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

To: Road Walker who wrote (10456)	10/14/2009 3:27:09 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

It depends on which measure your using. Measures of wages exclude all government benefits. Others include cash benefits (or some cash benefits), but not noncash benefits (even not non-cash benefits that are part of compensation for labor). Do they also exclude some government benefits to the rich? If they are measuring wages (which isn't usually what they are measuring for the rich for good reason since many have high non-wage income) then yes. For the common inequality calculations usually all income for the rich is considered, so yes most of the government benefits would count, unless your talking about public goods which are seen to benefit everyone (for example government roads or police protection, are not, IMO correctly not, counted as income for either the poor or the rich or the middle)