause me to lose ~$300/mo in disposable income.
The actual Adam Smith argument (that is, the one actually found in the Wealth of Nations [0]) is that different classes of people whose interests are more or less aligned with the public interest on matters of public affairs -- the former including both the landed aristocracy and wage laborers (though, in the latter case, he describes that class as being incapable of understanding their interest despite the fact that it is aligned with the common interest), the latter consisting of the capitalist class (though, not anticipating a term that would be coined around a century later than he wrote, he calls them "those who live by profit".) And that the last group is to be especially distrusted as their recommendations will consistently advance their own interest at the expense of the public interest.
Smith was advocating that people be aware of the fact that people tend to advocate in their own narrow self-interest in public affairs as a safeguard against the threat he saw from certain powerful groups doing that (and, particularly, the danger he saw from business proprietors -- who were both aware of their interests and had interests opposed to the general interests -- manipulating wage-earners -- who he saw as having interests aligned with the common interest but being ill-equipped to recognize either their own interests or the public interest or to advocate for either -- into supporting the interests of the owners.)
[0] Book I, Chapter XI, Part III, Conclusion of the Chapter
Sanders calculator says I'd be paying more.
The idea is that you wouldn't be the only one paying more. Real estate prices would need to come down as well, so everyone else buying a house would feel a similar crunch.
What it really comes down to is that the US has collected a lot of infrastructure debt over 30 years of budget austerity dating back to Reagan. Roads and bridges are crumbling, water systems are poisoning people, our education system is a joke, and there are a lot of people without access to health care.
These are all federal programs that have been cut over the last 30 years because we have been determined to make sure the US has the lowest tax rates in the industrialized world. As a result, it's one of the most run-down and least safe places in the industrialized world, and that trend isn't going to stop until we pick back up the investment in infrastructure. We leveraged our long-term prosperity for short-term growth, and it's about time to pay the piper.
"temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
As simple as that. Every one's worried, even the guy who is making $5 an hour, is dreaming it will be unfair to him to pay that tax, even if there is no realistic chance that he will see that kind of money ever.
Bay Area living is expensive because lots of people want to live there: There are more dollars chasing limited real estate and other resources. Making it "cheaper" by shifting around tax brackets based on how expensive it is will only make it more desirable to more people.
This plan will push the bay area in particular far to the right on the laffer curve. What'll happen to US GDP growth if the tech industry starts imploding and moving out? It's possible to make more in the bay area than in the rest of the country, but if you're only retaining 30% of that excess, all of which is soaked up by long-time landowners and the insane cost of living, why bother.
Purchase an expensive house on a big loan? Get a bigger reduction in federal tax liability than someone in a lower bracket that is buying a cheaper home.
We still don't really know what his tax plan is.
I heard him in an interview that the upper federal tax bracket will be 55%. This combined with state and local taxes means it will be closer to 75% (not including sales tax and countless other taxes that are paid).
It's just like in Norway and Sweden (the countries he wants to emulate). On paper, it looks like a small amount. But when it actually comes down to it, it makes it nearly impossible for even things like startups to thrive.
I also heard him say that the money will only come from 'greedy wallstreet executives' (I got a flyer in the mail saying exactly this).
I think many people will be in for a rude awakening when the middle class has to foot the bill for all of this and the system is substandard compared to the rest of the world.
Most of his corporate tax plans also seem to centre around preventing tax evasion and closing loopholes for massive businesses. If he's really modelling his system after European states, that likely means subsidies for small businesses.
How "reasonable" that seems would depend on from which side of the $250k mark you are looking at it. Of course it is an easy sell to convince people to vote for a tax they don't have to pay. But such is democracy... two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
I was curious.
What's the alternative to socialized healthcare? Everything staying the same? That's not going to fly.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/08/hospital-prices-cos...
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
The US has begun to track health care costs, and is beginning to make it public. Oklahoma Hospitals are publishing prices, leading to a free-market solution.
http://newsok.com/article/5434353
You no longer have to leave the US to take advantage of Medical Tourism! Furthermore, health care plans are now required to have some degree of out-of-network costs under the ACA, so you know that even in the worst case, medical tourism to Oklahoma will lead to clear and consistent pricing. Or if you have good out-of-network costs (ie: More typical of the higher-cost Gold or Platinum plans), medical tourism might be a very good idea for you.
Hopefully, other hospitals will notice the beneficial (and profitable) effects of medical tourism, and will join the hospital free market association. At which point, they'll start publishing health-care prices online to capture marketshare in the growing medical tourism industry.
It will take years before the market builds out the infrastructure, but America is actually well on its way to fixing the problem. I think we should hold the course with Obamacare. Lets not go left (Bernie) or right (Repeal), lets keep steady and see what happens.
Its mind-boggling to me that the right-wing doesn't like Obamacare in general. The major 'left wing' portions are:
1. Individual Mandate (but all Republicans agree that pre-existing conditions are bad, but they have no idea how to get rid of it)
2. The health care exchange website (Republicans don't seem to like new government programs at all)
And... that's about it. Everything else attempts to leverage the free market infrastructure to solve the problem.
The sad part is that it is even more insane than that. For most things we buy, we have the ability to either walk away and say no or we have the ability to wait. For health care, there are many times when the service is an immediate need, so there is rarely an ability to even refuse it (I mean, you could opt for letting a potential problem kill you, but at that point we have basically gutted the meaning of 'need').
Your employer should have no influence on health care decisions, which is one of the many reasons we need to fix our current system.
That's not what an HSA plan is.
I'm not OP, but OP's situation is pretty common, and it's more equivalent to employers offering 401(k) matching. They deposit a certain amount of money each month into your HSA account, though by law, you can only have an HSA account if you're on a high-deductible plan.
Generally, the only employers who offer this are the ones who have the money to offer very attractive benefits (ie, tech companies). This usually includes covering part or all of employees' premiums, so their employees usually don't pick the government-mandated HMO plan option (it ends up not being any cheaper for them to choose the more restrictive plan).
Overall though, health care should not be tied to your employment.
Yes, I agree.
> So you're paying for most normal medical expenses out of pocket, and your insurance plan is basically a backstop for if you get cancer, have an accident, etc.
That's literally what insurance is supposed to be: a financial mechanism for smoothing risk. The actuarial price for insurance on routine events will be exactly the same as paying for those routine events directly.
Economically and financially, "insurance" is explicitly not supposed to cover predictable, routine costs, because there is no risk associated with them. It is a really terrible and unfortunate misnomer that we call this "insurance", because it's not. You wouldn't expect your collision insurance to cover your annual DMV fees.
If you want normal, routine medical expenses to be priced below cost, then you're talking about a subsidy. But a subsidy is not insurance. Insurance pools money from at-risk parties. A subsidy is a transfer of wealth.
To be honest, it's perfectly fine to advocate that if that's what you really want, but it's misleading to call this "insurance", because it serves a completely different goal (wealth transfer vs. risk pooling).
Yes, and don't forget about the foregone tax savings from having an HSA account in the first place (which this site does not take into account).
This site is a great example of how incomplete information can be misleading. For most people reading this site, the bulk of the impact would not be from the income tax or the health insurance costs, but the secondary impact that Sanders's plans would have on their other assets.
it makes it nearly impossible for even things like startups to thrive.
If you want to focus on things that hurt startups, focus on the lack of investors outside Silicon Vally.
No, just because a tax is levied on individuals doesn't mean the effects of the tax are limited to individuals.
(In fact, just because a tax is levied on one party doesn't even mean that party is the one really paying for it, in the end! This is the concept of tax incidence, which determines the entities who really feel the burden of any individual tax, independently of where it's collected).
And more than a few start ups cater to upper middle class folks with cash to burn.
https://berniesanders.com/issues/how-bernie-pays-for-his-pro...
I heard him in an interview that the upper federal tax bracket will be 55%. This combined with state and local taxes means it will be closer to 75% (not including sales tax and countless other taxes that are paid).
It's just like in Norway and Sweden (the countries he wants to emulate). On paper, it looks like a small amount. But when it actually comes down to it, it makes it nearly impossible for even things like startups to thrive.
Not an executive of any kind and can barely afford to raise one kid in a tiny apartment in NYC. According to this calculator, under Bernie's tax plan I will have pay more tax equivalent to one month of disposable income.
So yeah, it's almost certain that whatever Bernie promised, will be, as it always be, paid by the upper middle class.
The 55% rate is for people who make ten million dollars a year.
... which (if true) is a fine and factual comment for HN.
I think American youth has developed a sense of entitlement and no clue about rest of the world, that is why people like Bernie are getting such support.
I pay a substantially higher percentage of my income here in taxes than I did in the USA, out of a substantially lower salary than I made in the USA. Still totally worth it to live in a place with functional social services and infrastructure, and affordable (outside Amsterdam) housing.
I can tell you corruption is way worse under a more capitalist society. Reason is simple, if people are making nice profits why not ask them to pay a little extra bribe.
Every one starting from the government to the private citizen is involved. Scams run in the tune lacs of crores, government servants think they are entitled to a bribe, you will be hard pressed to get a driving license without greasing some one's palms(I was asked by a license agent, why I was worked up about paying a bribe while I was getting paid well as a programmer), the postman thinks if he delivers a important document like a passport he deserves a bribe(because you are going to US, and will earn well anyway, why not pay me a bribe tip here), clerks in the income tax office rake up all kind of false flags when questioned they will tell you, they put it out if you pay a small bribe. The list is endless. Every single activity or a movement of a file, has a bribe fee on it. Every single one, no matter what activity you do.
Lastly this isn't just government corruption. Private companies have rampant corruption issues. Even in top MNC's managers routinely favor people from their states and people who speak their mother tongue. Promotions, raise, stock bonuses, salary bonuses, foreign travel and many such things are decided based on which state you come from, which language you talk, may be even caste and religion too. God save if you, if you don't have a match with your manager.
But surprisingly every body thinks, every one apart from them is corrupt. So corruption is somebody else's problem. The very same manager who cheats openly will complain why India isn't making progress because of corruption. Irony.
One guy even told me he was not cheating or doing anything wrong. He was simply "Helping" people from his state.
I remember we had to bribe a local fair price to get sugar and better quality rice. Those days are over long back.
Also I don't see private company managers favoring people from their state of region as a corruption. It all depends on company's internal policies and whether they can run profitably under those cases or not.
Everything that I wrote, right from the prime minister's office to ordinary man on the street is public knowledge.
>>definition of corruption with something that you think is wrong.
If you think corruption is only when a printed note is exchanged, I wouldn't be surprised to see why its so hard to eliminate corruption in India. Bulk of the corruption doesn't see any exchange in money. Its the favors and grants that are exchanged in way that facilitate further ease in earning money. Bargaining ministries, portfolios, license et al work this way. Heck bulk of the corruption in the Media in India doesn't even involve money.
>>I remember we had to bribe a local fair price to get sugar and better quality rice. Those days are over long back.
When did you leave India? This was the scenario circa pre 1995. I don't even know any one close, even my relatives who are poor who take rations from government fair price since more than a decade and a half. I think only BPL people get it these days.
>>Also I don't see private company managers favoring people from their state of region as a corruption.
So true, most beneficiaries of a scam rarely see the scam as a scam. They see this as an one time opportunity to get ahead, and others are supposed to lie down and co operate.
Like I said before, most managers who do this think they are just "helping" their pets.
>>It all depends on company's internal policies and whether they can run profitably under those cases or not.
A manager openly manipulates employee ratings, discriminates on the basis of language, geography, caste or religion. The person in full knowledge hands out rewards to people who don't deserve. And denies and discriminates against those who do. Not only do you see nothing wrong in it, you seem to be justifying it.
Hardly surprising, why its considered impossible to eliminate corruption in India.
Socialism, in the context of poverty, inherently leads to corruption. This is something that's hard to understand for people who've only ever seen socialism and communism in countries that are already quite wealthy (e.g. Western Europe).
I say this as someone who is from West Bengal, which has had the world's longest-serving, democratically-elected Communist government.
As an Indian, who has experience working in the U.S.A here are statistics for you. Close to 50% in US pay taxes(Almost everybody working is paying taxes), in India close to 3% are paying taxes.
I can't even imagine the level of chaos, resentment and strife that will follow any attempt by the government to bring more people into the tax base. I have relatives and friends with small businesses and shops, who don't pay a rupee in taxes, nor do they think they need to or have any responsibility to pay. I know almost any body in that position(Nearly all of India) does the same. But every one thinks, they are entitled to development. They are entitled to roads, highways, airports, energy infrastructure, irrigation infrastructure, defence and what not; all for free.
I'm not least bit surprised US citizens who pay that much taxes, expecting things in return. Not to say that they don't get a good deal already.
But if I were to paying up 50% of my income to bail out bankers I would probably be equally pissed.
> As for the world’s second major propaganda system, association of socialism with the Soviet Union and its clients serves as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce conformity and obedience to the State capitalist institutions, to ensure that the necessity to rent oneself to the owners and managers of these institutions will be regarded as virtually a natural law, the only alternative to the ‘socialist’ dungeon.
> The Soviet leadership thus portrays itself as socialist to protect its right to wield the club, and Western ideologists adopt the same pretense in order to forestall the threat of a more free and just society. This joint attack on socialism has been highly effective in undermining it in the modern period.
Source: https://chomsky.info/1986____/
I don't necessarily agree with Chomsky but "I was there mannnn" and "if you disagree with me you're young and naive" is not the standard of discussion we should hold ourselves to.
A lot of historians would strongly disagree with Chomsky here. The leaders of the Soviet Union were true believers who acted as they did to bring about communism. Here's a good interview with one such historian, a professor a Princeton: http://www.hoover.org/research/hoover-fellow-stephen-kotkin-... . I believe the relevant bits are in part 2.
Chomsky is a great linguist, but when it comes to politics, I don't give his views much weight. You only need to look at what his buddy Chavez was doing in Venezuela, while Chomsky was singing his praises among leftist intelligentsia.
The USSR said it was implementing communism (not socialism), but really implemented a brutal totalitarian dicatorship.
Its not really possible to be implement communism without dictatorship of some kind.
The moment you seize power, the very first thing you will realize is you need money to run your schemes. But there is only that much available, and that pool too is dwindling over time. Anybody good is taxed beyond their share, so they are always moving out to greener pastures, reducing your spending pool further. Pretty much everyone else thinks, its everybody else's job to work and make for them. So no one's contributing, but expecting the party to continue.
Its basically a giant negative feedback loop in a system that's amplifying what's coming in. And that is playing out at the scale of a country's economy.
Now to control it all, you need to prevent people moving out(defectors), you need to continuously control what sort of information is fed to your masses, you need to control nearly everything there is to control because any deviation means people will stray away to create their own merit based islands. And if those islands get powerful, they can pull down the regime.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't describe the history of the USSR or the Bolshevik Revolution; that was a brutal dictatorship from the start. I read in one history how Lenin controlled regions by keeping them on the precipice of starvation - anger him and rations would be reduced further. Taxes don't seem like they would be much of an issue to those people.
I've never heard taxes discussed in regard to the USSR; when the government owns everything and provides all goods and income (or close to it) I'm not sure what would be taxed.
I really think Bernie is best penned down as a "social democrat". I don't understand why he calls himself a socialist?
Also, I do recall that Linux comes from Finland.
Finland: http://startup100.net/ Norway: http://torgronsund.com/norwegianstartups/
Plus, even if there were hundreds of hot Finnish startups (there is a site that measures them actually, but I'm not Finnish so I know little about their scene) they wouldn't have exposure in the US since the US is so US-centric. Hell I'm not American so all I know of startups in the US is what I see here.
And a little note on HDI (used to measure quality of life/human development) - its skewed in favour of the US because it measures average income, not taking into account the fact Americans pay extra for health care while Europeans include it in taxes/exclude it from income calculations. Even then several Euro states beat the US.
That's exactly how I'd describe it. At least under communism the leader wasn't most likely the richest man in the world.