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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (4934)	2/25/2008 5:55:19 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

Don't you think that may be a way to pay for universal healthcare???? I don't know that it matters. All general fund monies are fungible.

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (4934)	2/25/2008 6:03:55 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

Any tax could be a way to pay for just about any government program. Within reason there is normally "a way to pay for X", whether X is universal single payer health care, or a new bomber design for the airforce, or an increase in farm price supports. The question is not "is there a way to pay for it" (except that if there truly isn't, than you have to drop the idea) the questions are 1 - Is X a good thing? 2 - If it is, is it worth the cost of paying for it? 3 - Is your specific plan to pay for it a reasonably good way to raise money, that doesn't create a lot pervesive incentives, or very high compliance costs, or other harm to the economy. Our corporate tax rate is already pretty high compared to many other wealthy countries. Increasing it would be harmful. "Have corporations pay some taxes on their profits?" Well most of them do. If you point is to close some sort of loophole that specific companies use, well whether that would be a good idea (or even whether the method really should be called a loophole) would require a lot more specific information and gets us further and further away from talking about health care. But lets assume for a moment there really is a major loophole where profitable companies can just avoid paying taxes. Well 1 - If you think it should be closed, the revenue it raises could be used to cut taxes, or decrease the deficit, or it could be spent on something else. While at the same time if you think "universal health care" is a good idea, the money could come from somewhere else. Your really talking about two issues not one. 2 - In a real sense corporations don't pay income taxes. A tax on corporations is a tax on their shareholders, workers, and customers. Some studies seem to show that workers are the most likely to pay the largest part of the burden. The CBO estimated that they are hit by 70% of the corporate tax burden.