Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

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forrestthewoods

1. But debt as percent of GDP has been growing. Can't do that forever. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

2/3. If the US pays more for health care and gets worse results why should we give them more money?

I don't think health insurance companies should be abolished by royal decree. I think the government should offer an alternative and when that alternative is 4x as dollar efficient the health insurance companies will die a natural death.

4. Your chart shows corporate tax rates have been flat for 50 years. Seems fine?

As an aside, I dislike the overemphasis on Federal spending and Federal income tax. The real question is federal+state+local spending and revenue.

I wish as a society we could work backwards. What services do we want to provide? How much will that cost? How do we pay for it? We've turned into a culture where some people thinking spending is good solely for the sake of spending. When politicians trumpet how much money they're going to spend rather than the benefits they're going to be provide I get very sad!

1. Agreed.

2/3. Then perhaps the US should elect representatives who will expand Medicare to more people. (Or go back in time and get the public option added back to Obamacare.) Unfortunately, instead we have an increasing number of people using Medicare Advantage, essentially a private wrapper around a public insurance plan, which costs taxpayers 22% more per participant.

4. Are we looking at the same graph? The ratio is almost half of what it was in the '70s. The economy has grown substantially; corporate tax contributions, not so much.

I agree with your sentiment that we should talk about what spending achieves and not just the dollar amounts. Hopefully, now that a lot of things are being cut, more people will appreciate what the government has been quietly providing for us all this time. I just hope that the rebuilding won't be as slow and painful as I fear it will be.

4. Sorry, been flat for 40 years not 50 years.

> The economy has grown substantially; corporate tax contributions, not so much.

Hey wait a second. Why should the PERCENT of corporate tax contributions increase as the economy grows? That doesn't make any sense. Corporate tax percent has been basically flat for 40 years.

The absolute value of corporate contribution has, of course, increase substantially alongside GDP. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FCTAX

Personally I find the whole "tax the rich / tax the corpos" philosophy to be misguided. That's not how countries like Sweden and France pay for robust social services! They do so with extremely regressive taxes (20% or 25% VAT) and very high tax rates (40%+) at relatively low income rates (50k to 80k depending on country).

If we want to decrease inequality and increase social services then the average blue collar worker is going to have to pay for it. Taxing the rich is populism that cares more about being punitive than useful. But I digress.

I don't have time to dig into the history of US corporate tax rates, but two things:

1. The effective corporate tax rate has been decreasing over time. Corporations are enormously profitable, and contributing a smaller and smaller share of those profits over time. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...

2. The corporate tax rate was cut by the last Trump administration in 2017, which also removed tax brackets and made the rate uniform. So even the nominal rate hasn't been flat.

But at the end of the day, I actually agree with you. There are other ways to raise revenue, and the US needs to decide if it wants to pay to support its old people, its poor people, and its military. Right now, it seems like the answer is trending towards "no".

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