Obama Tax Plan a Frontal Assault on Entrepreneurs
pajamasmedia.com
pajamasmedia.com
There's some arm waving about how increasing the income tax on high wage earners will act as a disincentive to angel investors. Am I misunderstanding tax law, or aren't capital gains (e.g., from startup investments) separate from income for tax purposes?
Then, when Obama's "socialized medicine" plan would actually help, the author rails against it because it has 'failed everywhere it's been tried.' (Except where it has succeeded. And also, the dismal failures mentioned are anecdotal scaremongering.) The solution is held out in front of the author and he rejects it on unrelated, partisan grounds!
Maybe he makes sense to himself, but his oversimplifications haven't adequately made the case for the article title or his two supporting gripes.
I'm not rich, but let's assume I'm on track to become so by way of my ever increasing income. Obama would take more of the income I'm using to build my fortune, leaving me less to invest later on. Lower income taxes would give me more to play with later on, and since I'll already be quite well off by then, paying tax on my capital gains doesn't really bother me.
Personally I don't think this is a great argument and I am in support of Obama's plan, but I do see its point. It's a very long-term argument, and I think that if far smaller investors can use the capital gains 0% tax (such as entrepreneurs who self-fund) then it's an amazing idea. But if small self-funding entrepreneurs cannot take advantage of the 0% tax on capital gains in their own businesses, I'd probably agree with the author as it serves only to unfairly placate the rich.
In regard to health care, adding more tax incentives (read loopholes), thereby increasing the complexity of the laws, and making the market for health insurance "more competitive," when the lack of competition is not the problem in the first place, will make matters far worse. Health care is not a commodity that lends itself to a market. It's a human right, which lends itself far better to [competent] government.
A while back I wrote about some of these issues here:
We help other humans who are too weak to be helped. It's part of our primal human nature. When you say that it's not your obligation to make sure I survive, you are saying you want to try it the animal way. The way that failed.
Learn to make distinctions between what is common and what is general.
There is no such thing as natural freedom. We are born in a collective, we die in a collective and we are nothing without our collective. Humans and monkeys are group first, individual second, and have always been that way. That's why people form 'teams' and have a 'group of friends', have 'families'. It's all small groups which together form larger groups, and the overall aim of each group is to make itself survive, but at the very top, the overall aim is to make the entire human race survive.
Don't believe you are special. That you have 'natural freedoms'. That you have some inherent ingenuity. That's just sillyness.
What would you do with all your ingenuity if you were the only person on earth? Humans have this illusion of being individualistic, and that they work for themselves first. It's not true. People work for the entire society, because without other humans, nobody can survive, no matter how 'ingenious' he is.
Being a web developer does not make you intelligent. Insulting people who disagree with you shows stupidity.
You have a lot to learn, but it's only experience that can teach you that stuff.
Self-referential. I dig it.
You cannot have a right to goods and services that somebody else currently owns. Using the power of the state to acquire medical goods and services is not a basic necessity of being a human.
We've lived millions of years without the state caring for our daily health. We can live millions more without the state and we'll be just be fine.
For a constitutionally-trained lawyer to say that is to engage in demagoguery over substance. We have a problem with health care -- some free market principles do not work when you are dying. But cartoon solutions and slogans are not going to fix complex problems. Mark my words: we'll just end up more in debt, more frustrated, and more vulnerable to even more bullshit promises.
Support for social heathcare is to recongize that one day you may be in the same position. In fact, when you are a really old man, you WILL be in that position. You'll be on a pension and you'll have lots of illnesses. I pay 8% of my income so that this never has to be a worry.
Social healthcare may not be a fundamental human right, but it's a hell of a convenient thing!
Good point. E.g.: "Competition will cause insurance companies to drop price and increase service. Innovation will come to insurance and new and different types of policies will enter the market, making it even more competitive. Consumer behavior will cause people to shop for insurance and minimize costs while trying to increase coverage."
You may want to read Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights before reconsidering that statement.
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Current members of the UN Human Rights Council:
China Cuba Ghana Nigeria
That's it. It's not a global government. It has no representation from the masses, it has no balanced system of government, it has no executive to speak of.
It's done a great job of preventing WWIII. Let's leave it at that.
This nation was built on individual liberty and responsibility, not as a nanny state.
For a family of 4, private health insurance with a typical deductable costs something like $1200 per month. That's half a reasonable mortgage, or 3 times the monthly cost of two parents each commuting 50 miles a day on $4 gas, or 3 concurrent car lease payments. Over 60% of Americans today are covered by their employers, who in addition to accessing lower-rate group plans, cover some or all of this expense.
But that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that out of the 163,000,000 people that would need to switch to private health insurance in these schemes, a huge portion of them will be unable to access a competitive plan. Private health insurers can and do decline coverage for a myriad of reasons. My daughter had a (drug reaction) seizure when she was 3. NO COVERAGE. A friend's wife had a minor women's health issue. NO COVERAGE.
Advocates for private health insurance are quick to point out that they'll work with states to set up "last-resort" health insurance coverage for these people. Those advocates don't understand what the word "competition" means. Those "last-resort" plans already exist (at least in Illinois, Michigan, and California), but they're far more expensive than Blue Cross or United. Insurance works efficiently by creating pools of shared risk. What happens to the plans that get all the "risky" people?
With a couple obvious exceptions, my sense is that no country loves its health insurance system. Canadians bitch about theirs, British people bitch about theirs. But our system is an international joke. We pay more than everyone else, we shift the burden of those payments to the least convenient places in our economy, the average patient receives poorer care, and we still manage to bankrupt people with the system at random intervals.
This is the same "as long as you make the rich richer they'll spill some on everybody else" thinking that, frankly, has no actual merit in fact (Before you downmod me on this, lookup the some actual data!)
This guy should read a biography on Henry Ford.
If that extra money taxed gets used for something useful such as building High Speed Rail in California, or jump-starting alternative fuels technology, then it is a win win situation for the economy and for people.
If that extra tax money gets spend in useless wars such as the one in Iraq, that is plain economic destruction.
That's why picking the right president is so important, and makes the huge difference between economic prosperity, or economic destruction.
While I may say, that Bush's tax cut, and flood of money (with low interest rates), left the rich flush with money, who invested in short-sighted and useless economic destructive market. For every house that is in foreclosure, every house/street/building that is left half build, that is all economic loss to all.
While it is a good idea to let markets decide private investments in the long run, sometimes it is necessary for the government to step in, and invest in things that are not profitable in the short term, but have huge positive economic impact in the long run. And if pinching some money away from the private market is necessary, so be it.
According to http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/images/chsr/20080121152955... , the system can't pay back the bonds that are currently on the ballot, bonds that cover less than half of the projected construction costs. Since such projections almost always overestimate revenues and underestimate construction costs, the real gap will be even larger.
Some of the tricks used to get the revenues up include high-rises in Fresno and other central CA cities over the train station. That makes a lot of sense in NYC where land is at a premium, but Fresno?
There's a reason why the ballot statement says that the operating costs "[operating] costs would be at least partially offset by revenue from fares paid by passengers" and doesn't mention interest and principle.
I can't find a breakdown for the operating costs on this version of the project. The last time I saw such a breakdown, the projected salaries and benefits of the folks running the trains exceeded the projected revenues....
If high-speed rail in CA made financial sense, why wouldn't a for-profit enterprise be interested in doing it?
Because there are externalities which a private company can't benefit from, but that people benefit from.
More importantly, what's the difference between "private company" and "people?"
If we want real innovation in the health care sector, the personal tax deduction will help but ultimately, we need to get rid of these two bloated freaks. Too bad that that is one sacred cow that no politician is going to touch with a 9 foot stick.
US incomplete health care is $600bn/305m people = $2,000 per person.
UK national health service is $120bn/60m people = $2,000 per person.
The US needs a really hard look at why it is getting such a bad deal. You already have socialised medicine (anyone can go to the ER and it gets amortised over private insurance patients - essentially taxing the rich) but that cost is on top of the $2k/person you pay for an inferior national program!
Note that about half of the insured are insured through US govt programs. Interestingly enough, the cost of those govt programs is about the same as the cost of the private programs that cover the other half of the insured. And, the results of those govt programs is not better.
If you're going to argue that the US govt can do better than the private sector, you should explain why it doesn't. Same cost, same results. Why will making it universal change any of that?
Better yet - work on the US govt programs and then open them up at cost. When they're better and cheaper, folks will flee the private system. Until then, why should we believe that they will be any better than they are?
Why should anyone believe that they'd do better if they covered everyone?
The easiest way to come to the conclusion that the government would do better is to recognize that the only way we could possibly do worse would be to let people die in the emergency room instead of treating them.
Your argument appears merely to redefine the word "covered" to mean "screwed".
Some do, but others don't. You can go to county or free clinics. When/if they bill, ignore.
It's not the ear infections that bankrupt people.