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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (22616)	6/30/2006 10:17:47 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543684

If Venti and Wise had just read Stanley and Danko's "Millionaire Next Door" they could have reached the same conclusion based on existing research. ;<)

To: Lane3 who wrote (22616)	6/30/2006 10:18:48 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 543684

Crook on Health Care Reform The ever-thoughtful Clive Crook opines on the recent health care initiative in Massachusetts and what it takes to reform health care more broadly. An excerpt: How to do national health reform worthy of the name? First, and most important, create a level playing field tax-wise for individuals and firms, so that nobody has a financial incentive to prefer employer-provided insurance to the individually purchased kind. You could do this by extending Connector-style tax relief to all taxpayers, or by abolishing it for employers. Abolition would be better. It would raise a lot of revenue (which will be needed in my plan) and would jolt people into changing their insurance arrangements. Second, the free-rider problem makes the case for an individual mandate compelling, in my view. Massachusetts is right about that. And the mandate, in turn, makes health subsidies for the poor, which would be desirable in any case, unavoidable. Massachusetts is right about that, too. But to avoid the enormous problems of enforcing and administering the mandate (all in return for less-than-universal coverage in any case), turn this logic around and give everybody a voucher sufficient to buy stripped-down, Connector-style coverage. These two ideas--scrapping the subsidy for employer-provided insurance and instituting an individual mandate--make sense to me. The individual mandate turns the traditional liberal idea on its head: Health insurance is not a right but a responsibility. I see the appeal of the voucher idea, but I would like to see the numbers before I sign on. I am apprehensive about expanding entitlements, as we haven't figured out yet how to pay for those we have already promised." gregmankiw.blogspot.com

To: Lane3 who wrote (22616)	6/30/2006 10:49:47 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543684

Combining those two observations gives the wrong impression. On the first, the notion that the top 20 percent were twice as likely to work long hours as the bottom, it needs to take account of the dramatic changes in the structure of the workforce since 1983, i.e, the declining loss of high wage unionized factory jobs and the increasing presence of low wage service sector jobs. In short, that may be more of a structural labor force change than the high income earner just work longer hours. As for the Venti/Wise research that's really about a different phenomenon. Not the poor versus something else.