Now is the time to get entitlement spending under control. (benefits, unemployment)
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I don't know many people who could pay that kind of premium
If we really socialize medicine, it would start at the bottom. Med students would be subidized, and we would open many new medical schools so we have enough MDs to take care of the population. The primary reason medicine is expensive is that the supply is inadequate. We couldn't provide medical care to everyone if we wanted to.
Malpractice insurance would be socialized too. If some moron OB postpones a C-section even though the fetal monitor shows the baby is in distressed, somebody has to pay for caring for a brain damaged kid for the rest of his life. Insurance settlements are huge because nobody knows what it will cost.
MDs would do fine at 3x or 4x the median income. Without the "tuition" dodge, there would be no reason to let them bill out a million dollars a year. They, their nurses and receptionists would be employees.
It should be easily possible to provide medical care for everyone while cutting the amount we spend on medicine in half. Every other developed nation in the world does it, there's no reason we can't do it too.
Sorry but that is ridiculous. Nobody should have to pay 90% of their money to the government.
If you think taxes need to go up on the super wealthy, I'm with you there. But I'll draw the line well below 90%. Who do these liberals think they are - God? , that they have claim to 90% of someone's money?
When we had a 90% marginal tax rate, nobody paid 90% of their money to the government. They invested in a booming economy and got stinking rich. The problem with our current form of capitalism is that there is no incentive for the rich to be productive, so they are just leeches. Make them go back to being productive and it would actually make America great again, with rising wages and a thriving middle class.
The biggest one is taxing capital gains separately from income. All income, from whatever source, should be taxed the same. If you want to index the basis to inflation, I don't have a problem with that.
Congress doesn’t agree with you, and it’s not a loophole, shell game, or anything else.
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Writing off losses against gains is another scam. That's how Trump managed to go years paying no taxes despite 7 and 8 digit annual incomes. Government should not be in the business of subsidizing business losses. Speaking of subsidizing losses, "too big to fail" is right back on the table.
Deducting NOL's against income is one of the best, most rational parts of the IRC. if you’ve missed the explanations in the past, let me know, and I’ll explain it again. But understand, nothing about it is “subsidazation.”
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The only reason a lot of rich people are not in prison is that they write the laws. Those are the loopholes. How many bankers went to prison after the bank crash? How many oil company execs went to prison after Deepwater Horizon? Of you are rich enough you can kill people and get away with it. How many crooked politicians went to prison after defrauding college students out of tuition to a university that didn't exist? That's not business, that's theft.
This idea that there are “loopholes” available only to the rich is complete nonsense, and beliveing (and posting) such a thing only serves to let others know how ignorant you are about the topic under discussion. Stop trying to perpetuate such nonsense and you won’t look nearl as silly as you currently do.
When we had a 90% marginal tax rate, nobody paid 90% of their money to the government. They invested in a booming economy and got stinking rich. The problem with our current form of capitalism is that there is no incentive for the rich to be productive, so they are just leeches. Make them go back to being productive and it would actually make America great again, with rising wages and a thriving middle class.
Yeah, the rich get richer just by laying around, watching soaps, and eating bon-bons.
LOL!!!
Do you really not care how you look as a result of posting such drivel?
The biggest one is taxing capital gains separately from income. All income, from whatever source, should be taxed the same. If you want to index the basis to inflation, I don't have a problem with that.
Writing off losses against gains is another scam. That's how Trump managed to go years paying no taxes despite 7 and 8 digit annual incomes. Government should not be in the business of subsidizing business losses. Speaking of subsidizing losses, "too big to fail" is right back on the table.
What do you think are the chances of Carl Icahn serving prison time for insider trading? I would call that one a dodge. Apparently you are never too rich to pluck a few million bucks out of the gutter.
The only reason a lot of rich people are not in prison is that they write the laws. Those are the loopholes. How many bankers went to prison after the bank crash? How many oil company execs went to prison after Deepwater Horizon? Of you are rich enough you can kill people and get away with it. How many crooked politicians went to prison after defrauding college students out of tuition to a university that didn't exist? That's not business, that's theft.
Sorry pal but writing off losses against gains is logical and valid.
I play daily fantasy sports as a hobby. And this basic situation has actually happened to me.
Day 1: I play 3 teams at $5 and lose all three. Net loss = $15
Day 2: same thing. Net loss = $15
Day 3 through day 20: I lose every team I play. Net loss = $270
Total loss: $300
Day 21: I win the tournament and $500.
What do I pay taxes on? $500?
No. The answer is, I net out the losses. I have made a real profit of just $200 and that is the income that I pay the tax man. NOT the $500
It's a simple example but it's really the same concept for business losses.
In theory, reducing that bloat would reduce the cost.
The reality is that trying to do that would be to eliminate millions of jobs in every community in the country, rapidly. Not just any jobs. The health care industry is one of the few growth industries that actually pays living wages for people who do not necessarily have high levels of education - the payment specialists, etc... can do their job with Associate's degrees.
I think you can foresee how that would go over. Please proceed.
Yes -- I agree. Eliminating countless paper pusher jobs would indeed throw the incumbents back into the would-be workforce without real jobs for them. It would cause disruption, but as with all forms of creative destruction, once we come out the other side, life is better.
By the way, China faces the same issue with its steel and aluminum factories - they have way too much capacity, and need to close factories, but they choose not to do so because of the potential unemployment issue. Chinese Economists have, for two decades, argued it is better just to subsidize unemployed directly than for the government to subsidize the factories. Actually, to call them factories is a misnomer - one steel factory employs 500,000 former rural peasants, so the subsidies to keep it open are huge. Instead of calling them factories, it might be more accurate to call them cities.
Now is the time to get entitlement spending under control.
I find these charts compelling, and fit within the category of "any trend that cannot go on forever, won't."
The first chart shows entitlement spending per year divided by the number of US Citizens. It is the entitlement cost per person. It now stands at $7500 per citizen.
Yep...Just start telling people not to get old so they die after collecting a few years of SS and only are on the medicare dole for 3-4 years.
I appreciate your sentiment, but you're glossing over some fairly huge cost components. The real cost of a typical X-ray does not simply end at the cost of energy and the salary of the the tech. I realize that the typical layperson tends to equate the transition to digital x-ray with the transition to digital photography, but it isn't nearly that simple. Digital x-ray equipment is several orders of magnitude more complex -- and, therefore, significantly more costly -- than their analog counterparts.
You must then figure in the overhead involved in non-medical day-to-day operations, depreciation, maintenance and housing of the equipment. In addition, there is usually a rather costly image storage (aka, PACS) and reconstruction system required for image distribution. Of course, this is all before the image is sent out for diagnosis.
In economics, in a marketplace that is competitive, price is driven down to the marginal cost. One of the first equations we all learned in microeconomics in Econ 101 is "P=MC." While this is an economics forum and hence it is appropriate to include opportunity cost and cost of capital and depreciation expense into the above equation, that would most certainly complicate the analysis to the point of obscuring its purpose. At current interest rates, what is 10 minutes of the cost of capital of a hospital-based digital X-Ray machine? What is 10 minutes of depreciation? etc? Does it materially affect the outcome of the analysis?
Those items, while very real, just obscure the analysis: Other first world countries have Hospital ERs with similar or perhaps even identical digital X-Ray systems, and they have cost of capital, and they have depreciation expense, and they have back-office functions -- and they don't need to charge $500 - $800 for the X-Ray.
So the correct question stands: Why the hell does our healthcare system need to charge $500-$800? No one is getting rich, by the way - so it isn't falling to the bottom line as gross profit. Hospital administrators and senior employees and physicians surely make a good living, but they do not become wealthy (i.e., 300-foot yachts and 35,000 square foot vacation homes on 60,000 acre estates, etc).
My thesis remains: it is a long-term decline in health care productivity, where the denominator in that calculation is all the labor - both employees involved in the actual delivery of healthcare and the armies of paper pushers who support them.
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Originally Posted by Cleveland_Collector
Trust me when I tell you that the base cost of an actual still-image x-ray is well north of $200 prior to even getting the doctor involved.
Yes, I do trust you on your articulation of the many things involved. But your articulation just restates the problem: health care costs too damn much, and collectively we need to find a way to drive down its price.
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Originally Posted by TaxPhd
Good analysis, but you only addressed the direct costs, and left out the overhead. How much is the depreciation on that fancy new x-ray machine??
See above. I left it out on purpose to illustrate the point. Yes, cost of capital, cost of depreciation, etc are very real, but they are similar if not identical to the cost of capital and cost of depreciation in other 1st world countries with ERs and modern digital X-Ray equipment and support systems. So they are a wash.
The burning question remains: why is the price of a digital X-Ray in other 1st world countries a small fraction of the price of a digital X-Ray in the USA?
Why do we accept an answer from hospital executives that boils down to "because" and "you wouldn't understand?"
I appreciate your sentiment, but you're glossing over some fairly huge cost components. The real cost of a typical X-ray does not simply end at the cost of energy and the salary of the the tech. I realize that the typical layperson tends to equate the transition to digital x-ray with the transition to digital photography, but it isn't nearly that simple. Digital x-ray equipment is several orders of magnitude more complex -- and, therefore, significantly more costly -- than their analog counterparts. You must then figure in the overhead involved in non-medical day-to-day operations, depreciation, maintenance and housing of the equipment. In addition, there is usually a rather costly image storage (aka, PACS) and reconstruction system required for image distribution. Of course, this is all before the image is sent out for diagnosis. Trust me when I tell you that the base cost of an actual still-image x-ray is well north of $200 prior to even getting the doctor involved.
A lot of the equipment sits idle much of the time. You're paying to maintain availability of equipment and staffing to meet emergencies. The equipment has to be on site 100% of the time. You can outsource staff but you still have to pay a premium for on-call consultations around the clock.
They [the rich] use various loopholes, accounting tricks, shell games and various shelters to drastically lower their actual out-the-door taxes paid.
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Originally Posted by SportyandMisty
Please enlighten us: Name 10 "loopholes, accounting tricks, shell games, and various shelters" used by the wealthy. I dare you.
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Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
The biggest one is taxing capital gains separately from income. All income, from whatever source, should be taxed the same. If you want to index the basis to inflation, I don't have a problem with that.
A differential tax rate on capital gains is not a "loophole, accounting trick, shell game, or tax shelter."
Short-term capital gains are taxed as ordinary income - and then on top of that, you must pay the 3.8% "net investment income tax" that partly funds Obamacare.
Long-term gains are taxed at rates of 0%, 15%, or 20%, depending on your tax bracket -- and then you must also pay the 3.8% "net investment income tax" to partially fund Obamacare.
Congress in its wisdom has provided economic incentives to invest in capital because of its long-term positive effects on the economy and overall GDP per capita.
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Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
Writing off losses against gains is another scam.
The "writing off" of losses against gains (in the circumstances allowed) is not a "loophole, accounting trick, shell game, or tax shelter."
It is sound accounting policy.
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Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
What do you think are the chances of Carl Icahn serving prison time for insider trading?
Better to ask Martha Stewart, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, R. Foster Winans, Jeff Skilling, Michael Steinberg, and others.
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Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell
The only reason a lot of rich people are not in prison is that they write the laws. Those are the loopholes.
The topic is "loopholes, accounting tricks, shell games, and various shelters" used by the wealthy. You seem to be changing the topic from taxes to illegal activity.
So far, you have not identified a single loophole, accounting trick, shell game, or shelter used by the wealthy.
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