Dem Robert Rubin - "We must raise taxes"

Well, I'll certainly hand it to you, dddooo. if you are not currently employed as a saleperson for a National Healthcare system, you ought to be. Not that I'm sold, or ever will be.

Speaking of comparing apples to oranges, comparing the US to Japan, UK, Denmark, etc ... is the akin to it. The US economy is many degrees more complex than these countries.

The employers will either pass thes savings on to you or will be required to pay a healthcare tax

I think we both know which route will be taken. Here is the net result, everyone will have the same SHITTY healthcare, and the ones that can afford it will buy supplemental private plans, if allowed, this is Illegal in Canada. Higher taxes/worse service.. It's a redistribution program ...

"pass the savings on to the employee" :D

This is my last word on this. It will liikely be one of the most discussed topics for years to come though. I'll save my breath.

Here's something ironic for you dddooo, I have an interview on Thursday with EDS. Medicare in serveral states has outsourced much of their backoffice operations to EDS, and I have a particular skillset in one of the workflow systems they employ. A 6 month contract...
:)

http://www.eds.com/news/releases/2951/





Quote from dddooo:

Incorrect... I'm a subcontractor. I pay $1200/per annum with a $3000 Deductiable (never used once). Under, a federalized plan, I'd wager a guess and say I'll pay closer to 5-10k a year in increased taxes. With ZERO discernable benefit. If my taxes go up from, say 5-10%, that is ALOT of fricking money out of my pocket.
I was not talking about you personally, I was talking about a typical american family which gets their health insurance (most likely HMO) though their employment. Your coverage sucks, I bet you don't have a family, and you pay $1,200 to cover yourself only, then you have to pay $3,000 deductible and then your insurance will cover 70-80% of your healthcare expenses with a bunch or restrictions, limitations and exclusions. Comparing your coverage with a comprehensive coverage that Universal Healthcare would provide is comparing apples and oranges. The kind of coverage you have may suit you just fine today but it does not suit 90% of the country and it will not be nearly sufficient for you when you are 45-50 with family and kids.



Basically your advocating replacing the cost to employers with payroll taxes on their employees.
One way or another these insurance premiums are part of your compensation package. The employers will either pass thes savings on to you or will be required to pay a healthcare tax instead of paying insurance premiums. Chances are they will end up paying significantly less in taxes than what they are currently paying in premiums and they'll be absolutely happy to avoid a huge headache and expense associated with managing private insurance plans, enrollments, claim forms etc. Everyone wins, with the exception of insurance companies of course.


You've mentioned that you believe admin costs are at 30%. OK, let's cut those in half under a federal plan. What will the costs be for implementing such a plan, and what will the costs be if the implementation fails?
It's already implemented, it's called Medicare, its overhead is 2%.



Health care costs are skyrocketing because healthcare services have made leaps and bounds in the past 20 years.... artifical limbs, face transplants, etc, etc ...
What makes you think they don't have it in Paris, Tokyo or Tel Aviv?
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:)
 
Quote from Pa(b)st Prime:

Two points. Toss African/Americans out of the stats (they bring life expectancy down with murder, hyper-tension, crappy lifestyle choices, ect) and American's live as long as anyone else. (white males here live to 73.6 avg)

Secondly, I don't know about you but I find it pretty darn telling that Englishmen and Swedes are almost as dissatisfied with their health services as Americans. Considering that MOST uninsured Americans would "poll" that they "believe their health care system needs fundamental change" it would seem reasonable to extrapolate that insured American's are happier with the present system than those sampled in either the U.K. or Sweden.
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Excellent Data Mining Pabst!!

"There's Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics"
 
Quote from neophyte321:


Incorrect... I'm a subcontractor. I pay $1200/per annum with a $3000 Deductiable (never used once). Under, a federalized plan, I'd wager a guess and say I'll pay closer to 5-10k a year in increased taxes. With ZERO discernable benefit. If my taxes go up from, say 5-10%, that is ALOT of fricking money out of my pocket.

"![/b] [/B]
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wait until you get older. wife and i are in our 50s and good health. ins costs us 523 a month for 5k deductable 80/20 after that. just got a letter in the mail this week. jan 1 we got a $100 increase. will now be $623 for 5000 deductable.
company is Assurant Health.
 
Quote from neophyte321:
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Well, I'll certainly hand it to you, dddooo. if you are not currently employed as a saleperson for a National Healthcare system, you ought to be
I am not, but thanks anyway.

Not that I'm sold, or ever will be.
Too bad. :)

I have an interview on Thursday with EDS.
Good luck!
 
Quote from dddooo:


One way or another these insurance premiums are part of your compensation package. The employers will either pass thes savings on to you or will be required to pay a healthcare tax instead of paying insurance premiums. Chances are they will end up paying significantly less in taxes than what they are currently paying in premiums and they'll be absolutely happy to avoid a huge headache and expense associated with managing private insurance plans, enrollments, claim forms etc. Everyone wins, with the exception of insurance companies of course.
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You mean the same way the government reduced Medicare spending by the amount it cost to offer drugs? NOT!!

Btw, The plan you advocate is a "one size fits all", which I would strongly oppose. You keep harping on HSA's as being unfair because only the "rich" can afford them. You don't know what your talking about. I had a HMO that saw premiums go from $350 to over $800 with all the silly co-pays (same theory as a tax "refund"). Now I have an HSA with premiums of $125, plus what I contribute to the savings account, and a $5,000 deductible. Basically I am self insured for the first $5K. Whatever is in the savings account when I turn 65 is mine, taxed just like a 401K. I'll take this over an HMO any day. At least with a HSA you have some market forces involved compared with a traditional plan where everyone thinks it only "costs" the $20 co-pay.
 
Rubin's Tax Gambit
Raising taxes in a housing slump isn't the smartest policy.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

That was fast. A mere two days after Democrats capture Congress claiming they wouldn't raise taxes, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin tells them they should do so anyway.

"You cannot solve the nation's fiscal problems without increased revenues," declared Mr. Rubin, the Democratic Party's leading economic spokesman, in a speech last Thursday. He also took a crack at economic forecasting by noting that "I think if you were to increase taxes right now, you would have probably about zero negative effect on the economy." The economics and politics here are worth parsing.

We suppose it's reassuring that Mr. Rubin now thinks the economy is strong enough to withstand a tax increase. That's a switch from his opposition to the 2003 Bush tax cuts, which he predicted would bust the budget and do little for growth. The U.S. economy proceeded to grow by an average of nearly 4% a year for three years following mid-2003, until the recent slowdown due largely to the housing slump.

Everyone makes mistakes, but raising taxes amid a housing decline doesn't sound like brilliant policy to us. Depending on inflation signals in the coming weeks, the Federal Reserve may not be done raising interest rates. The best hope for avoiding a recession next year and into 2008 is that strong corporate profits and the tight job market will lift business investment and consumer spending enough to offset the impact of tighter monetary policy. The last thing the economy needs now is a tax increase, too.





And what are the urgent "fiscal problems" that justify a tax increase, anyway? As the nearby chart shows, federal revenues in fiscal 2006 were 18.4% of GDP, higher than the 18.2% post-1965 average. In October, the first month of fiscal 2007, revenues rose by 12% from a year earlier. Mr. Rubin thinks this windfall isn't enough; perhaps he wants to return to the late Clinton years, when the feds grabbed a record 20.9% of GDP and taxpayers demanded a refund by endorsing George W. Bush's tax cut proposal in the election of 2000.
By the way, the federal deficit for fiscal 2006 was only 1.9% of GDP, which is lower than all but eight years since 1975. Add in the budget surpluses at the state level, and the overall U.S. fiscal "deficit" is economically trivial. It is all but irrelevant to Mr. Rubin's complaint that the U.S. borrows too much from "foreigners." Those foreigners invest here because of safety and soundness and the expected after-tax return. The quickest way to drive away those investors is to reduce that return by raising taxes.

Mr. Rubin's "fiscal problems" riff is really a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, using future entitlement problems to justify a tax increase today. He knows all too well that not a dime of new revenue raised today would be "saved" or otherwise devoted to paying for future Social Security or Medicare benefits. They would be spent on other things by the current Congress, just as today's surplus payroll tax revenues are spent, and just as they were spent when Mr. Rubin was at Treasury in the 1990s.

If Mr. Rubin wants to help reduce the future entitlement benefits he frets so much about, he could always support reforming those programs. Yet when President Bush invited him to participate in a bipartisan entitlement commission last year, Mr. Rubin refused.

Which is why we suspect that Mr. Rubin's real game here is politics. The Citigroup Inc. executive is part of Hillary Rodham Clinton's braintrust, and he and she would like nothing better than to coax Mr. Bush into raising taxes in the next two years. That would take the tax issue off the table in 2008, while splintering Republicans the way President George H.W. Bush's tax-hike deal with George Mitchell did going into 1992.

And if a tax increase did contribute to a severe slowdown or recession, Republicans as the incumbent party in the White House would get the political blame. Recall how Bill Clinton pinned the recession of 1990-1991 on Mr. Bush and Reaganomics, even though the Gipper had left office long before and the economy was growing at a 4% annual rate by late 1992. Readers may recall who won that election.





By the way, how does Mr. Rubin continue to dodge any historical accountability for the dot-com bust of 2000 and the recession that followed? In the liberal economic narrative, we are supposed to believe that the Clinton Administration somehow ended in 1999, and that Mr. Bush is to blame for everything that followed. Yet the Nasdaq peak came in the spring of 2000 and the third quarter of that year recorded negative growth. The shallow recession began in March 2001, with slower-than-average growth continuing until the tax cuts on dividends and the top marginal income rate passed in 2003 and the expansion moved into high gear.
If Mr. Rubin and Senator Clinton really believe the economy needs a big tax increase, by all means they should make this a plank in their 2008 agenda. But they shouldn't do so by asking fellow Democrats to betray their recent campaign pledges or Republicans to make it easier for them by repeating the GOP's blunder of the early 1990s.

WSJ
 
Quote from AAAintheBeltway:

Stop trying to confuse things with facts.
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another annoying little fact:

Bush Borrowed More Than All Previous Presidents Combined, Group Says
By Melanie Hunter
CNSNews.com Senior Editor
November 04, 2005

(CNSNews.com) - President Bush and the current administration have borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the previous 42 presidents combined, a group of conservative to moderate Democrats said Friday.

Blue Dog Coalition, which describes itself as a group "focused on fiscal responsibility," called the administration's borrowing practices "astounding."

According to the Treasury Department, from 1776-2000, the first 224 years of U.S. history, 42 U.S. presidents borrowed a combined $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions, but in the past four years alone, the Bush administration borrowed $1.05 trillion.
 
Quote from vhehn:

another annoying little fact:

Bush Borrowed More Than All Previous Presidents Combined, Group Says
By Melanie Hunter
CNSNews.com Senior Editor
November 04, 2005

(CNSNews.com) - President Bush and the current administration have borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the previous 42 presidents combined, a group of conservative to moderate Democrats said Friday.

Blue Dog Coalition, which describes itself as a group "focused on fiscal responsibility," called the administration's borrowing practices "astounding."

According to the Treasury Department, from 1776-2000, the first 224 years of U.S. history, 42 U.S. presidents borrowed a combined $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions, but in the past four years alone, the Bush administration borrowed $1.05 trillion.
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did they provide inflation adjusted numbers? No? So, these numbers are worthless. ("lies,damn lies and stats" ... I love that one) I don't think anyone is suggesting Bush is a sprend thrift, but things need to be put into perspective.

9-11, the dot-com bust, katrina, these weren't exactly minor economic events.

Smaller Budget Deficit Projected
Tax Cuts Credited; Long-Term Outlook Still Seen as Bleak
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/10/AR2006071001330.html



...
Whatever the source of increased revenue, the numbers to be released today bolster predictions that Bush would meet his goal of cutting by half the 2004 deficit of $412.7 billion by the time he leaves office. But that does not erase much deeper worries about the budget woes that will beset the economy when members of the baby-boom generation reach retirement age over the next couple of decades. Projected deficits for the middle of the century, though obviously subject to much imprecision, would account for such a large portion of the economy that they would drive the government's cost of borrowing -- and thus interest rates throughout the economy -- to unaffordable levels, economists generally agree.

"Even if somehow we balanced the budget by, say, 2010, we would look forward to an enormous fiscal problem," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director and Bush White House economist.



Perhaps we add another few 100 trillion in federal liabilities!
 
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