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Comment by mcny | Hacker News Reader

Why can’t we do the obvious:

1. increase income tax rates on everyone

2. Remove ceiling on payroll. Or call it a tax as well.

3. Slightly lower the floor for estate tax and close loopholes (like buying an insurance to inherit...) and slightly increase estate tax rates (I think 60% estate tax of the estate value over a limit of about $5M is fair).

4. Higher Medicare and social security tax rates to pay for Medicare for all.

I hate how people treat this as an unsolvable problem: the solution is obvious: increase taxes and cut expenses where we can. It isn’t that hard.

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1. You're proposing a linear increase in taxes to solve the problem of exponential growth of entitlements. Eventually you'll run out of GDP.

2. Doctors don't come out of assembly lines. Professionally trained medical staff is the biggest component of the Medicare blowout, and there is no easy way to increase supply in the short term. Dumping a lot of dollars into the Medicare system just drives up costs for everybody while shifting the limited supply of medical care around. From the perspective of the tax-paying middle-class, they'll be paying more into the system AND get worse medical care. That's the real political non-starter.

The answer to "why can't we" is that the benefits are diffused over the next decade+, while the pain is felt immediately. The problem is political.

Run for office and vote. That’s how you fix the problem.

This.

How many people complained about FDR's 'New Deal' as a bad thing - who weren't in the top 1%? The New Deal setup systems and infrastructure and laws to basically allow for a strong free enterprise system while ALSO reigning in crony capitalism.

I.e. regulated capitalism.

Since Reagan we've just been dismantling everything FDR got right, just to find out, hey those things were there for a reason. We need to go back to the tax rate that he had which was about 70% for incomes over 10 mill, or even 50% at 10, 75% at 50...

Alternately we could move to VAT + Land/Property taxes, and maybe Yang's UBI to offset the VAT for the poor. I don't see a VAT working w/out fixing some poverty issues first though...but I'm more thinking medicare for all needs to be the first.

It's the biggest social program with the most media attention, and I'd say of anything out there it has the most likelihood to gain momentum. UBI, College, Paid Maternity/Paternity - are pipe dreams if we can't muster the political capital for M4A.

The wealth tax that some candidates are pushing for would also possibly be a good thing.

The biggest thing though, I think we need to somehow change/streamline/modify how everything in congress works. There's TONS of money that just gets wasted that could work better via automation, combining two departments, re-thinking if a department is even needed - esp. if it only exists to enrich some constituent.

When designing medicare for all, we need to take congress out of the equation, instead we need to bring in physician groups, and economists and say here's what we're aiming for, come up w/ some proposals to make it the strongest possible plan for all parties -- without consideration to what it'll do for the pharma/insurance lobbies.

I mean, I trust scientists/mathematicians/accountants more to come up with sound economic theory/principles than a bunch of lawyers, and lay-people without experience doing that sort of thing. But for things like this and global warming, maybe Congress should sit back and let experts come up some solutions.

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