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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (52602)	7/4/2012 3:35:44 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

If its far in the future, counting it as the interest forgone on a free loan for that amount can eventually show it as being an even larger break than just making it tax free to begin with. Even 1% interest forever adds up to more than the initial amount over time (assuming no compounding, because your measuring the break as forgone interest on the initial amount but not interest on the interest, then at100 years for 1% interest, or 10 years for ten percent interest, you have an amount equal to the initial break, and greater after that), reasonable the initial amount should be a limiting factor. Letting me borrow $100 for a a century interest free isn't actually worth more than just giving me the money as a gift. "Companies can count most of the cost of boring a new well against their taxes at the time the money’s spent, rather than recognizing it over several years." Is in effect borrowing a tax break. You pay less taxes now, but you can't claim the deductions later. It doesn't go off towards infinity, the specific investment costs, would get deducted according to a normal depreciation schedule anyway. The delay is the several years, not indefinite. If they drill more wells that's a new instance of investment, with its own separate deductibility, not an extension of deductibility of the old investment. Once you accept the idea that taxes are on profits, not revenue (and that is the basis of our corporate tax system), then you can just as reasonably call not allowing immediate expensing to be an extra burden on corporations, as you can call faster expensing to be a giveaway to them. The only somewhat solid argument for it to be considered a government benefit is the relative speed and amount of various breaks. The oil companies get quicker deductions on intangible drilling costs, but they are limited to a 6% deduction on the "Domestic Manufacturer’s Deduction (Section 199)", when other industries don't have that limitation. (see hotair.com and reason.com ), and looking at the big picture, oil companies pay a larger percent of their income in taxes than other companies do. mjperry.blogspot.com So even just considering the income tax, the idea that oil companies are subsidized is questionable (and if they are they are subsidized less then other industrial companies). And that's before 1 - Considering that a tax break really isn't a subsidy (its taking less from you, not giving more to you) and 2 - All the extra taxes on the products of the oil companies.

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (52602)	7/9/2012 3:05:32 AM
From: greatplains_guy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

The Dream of Command Economics By Yuval Levin July 5, 2012 3:16 P.M. In today’s Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria offers an unusually stark example of the left’s basic conceptual error in the health-care debate. Arguing (correctly, I think) that the core problem to be solved is the problem of controlling costs without undermining quality, he insists that centralized coordination and control is the only effective way to do so and that conservatives are therefore barking up the wrong tree when they look to markets for help. Zakaria begins by getting the conservative approach wrong. He writes: Republican alternatives to Obamacare, such as Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan, don’t bother with expanding coverage, which is a mistake because they leave in place a broken insurance model in which people can freeload. Actually, Paul Ryan’s alternative to Obamacare—the Patient’s Choice Act—proposes an enormous expansion of coverage. Among other things, it would transform today’s tax exclusion for employer-provided coverage into a capped universal health-care tax credit, which people could use to buy coverage or care regardless of their circumstances. A similar proposal by John McCain in the 2008 campaign was projected to reduce the number of uninsured Americans by roughly 21 million. Over time the effect would likely be even greater than that since this system would create an enormous incentive for insurers to offer attractive low-premium plans that could be purchased for the amount made available by the credit (simply put, neither consumers nor insurers would leave billions of dollars on the table unclaimed, and the enormous competition among insurers for that money would yield appealing options). So while it wouldn’t always involve insurance as comprehensive as Obamacare would require, it would be likely to get us closer to universal access to health insurance than Obamacare—and without the kinds of violations of individual liberty, the Constitution, and the laws of economics involved with Obamacare. Zakaria then contends that the inefficiencies of the American health care system—and especially the frequent disconnect between costs and outcomes—are a function of there just being too many different players in the system, each with his own goals. This is the classic liberal complaint: disorder causes inefficiency. Citing a conversation with Daniel Vassela, the chairman of Novartis, Zakaria writes: “In America,” he said, “no one has incentives to make quality and cost-effective outcomes the goal. There are so many stakeholders and they each want to protect themselves. Someone needs to ask, ‘What are the critical elements to increase quality?’ That’s what we’re going to pay for, nothing else.” And from this, Zakaria does not conclude that we need to rearrange the financial incentives in our health-care system so that, like in other parts of our economy, providers of services have a powerful incentive (called the profit motive) to make quality and cost-effectiveness their goal. Instead, he concludes that government must take over decisions about how to provide coverage and organize the system because presumably government is very good at making quality and cost-effectiveness its goals. Right. The fact is that the incentives in our health-care system are all screwed up precisely because of government policies and programs. Medicare, the biggest player in our insurance system by far, is an arcane fee-for-service system that encourages volume over value and inflates (while shifting) costs. Medicaid, meanwhile, has a state-federal structure that makes cost-containment nearly impossible (by having state policymakers make spending decisions while the Feds pay at least half the cost in an open-ended way). And the tax exclusion for employer-provided coverage creates a huge incentive for high-premium insurance while shielding everyone involved from actual prices and costs. All the incentives point to cost inflation and away from outcome-based health economics, so we shouldn’t be surprised to have an inefficient system. It is precisely conservative reformers who have proposed to change this, and it is precisely liberals who seek to avoid that change. Obamacare doubles down on all of these sources of inefficiency, and it does so on exactly Zakaria’s premise: that the chaos of the market would make things less efficient and only the centralized coordination of a benevolent bureaucracy can make the system work. It’s hard to believe we are still having this argument. nationalreview.com