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Comment by ddxxdd | Hacker News Reader

I'll be more inclined to listen to diatribes about the inevitability of America's economic decline when we no longer have the highest corporate tax rates in the world.

Until then, I firmly place the blame of America's economic woes on one political party. Hint: it's the party of higher taxes.

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Huh? America can be economically ascendant - we have a LOT of businesses doing quite well with massive profits and cash holdings, tax rates completely aside - without being dominant in every single industry. Regional drug addiction trends are NOT national economic issues (the national economy has been going up at the same time as the opiod abuse!), but plainly regional ones.

What specific parts of the opiod issue do you think a lower corporate tax rate will fix?

The thing that I don't get about this opioid crisis is I keep hearing about it but I have never really seen the corresponding human misery being captured in photography or film -- I see and hear words but I can't gauge the magnitude of the problem. Is this mainly prescription opiates? That's an issue with with the ethics of medical professionals more than anything else -- if you have a low threshold to prescribe this shit what the hell bdo you expect?

Update: found a nice heat map from NY Times; still the issue is there are no absolute numbers or the table that shows how the color gradient in the heat map progresses -- I get tall tales of year over year percentage increases but no absolute numbers to reference against. Is it really that hard to make a decent chart/graphic for this for a org like NYT?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/faces-of-an-ep... will give you some human form

Prescription opiates that lead to street drugs like heroin or illicitly-sourced ones after the prescription runs out, is my understanding. I don't know how the numbers break down in terms of initial exposure - how many bored desparate people were seeking a release, how many people got injured and then got hooked, etc...? But when we end up talking about drugs designed for 2,000lb elephants, it doesn't seem purely a problem of doctors/pharmacists, people are getting it from some unofficial sources.

Read also https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-tha... for some context. In my opinion it shows how 'marketing' in pharma is a recepie for a disaster.

Thanks for the link. Found some data: https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o... -- and also found this gem http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/drug-use/b... This looks more like a symptom unique to specific countries, when you consider accuracy of data and the penalty for trafficking by jurisdictions.

If you've got Netflix, check out "Dope." Episode 2 is most applicable to the opioid crisis, but the other episodes are all worth a watch too.

> highest corporate tax rates in the world

You might have missed the tax law that just passed, greatly lowering those rates.

Regardless, the statutory rate isn't important; the question is, how much do corporations actually pay after deductions, etc. The rate was 35%, but U.S. corporations actually paid around 20%. Also, overall taxes paid by Americans is among the lowest in the OECD.

http://time.com/money/4862673/us-tax-burden-vs-oecd-countrie...

Wow. Corporate taxes cause drug addiction? Is there any evil that cannot be solved through lower taxes?

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