Fiscal Cliff Political Stupidity

[overtone]

Who is going to pay for all that? The only people who can pay, the wealthy. But eventually wealthy will mean earning about $100,000/year.

Although a steady 100k personal income is in the highest quintile, the standard definition of "rich", we can pay for a reasonable life by progressively taxing only the 200, maybe 250k and up. Most of the available wealth and income has accumulated in the very highest percentiles.

Social security and medicare cannot last much longer at the current payroll deductions and ever-increasing-inflation-adjusted monthly payouts to the increasing numbers of old people with expensive health problems.

SS is solid for many years - at least fifty, with only minimal tweaking. Medicare has the Republican Plan D anchor hung on its neck, but that is a simple (if not easy, politically) fix. The employer based private insurance setup is already doubling our costs, but we have proven willing to pay double to avoid treating the poor and undeserving, so that will go on for a while.

Even the middle class will take a tax hit. The poor will have Obamacare, but that will eventually evolve to just drugs to take away the pain while dying of conditions that CAN be cured, but too expensive to cure.

If Obamacare actually provides diagnosis, painkillers, and symptom relief at reasonable cost to the poor, that will be a step up from current emergency room situations. I think it won't work, but it might - we'll see.

 

Probably the middle class will most benefit from Obamacare, for a while, as continuing rocketing costs even further erode employer based health insurance but their incomes can buy them in at the income-controlled individual prices. Eventually we install a single payer system financed by steeply progressive taxation, or we give up on providing First World medical care to the majority of the citizens of the United States: either will probably involve the current Bandarlog of white male voters suffering a "hit bottom" experience. That's the only way those guys learn anything.

 

The basic problem is that thirty years of government according to Reaganomics has fostered a degree of inequality in wealth and income that is creating (and if not corrected will continue to create) a second or even third world economy in the US. We have to figure out how to tax the rich.

[Airbrush]

"The basic problem is that thirty years of government according to Reaganomics has fostered a degree of inequality in wealth and income that is creating (and if not corrected will continue to create) a second or even third world economy in the US. We have to figure out how to tax the rich."

 

If we detected an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, and we had enough time to build a defense system to save the world from annihilation, but the system cost Trillions of dollars, would the rich be willing to pay for it or any other natural mega-disaster?

Edited January 3, 2013 by Airbrush