Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Medicare for All’ Math
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
“The top 1 percent [...] would pay taxes on increases in investment value annually, instead of waiting until assets are sold.”
Taxing all stockholders of a company on the fiction that they all could have sold all their shares at the maximum possible price, without crashing the price, is naively out of touch with how markets actually work.
Investments, especially stock, have no precise value until they are sold. It’s unfair to preemptively tax a capital gain before the capital gain has occurred. Otherwise the IRS will assess your unsold Beanie Baby net worth to have increased by $14k and tax you on 20% of it come the end of the year when in fact it turns out your collection has no resale value at all on an open market.
This is just as silly as market cap — the idea that just because someone paid $X to buy 0.1% of a company that’s currently in high demand and short supply it does not follow that, should every stock holder suddenly decide to panic sell 100% of the company, they would collectively get $X,000 in return.
Taxing the flow of money is the only moral way a government can bring in revenue and the only way to increase that revenue is to raise taxes. Higher income tax and higher capital gains tax means the more you benefit from sharing this society with everyone else, the more responsibility you take for funding it through taxation.
Also, taxing the flow of money is not enough. Earning more in investments than you spend is pretty much the entirety of getting wealthy in the first place. If you only tax money flows, you're doing very little to combat inequality at a fundamental level, and at the same time leaving open giant loopholes to avoid paying taxes for things like MfA.
A home gets assessed and taxes paid based on the current market worth, not just when sold.
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/11/01/warrens-perp...
As well as the more rational avenues through which Medicare for All could be funded:
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/10/30/how-to-appro...
That's just one sensible (I think) proposal. We don't need to refinance the current system, we need to completely reengineer it.
This is probably an unpopular opinion so I'll add: I'm not a billionaire, I'm not even a millionaire, and I know there's a lot of valid (but not necessarily good) arguments for why rich people deserve to pay more. But my moral compass is spinning.
Think of it not so much as reverse-discrimination, but rather a revolution. Returning the economic system to something that works, instead of the broken dysfunctional mess its gotten into.
I agree we need more than tax adjustments to complete the task. The paths money follows need realigning, back to something like they used to follow in the 70's or something. But its a start.
Changing the rules back, is no more or less moral.
Its fine if we all borrow money from BG and friends, to create businesses, and the profits are bled back to BG&F as interest etc. So we create value, but its almost all for them?
Of course money gets moved around. But its important to understand the flows. And the flows are all to the rich, so they get richer. This is so well understood, I have to suspect the simplistic comments as trolling.
How about an estate tax of 100% over 10 million, 0 under 10 mill. That's plenty of money for anybody, and puts the money back in play.
Honestly, if i were filthy rich, my kids wouldn't get a ton of that money. I want my posterity to be self-enablers, not born with golden spoons like Trump and others.
Though, I think the best way to pay for this is MANY different ways: Companies already pay healthcare --make them keep paying that just as a tax to the pool for everyone's care.
Create a VAT tax that's something like 5%, 10% for non-residents. (Bonus this makes it so illegal/legal visitors from other countries actually pay more in taxes (at least VAT) than we do so people shut up about "those lazy immigrants don't contribute nothin'" -- now they do, so shut up about it.
Next we need to do whatever we can to get our bottom tier of American's to rise higher. The higher they rise the more they spend locally, the more VAT they pay, the more income tax they pay. GBI could help, or just free education, or re-trainment programs for lost jobs or those in shitty jobs who want to move up to something better.
America's also desperately facing infrastructure issues all over the place from falling bridges to natural disasters destroying things. We need a guaranteed jobs bill where anyone who wants work gets to work.
We also can legalize and tax Marijuana and natural psychedelics and decriminalize. This puts more people to work -can't work in jail, and increases tax flows.
A tax on speculation could also help as well. What about a foreign tax on property. All property owned by non U.S. citizens has a 10%/year tax -- make China pay for our healthcare!
A small 1% tax on all NYSE/Nasdaq trades. Again lots of foreign money circulates through there so some of that tax will come from foreign investors.
Find other ways to save money. Maybe cut the military budget 50%. Cut foreign aid. Close down some air bases and get rid of a lot of our out-of-america buildings/offices/etc. Let's stop being 'police of the world' and focus more on homeland security and our own borders.
Most people on the left are trying hard to make the rich pay for all this, when a lot of the middle class and lower class would be happy to chip in. Sure we all can't afford a million/year but 1k per 20k of income in medical tax from every working American should be do-able. If the average family makes $50k that's 1 trillion/year. If an employer is required to pay $5k/year/employee we now have 2 trillion/year allotted for M4All.
There's definitely wiggle room. Or they could just do 500/20k income w/ no caps... that would make someone earning 2 billion/year paying 10 million/year -- a drop in a bucket for them, and a win for everyone.
Forget about stocks. How about if I just put money in a savings account? What happens to that money?
I'd suggest that even if Bill Gates is shoving money under his mattress it still might be doing work. What if there's a set amount of money Bill wants to have in case things go poorly. He shoves that amount under the mattress.
Is the money under the mattress doing anything? Technically, no but in another sense what it's doing is allowing Bill to invest in what ever other riskier things he's like to do. If you say well, we should take the money under Bill's mattress he's not using it, it may well be that Bill will just remove money from investments to replenish that money.
Let me put this another way...
Say you own 5 houses. You don't much need any extra income, so you don't waste time Airbnb'ing them or anything.
When you're not using them, they basically just sit unoccupied. These are maybe 5-10 bedroom houses. 1-2 families could live in these, but no -- someone somewhere is homeless while you have abundance that you don't actually need. I mean could you not afford to rend a studio or small apartment if you needed to visit NY or Florida, or Seattle?
The point is that people have more money than they know what to do w/ and also that generational wealth is also a huge issue.
Not saying we take everything but we need trickle down economics failed miserably.
You could continue to spend the same amount of money and have healthcare free at the point of delivery for all.
Also why are you standing up for ultra rich? They have enough power and influence to stand up for themselves. Somehow they never stand for the poor.
I'm very much in favor of Medicare for All as a whole as it's shown to definitely bring down the average cost per American as well as remove the middle-man insurance companies taking their cut and give the government better leverage against drug prices and services. However, considering many proposed M4A plans are covering green card holders and undocumented workers, it would be nice to know that citizens abroad could be in the loop too with a name like "for all".
Also, can change the abbreviated version to "M∀"?
Social Security is 12.4%, Medicare is 2.9%.
From an election standpoint, it also seems like a good way to galvanize the support bases - something that presidential candidates are looking for currently.
100% tax of company profits at end of the year use or lose all the income earned.
Basically make it impossible for corruption/self-enrichment at the expense of others.
Also make insurance a national thing, i.e. plans cross state-lines. How much money is wasted because an insurer needs to hire people who know the laws of utah, more people to work within the laws of AZ, etc... and create plans centered around different states and their nuances?
If we can streamline some of this stuff, and make it uniform across the nation maybe they save money and pass that savings to us.
(I say this as possible solutions to the non-profit thing, but I'm a huge supporter of Single-payer). There's other options on the table for sure, but something definitely needs to change. Better we bankrupt the entire country than 100k people die from Cancer over the next 10 years who could've lived, had children, and one of those children end up discovering FTL drives or curing Global Warming.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.