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Banned
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Originally Posted by dksuddeth
The American people want a socialist economic system?
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They do....this is a forward thinking discussion...they want it...they've been ripped off and abused to the point that there will be an extreme, if delayed reaction.....they want a socialistic economic system....if wanting similar "balance" to what exists in Canada and continental Europe is socialistic....
Americans are an aging, increasingly ailing and poorer population....soon to be foreclosed on in unprecedented numbers as the housing bubble pops....it's just beginning to unwind now, and they already poll this way:
Quote:
http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2006/images/11/21/rel29d.pdf
Interviews with 1,025 adult Americans conducted by
telephone by Opinion Research Corporation on
November 17-19, 2006. The margin of sampling error
for results based on the total sample is plus or minus 3
percentage points.
FOR RELEASE; TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 21 AT 6 AM
3.
Who do you have more confidence in when it comes to handling the following issues --
President Bush or the Democrats in Congress? (RANDOMIZED)
Taxes
Bush: 38%
Democrats in Congress: 52%
The economy
Bush: 36%
Democrats in Congress: 57%
Health care
Bush: 30%
Democrats in Congress: 61%
Social Security
Bush: 30%
Democrats in Congress: 61%
The federal budget deficit
Bush: 27%
Democrats in Congress: 61%
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Another year has gone by since the following article was written and nothing has been accomplished....is it any wonder why the party that controlled both house of congress, and the presidency during the past four years, polled so poorly?
Quote:
http://www.economist.com/world/displ...ory_id=5436968
America's health-care crisis
Desperate measures
Jan 26th 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
The world's biggest and most expensive health-care system is beginning to fall apart. Can George Bush mend it?
.....America's health system is a monster. It is by far the world's most expensive: the United States spent $1.9 trillion on health in 2004, or 16% of GDP, almost twice as much as the OECD average (see charts 1 and 2). Health care in America is not nearly as rooted in the private sector as people assume (one way or another, more than half the bill ends up being paid by the state). But it is the only rich country where a large chunk of health care is paid for by tax-subsidised employer-based insurance.......
....Set alongside other rich countries, which typically offer all their citizens free (or very cheap) health care financed through taxes, America's system has some clear strengths. Consumers get plenty of choice, and innovation is impressive. One survey of doctors published in Health Affairs claimed that eight of the ten most important medical breakthroughs of the past 30 years originated in America. Equally clearly, the American system has big problems, notably inadequate coverage <h3>(no other rich country has armies of uninsured)</h3>, spotty quality and high cost.......
....The great unravelling
With medical inflation far outpacing inflation in general, American firms are scaling back the health coverage they offer. The share of workers who receive health insurance from their own employer has fallen from almost 70% in the late 1970s to around 50% today. In the past five years, the proportion of firms offering medical benefits has fallen from 70% to 60%, with the steepest decline among small firms and those employing the low-skilled.
Those employers who do offer health insurance have pushed more costs on to workers by raising co-payments and deductibles (the expenses before insurance kicks in). Employer-provided health coverage for retirees, once common, has shrunk, although America's big carmakers, including Ford and General Motors, are still hobbled by having to provide it. Mr Hubbard's assessment is stark: “The private market is broken.”
At the same time, the burden on government is about to soar. Add together Medicaid, Medicare and other publicly financed health care, such as that for ex-servicemen, and the public sector already pays for 45% of American health care. (The total is nearer 60% if you include the tax subsidies.) But as America's firms limit their health-care spending and, particularly, as the baby-boomers retire, that share will rise sharply. On current trends, federal spending on health will double as a share of the economy by 2020. That would mean much higher taxes, something Americans do not want to pay.
With employers limiting their exposure and government unable to fund its commitments, America's health system will unravel—perhaps not this year or next, but soon. Few health experts deny this. Nor do they disagree much on the sources of the problem. Health markets are plagued with poor information, inadequate competition and skewed incentives. .....
.....The truth is that the shift to consumer-directed health care and greater cost-sharing involves a culture change that may take decades. It will also come at the price of greater inequality. The burden of health spending will be shifted on to those who are sick, and not just because people will pay a greater share of their health costs themselves. High-deductible insurance policies are attractive to the young and healthy. But as these workers leave traditional insurance, the risk pool in other insurance plans will worsen and premiums will rise even faster. The real losers will be poorer workers with chronic illnesses.
American health care has already become more unequal as employers have cut back, and this will continue. The Bush team argue that “fairer” tax treatment will slow cost rises and enable more people to get basic insurance. The opposite is more likely. Bigger tax subsidies for health care are, if anything, likely to raise overall spending. Worse, since most tax breaks benefit richer people most, more tax incentives are likely to bring more inequality. They will also reduce tax revenue and worsen the budget mess.
Mr Bush's health-care philosophy has a certain political appeal. It suggests incremental change rather than a comprehensive solution. It reinforces existing industry trends. And it promises to be pain-free. Unfortunately, it will not work. The Bush agenda may speed the reform of American health care, but only by hastening the day the current system falls apart.
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Quote:
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssen...l/16319858.htm
Government helping rich to get richer
Posted on Tue, Dec. 26, 2006
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
(MCT)
The following editorial appeared in the Kansas City Star on Friday, Dec. 22:
X X X
The United States is enjoying a strong economy and high employment, and new technology is making life easier in many ways. A stroll through the nearest shopping mall provides ample evidence that there is a great deal of discretionary income floating around.
Yet many Americans are not sharing in this prosperity, and there is widespread uneasiness about growing disparities in income and wealth.
A Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll this month found nearly three-fourths of the respondents calling the divide between rich and poor a "serious" issue.
As a Kansas City Star story pointed out last week, those at the very top of the scale are pulling further and further away from everyone else - even the merely wealthy.
Meanwhile, many in the middle class worry that their paychecks don't go far enough to take care of rising costs for health care, energy, higher education and other high-cost items.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, one of the best number-crunchers in Washington, finds that for <h3>the bottom 90 percent of the U.S. population, real household income rose by only 2 percent between 1990 and 2004.
The increase for the top one-tenth of 1 percent of the population: an astounding 85 percent.</h3>
If such disproportionate gains were merely the result of the impartial workings of the marketplace, it would be one thing. But in recent years, many government policies have deliberately increased economic disparities.
While people with high incomes enjoyed huge tax cuts, millions of low-income taxpayers received no reductions at all in their federal tax burden. (That burden consists largely of Social Security taxes, which take a larger share of low incomes than high incomes.)
Another example: While Washington fritters away billions of dollars a year on unnecessary health-care subsidies for wealthy retirees, many low-income workers and their families must do without any health insurance at all.
Business and housing subsidies from governments at various levels have also showered money on wealthy individuals at the expense of other taxpayers.
Defenders of such unfair policies often try to claim the moral high ground, advising low- and middle-income taxpayers to steer clear of envy and "class warfare."
Yet that ducks the essential question: Why have presidents, governors, members of Congress, state lawmakers and city council members so frequently tipped the economic scales in favor of those who already have wealth and high incomes?
Part of the explanation lies in the personal gifts, campaign donations and even outright bribes that many government officials receive from special interests.
Public outrage over such corruption was a factor in Republican losses in the November elections. That's a message the resurgent Democrats should heed.
In addition, many politicians - including many self-described "conservatives" - simply fail to grasp the essential virtues of the free market. Focused on the short term, they neglect the long term. Intent on helping one group, they lose sight of the fact they are hurting everybody else.
In a free economy, there will always be considerable disparities in income; some people work harder or may simply be luckier than others.
But the public as well as far-sighted business, civic and political leaders should be concerned about government policies that have encouraged such deep economic rifts in our society.
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Quote:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NG0UC4LLO1.DTL
How rich get richer: all the rest pay more
IRS scrutinizes wage earners but takes investors at their word under separate, unequal system
David Cay Johnston
Sunday, April 10, 2005
Get a raise last year, or a bigger job, or make some extra money working overtime? You'll pay the tax man.
Too bad you did not get a job as a hedge fund manager. If you had, you would not owe any taxes come April 15 on your share of the hedge fund's profits.
Hedge funds are unregulated investment pools open only to rich individuals and big institutions. They operate offshore. And for their managers, some of whom earned a half-billion dollars last year, taxes are deferred as long as they keep the hedge fund open and the profits offshore, while you get taxes deducted from your paycheck. And, thanks to our government, their tax avoidance is perfectly legal.
The favored treatment afforded hedge fund managers, several of whom are in their 30s and have untaxed, multibillion-dollar fortunes, is just the tip of a very costly iceberg. Vast amounts of untaxed income, collecting unseen beneath the surface of the news, helps explain why the administration proposes less spending on education, health care, basic scientific research and veterans. Even as our government borrows more than $50 billion each month, it lets many of the richest Americans defer and sometimes completely avoid taxes.
What few of us realize is that the United States has two income tax systems, separate and unequal.
One system is for wage earners. Congress requires that your employer report your pay so Internal Revenue Service computers can check up on your tax return. Banks report interest. Brokerages report dividends. You must provide a Social Security number for each child you claim as a dependent. Congress does not trust you.
The other system is for business owners, landlords and investors. Congress does not require such independent reporting, saying that would be a burden.
These people do not escape all independent reporting. Anyone who sells stock, for example, has the gross proceeds reported to the IRS. But the investor is trusted to say how much the stock cost and, thus, how much profit or loss was incurred.
Studies by the government show that investors understate their capital gains by close to $200 billion each year. The IRS has no mechanism -- none - - to check up on capital gains, according to two professors, Jay Soled, who teaches business at Rutgers in New Jersey, and Joseph Dodge, who teaches tax law at Florida State University. They estimate that capital gains tax cheating alone costs the government $29 billion annually.
But IRS auditors will catch people who cheat, right? Not really.
For more than a decade, Congress has steadily eroded the capacity of the IRS to enforce the tax laws, with one exception. Since 1997, Congress has approved more than $1 billion in extra funds to audit the working poor. In recent years, parents who work full time at the minimum wage have been as much as eight times more likely to be audited than millionaire investors in partnerships.
The wealthy who mine the tax system face little risk of getting caught. Only 1 partnership in 400 gets audited, and agents say many audits are superficial and closed quickly to make statistical reports create the appearance of toughening enforcement.
Last month, the IRS announced it expects to collect more than $3 billion from people who bought an abusive tax shelter called Son of Boss, a strategy for people with tons of stock options. The penalty for most of these cheats will be 20 percent or less. But penalties twice that size are being applied to the small-time chiselers who owe the government about $7,000 each in taxes because they got taken in a scam called the National Audit Defense Network.
That it is official government policy on taxes to favor the rich and go after the little guy is an open secret in Washington.
Charles Rossotti, the wealthy businessman who was IRS commissioner for five years beginning in 1997, says so in his own new book, "Many Unhappy Returns." He wrote that the IRS is "like a police department that was giving out lots of parking tickets while organized crime was running rampant."
The IRS, he wrote, "picks on the little guy" over small sums while "largely overlooking an ocean of money hidden in business entities for which the owners, rather than the businesses themselves, were supposed to pay taxes. "
<b>In their first 15 years, more than a quarter of President Bush's tax cuts will go to the top half of 1 percent of the population, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates. The top tenth of 1 percent will pocket 15 percent of the income tax cuts, far more beyond their share of all income.</b> And estate tax repeal will be worth even more to this thin and rich slice of Americans.
Under President Bill Clinton, who is widely known to have raised taxes on top wage earners, the effective tax rates paid by the 400 highest-income Americans fell sharply, from 30 percent in 1993 to 22 percent in 2000.
I calculated that had the Bush tax cuts been in effect in 2000, the top 400 would have paid a tax rate of 18 percent on incomes that averaged $174 million each that year. The government knows what the top 400 actually paid in 2001 and 2002, but the Bush administration refuses to release the data. One official who has seen the numbers said my 18 percent figure is wrong. "Your estimate was high," he said.
Bush says he wants a new tax system that will lower taxes on savings and investments and on "risk takers." He said a new system must be revenue neutral, meaning it will bring in the same amount as the old system.
If those with significant assets are going to pay less, there are only two ways to make up that revenue. One would be tremendous economic growth. The other would be to subtly shift more of the tax burden onto those Congress already watches closely: wage earners.
David Cay Johnston, a San Francisco native, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times. This article was adapted from the new paperback edition of his book "Perfectly Legal," an expose of how middle-class taxpayers subsidize the rich. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
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Last edited by host; 01-02-2007 at 10:58 AM..
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