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Comment by raiyu | Hacker News Reader

The things that affect me most directly in life are education, health and housing.

Neither one of these is getting fixed by simply increasing tax revenue alone.

When I goto the hospital and get an MRI and get billed through insurance and the cost is $2,000 and out of pocket I can pay $200 for the same procedure that looks like legalized fraud.

The same can be said for education. When the majority of student loans are given in such a way that a student can't default out of it, it reduces the risk on the lending party and so they give out a ton of cash and prefer the interest payments later on which raises the price of education.

Property taxes are also inherently low and should be raised and redistributed to lower income neighborhoods especially when so much property is already in the hands of the wealthy.

I would love to see higher property taxes because I have more faith in local governments than the larger bureaucracy.

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I look at the bay area, and I almost feel the opposite in faith of 'smaller' governments constantly failing prisoner dilemma coordination problems with NIMBYism and a lack of an ability to make a asia-level metro area transit system. Small governments get little sunlight.

Some people and corporations are getting obscenely, criminally wealthy by profiting from education, healthcare, and housing. I'm theorizing that if taxes were high enough such that it was impossible to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth in these sectors (and others) we could focus our efforts to provide these things to members of our society without interference by profiteers.

I think that's where regulation comes in rather than taxes.

Think of it like this if I'm in an industry and polluting the river. Do you want to raise taxes on me so that I stop polluting, or do you want to just make that illegal?

When there are things that completely don't make sense I don't think taxes are the solution.

If I can buy a house which costs more than education in a lot of cases with a mortgage and then declare bankruptcy and not have the mortgage follow me for the rest of my life why can't I do the same with a student loan? Taxing the student loan companies won't solve that.

Similarly for the large disparity in prices for healthcare for out of pocket vs through insurance.

>> Think of it like this if I'm in an industry and polluting the river. Do you want to raise taxes on me so that I stop polluting, or do you want to just make that illegal?

Well, I think that it mostly is illegal right now, but the penalties are either so insignificant as to be considered just an inevitable cost of doing business; and the companies with an incentive to save costs by polluting will support legislation and lawmakers who will do things like dismantle the EPA or eliminate fines for these destructive acts.

I don't think taxes per se are the way to change behavior permanently. I just think it is the easiest way right now to make it so that it is difficult or impossible to make ungodly amounts of money by hurting people and the environment. Ideally we could solve all of these problems without things like taxes or laws but my utopia isn't quite here yet.

> or do you want to just make that illegal?

The problem is, once you're rich enough, you can start paying off congressmen to pass the laws that remove regulations and make the thing legal again. Look at the US gov't for the past 3 decades...

The only solution is preventing any one person from having so much power over others -- power which comes solely from their wealth.

>> If I can buy a house which costs more than education in a lot of cases with a mortgage and then declare bankruptcy and not have the mortgage follow me for the rest of my life why can't I do the same with a student loan?

Because the lender can at least recover the house you secured the mortgage against.

The problem is that the group collecting the lion's share of the economic rents from healthcare is not insurance or pharmaceutical company executives, but doctors and nurses. Pretending that executives are responsible for ever-increasing healthcare costs is very popular, but (almost) completely untrue.

That's a strange claim to make even if it is factually correct (of course the majority of costs in the industry go to the thousands of front-line workers, and not the few executives) and not even really what I'm saying. It's the profit motive of the entire "healthcare industry" that I have a problem with, which is at odds with what people actually need ("healthcare"). If it were not so possible to extract wealth from the fact that people need health care, food, housing, etc., we could focus efforts on providing the best possible outcomes and not simply the most profitable ones.

There's a reason doctors drive nice cars and wear nice shoes; they are collecting monopoly rents. The doctors and nurses are the ones extracting the vast majority of the wealth from the ever-growing healthcare sector. The problem is that saying we want more, lower-quality doctors, and cheaper foreign ones to improve services and reduce our expenditures is politically unpopular.

Doesn't medical school in the US cost something like $350,000? That might have something to do with high doctor salary. Doctors and nurses, heck let's include hospital janitors too, are not "extracting wealth" from the healthcare sector. They are being compensated for their labor and skills. Wealth extraction occurs when people profit from the industry who are not performing any labor or providing any value.

Medical schools are the method by which doctors control the supply of competitors (as the AMA controls school accreditation).[1] The schools are simply collecting their share of the rent.

[1] https://medianism.org/2018/03/31/occupational-licensing-is-t...

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