“From the top down, the official US government response has been slow, incompetent, and poorly suited to what was at stake. Abolishing billionaires would not magically make Trump more competent.
In that context, I find it hard to wish that Bill Gates had been taxed until he no longer had the resources he’s now spending to try to attack this pandemic. And until the problems that produced this government response are fixed, I’m opposed to tearing down the philanthropic safety net that has been there to catch us when the Trump administration failed. To be sure, Gates isn’t necessarily representative of his class. But the point remains: Abolishing the billionaire class hardly guarantees the kind of competent government response needed in a crisis like this.”
…
“for all the good Gates and other billionaires might be doing, it’s important to remember that it will not be nearly enough to meet the current crisis.
In a catastrophe of this magnitude, no billionaire can actually do a fraction as much as the US government can. If Gates liquidated all his wealth — no more vaccine programs, no more Gates Foundation — to distribute to every American, everyone would get less than $300 each. The $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package spends far more money than all the billionaires in America combined could.So the sensible role for philanthropists is not replacing the government. They can’t do that. It’s filling in the gaps — moving faster than the government, moving around bureaucratic red tape, making sure that good ideas break ground immediately instead of waiting weeks for approval.”
“The best item I’ve ever bought for my home is a machine that shoots warm water at my bare butt.”
“Nearly 18 percent of America’s economy is devoted to spending on health care, far more than the share in any comparable country. And although the U.S. medical system provides some of the best health care in the world, it does so only for those who can afford it. Moreover, fragmented service delivery undercuts overall quality. A decade after passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), health care spending is still eating up government and household budgets, nearly 28 million Americans remain uninsured, and costs continue bounding upward.”
…
“Too many of today’s policy “solutions” build upon the faulty insurance company model that currently organizes U.S. health care—a model that was concocted by the American Medical Association (AMA) in the 1930s as a way to protect the professional status and earning power of its members. It resulted in care that is expensive, bureaucratic, and frustrating for both patients and caregivers.”
“virtually every American gets some kind of government subsidy, from people who have mortgages or employer-sponsored health care (big tax deductions) to those who work for or invest in big companies (big corporate tax subsidies). Recipients of Social Security and Medicare get back far more in benefits than they paid in taxes.
Benefits to people who are not poor often equal or dwarf the cost of those for the poor. The home mortgage interest deduction, which the Congressional Budget Office found largely benefits the top one-fifth of income earners, cost the federal government about $70 billion in 2013; food stamps cost the government $74 billion last year. The tax break for employers who provide health insurance cost Washington $250 billion in 2013.
Medicare, which is available to all seniors regardless of income level, is more expensive ($587 billion in 2013) than Medicaid ($449 billion), the health care program for the poor, and an average-income couple retiring this year will get back three times more in Medicare benefits than they paid in Medicare taxes.”
…
“Among the biggest recipients of government generosity are corporations, which receive a multitude of federal and state tax breaks and incentives. These subsidies, sometimes called “corporate welfare,” primarily benefit the shareholders and executives of the nation’s largest companies. As of last year, 96 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were white, and white investors typically have three times as much money in the stock market as nonwhites. Investors are not direct recipients of corporate welfare, but the value of their holdings is shaped by any federal, state and local funds going to the publicly held corporations.”
“In the February issue of the American Economic Review, researchers Kamila Sommer and Paul Sullivan consider the implications for the US housing market if this $90 billion subsidy to homeowners were to be scrapped. They find that getting rid of it would actually improve overall welfare by lowering home prices and expanding opportunities for home ownership among younger and lower-income households.
“The people who are the primary beneficiaries of the deduction are the high-income households,” Sommer said in an interview with the AEA. “When you take it away, house prices fall, they consume less housing, live in smaller houses…but the decline in house prices reduces the entry cost for the marginal households that are previously renting. It’s almost like this reallocation of housing from high-income households to low-income households.”
Critics say the mortgage interest deduction is a regressive tax policy that inflates prices and encourages buyers to choose more expensive houses and take on debt rather than sinking money into other investments. It also robs the Treasury of tax revenue that could be used to close the deficit. But real estate lobbyists say its repeal would depress homeownership and negatively impact social welfare.”
…
“More than half of all existing homeowners — 58 percent — would see their consumption improve after the reform, with most of the benefits going to young, low-income households. Rich homeowners with big properties suffer the most, since they have outsized amounts of mortgage interest that can be deducted from their income tax burden. When that benefit goes away they end up bearing the brunt of the impact.
It’s less certain whether there would be any meaningful impact on tax revenue for the government, the authors say. Getting rid of the deduction leads to a 2.6 percent increase in income tax revenue, but the falling home prices translate to a 7.8 percent drop in property tax revenue. Overall, it’s essentially a wash, with a total revenue gain of just one-half of a percentage point.”
https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-daily-podcast/youre-middle-class-are-you-poverty
“Inspectors general are typically seen as nonpolitical operatives and are tasked with an independent watchdog role, overseeing various facets of the government and checking for waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump has clashed with several of them recently as they produced documentation that he views as unflattering to his administration.
That includes Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, whom the president railed against after she released a report detailing COVID-19 testing delays and critical supply shortages at U.S. medical centers.
“Another Fake Dossier!” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning.
Trump’s move against Glenn Fine follows the president’s Friday termination of Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community, who dealt with the whistleblower report that eventually resulted in Trump’s impeachment. The president did not name a successor.”
“programs for the poor are only a tiny portion of the U.S. welfare state. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that more than 60 percent of American households receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. To get an idea of just how big the American welfare state has become, consider that those transfer payments from the federal government are equal to 34 percent of all wages and taxes in the U.S.”
…
“The largest transfer programs are the middle-class entitlements, Social Security and Medicare. In addition, a large portion of the third biggest entitlement program, Medicaid, actually goes to the middle-class elderly and disabled individuals, not the poor. Those three programs alone now make up more than half of all federal spending.”
…
“we need to understand that, in practice, when an individual pays Social Security taxes, none of those taxes are set aside for that individual’s benefits. Rather, they are used to pay benefits to those who are currently retired. Social Security is merely a transfer payment from workers to retirees. In that sense, it operates exactly the same as any other transfer or welfare program.”
…
“Many individuals will receive more than taxes paid plus a reasonable amount of interest on those taxes.”
…
“according to the Social Security system’s trustees, the program faces a future shortfall of more than $43 trillion7 (measured in discounted present value over an infinite horizon—that is, if the government put away $43 trillion today and earned 3 percent interest on those funds, it would have enough money so that, combined with payroll taxes, it could pay all future benefits). Unfortunately, however, the federal government doesn’t have an extra $43 trillion. As a result, there is simply no way that Social Security can pay future benefits without a massive tax increase.”