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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (14702)	6/12/2002 8:20:31 AM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

With lower taxes there would be more resources to use to invest. In the late 90s you had an unsustanable buble that probably would also have happened with lower tax rates but allowing more resources to go to the private sector instead of the public sector would have produced more solid investment as well as more high flying bubble companies. I can just as easily claim, with a tad more support that if the additional cash was available for investment it would have been leveraged at the same rate. The bubble was expanding as much as investment and leverage would allow it. It doesn't intuitively follow that additional cash would have reduced the leverage. The savings and loans where deregulated while still keepingthe government responsible for making up lost deposits. Perfect example of moral hazard there. Or to put it another way a perfect example not of deregulation in general but of foolishly planned and executed deregulation. Deregulation of the airlines has allowed ordinary people to be able to afford flying. We do agree that there has been successful and unsuccessful deregulations. But along with that more people can fly [though it would be somewhat difficult to show how much that had to do with deregulation and how much it had to with rising income and other factors.], but you've also got a reduction in services, there has been no improvement in time to travel, and the maintenance practices of the major airlines have degraded, e.g., they now have third party machine shops providing non aircraft qualified critical parts [illegally]. The fact that there are lots of other factors doesn't mean marginal tax rates are not a factor, sometimes even an important one. Higher tax rates do discourage investment and tilt it towards tax shelters rather then the most productive investments. That doesn't mean that a country can not prosper after a tax increase just that it will need the other factors to be heavily in its favor. What largely influences investment is demand and competition. I can pull out the economic books that tell me that lower interest rates encourage investment. But in the absence of demand and competition, lower interest rates don't mean a whole lot. The interest rates are pretty damn low now, and it does not appear to be stimulating investment. A lot of companies are operating at losses, they can't afford to invest even with the low interest rates. The demand and competitive environment prevents them from doing so. Tax rates as a disincentive to investments. Eye wash. Bill Gates is pretty damn wealthy, and to a lesser degree all the other CEO's and officers of the company. None of them are sloughing off to an early retirement. They're personnally driven to excel and they let their tax accountants worry about the numbers. There universal health care often means that instead of straining to pay for medical care, you strain to pay the taxes, while you wait in line for non urgent care. A dispropotionate share of medical advances happen in the US and the care available here is so good that people who can afford it often come from other countries to get it, sometimes from Europe. And I could cite a member of Congress that sent his wife to Germany for medical treatment. What's the point? What your argument fails to recognize is that the health care systems your illustrating isn't an accurate comparison. England vs. the US for example. Both countries have publicly and privately funded health care. The difference between the two, is that the US primarily provides public health care to the very poor and elderly, another large segment is covered under private health care plans primarily subsidized by the companies they work for. That leaves a rather significant portion of the population that doesn't have any health care coverage at all. And it's a group of lower income, though not low enough to qualify for Medicaid that is strapped to the wall. It's a group that is denied access because of the costs. In the UK, there's a national health care system that covers everyone, the same care. And you're absolutely correct that for some types of non-emergency services there are waiting lines for those services. For day-to-day health exams, shots, flu, there are no lines. It's Wednesday, if I called my local doctor right now for an appointment because I had the flu, I'd be in no later than Friday. I certainly didn't get that kind of treatment from my HMO in the States, two weeks at a minimum to get an appointment. My sister was visiting from the States and forgot her blood pressure medication. Saturday morning at 9:00 am we called my local doctor and by 11:00 am, she was registered with the NHS, and had her filled-prescription in hand. Then consider the private care supplement that is used in the UK. It's available to those that can afford it to cover the lines for non-emergency services. There's no noticable difference in service availability between that system and a private health care plan in the States. If you want to compare the two systems. Compare them in their entirety, not compare the best of the US system against the worst of the European systems and then declare victory. And cost comparisons. Cost of what? Do you want to consider the comparitive costs only of government funding? If that's what you want to do, the US wins. If you want to compare the entire national costs between the two systems, the US doesn't win. Do you want to make any consideration for life expectency? I think that's a pretty important criteria for judging the effectivness of a health care system. jttmab