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"Welfare" - The Great Delusion
We have long argued that at its core, modern society, at least on a mathematical basis - the one which ultimately trumps hopium every single time - is fatally flawed due to the existence, and implementation, of the concept of modern "welfare" - an idea spawned by Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s, and since enveloped the globe in various forms of transfer payments which provide the illusion of a social safety net, dangles the carrot of pension, health, and retirement benefits, and in turn converts society into a collage of blank faces, calm as Hindu cows. Alas, the cows will promptly become enraged bulls once they realize that all that has been promised to them in exchange for their docility and complacency has... well... vaporized. It is at that point that the final comprehension would dawn, that instead of a Welfare State, it has been, as Bill Buckler terms it, a Hardship State all along. Below we present the latest views from the captain of The Privateer on what the insoluble dilemma of the welfare state is, and what the key problems that the status quo will face with its attempts at perpetuating this lie.
From The Privateer
The Great Delusion - “Welfare”
For the best part of the last two decades, it has been accepted as an indisputable fact even by the mainstream media that the two great pillars of the welfare state - medicare and social security - will break the government which offers them. Today, every nation in the world makes at least some pretense of providing “welfare” to its citizens. Since the “developed” (or “rich”) nations are those where these systems are most “developed”, these are the nations most at risk of crumbling under their burdens.
Welfare has many antonyms, but “hardship” is particularly apt in this context. Wikipedia’s entry on “welfare” ends like this: “... this term replaces “charity” as it was known for thousands of years, being the act of providing for those who temporarily or permanently could not provide for themselves.” As usual, the defining characteristic is missed. Charity is voluntary. “Welfare” as practised by government is compulsory. This makes the two terms opposites. It also brings about the opposite results. Charity is a voluntary act made by those who have a surplus to assist those who do not. “Welfare” is a system guaranteed to end up in hardship for everyone but particularly for those who are forced to be “charitable”.
The insoluble dilemma of a “welfare state” is twofold. First, it results in a situation in which the majority of people who vote are partially or wholly dependent on the state for their sustenance. In every “advanced” nation today, those who vote for a living outnumber those who work for one. It is true that not everybody, or even a majority of those eligible in many cases, bothers to vote at all. It is equally true that the “wards of the state” have much more incentive to vote than do those who are to provide for them.
The second dilemma is the issue of the unfunded liabilities. The US government divides its budget into discretionary and NON discretionary items. The bulwarks of the welfare state, social security and medicare, fall into the second category. They are considered untouchable. There are only two problems here. First, the unfunded liabilities of these two programs are somewhere in the order of $US 80 - 120 TRILLION. Second, any talk of sharply lower annual deficits (let alone talk of a return to a budget balance) are puerile without MAJOR surgery being performed on medicare and social security. They are gigantic millstones around the neck of the US economy as they are on the economies of all other nations.
In the hands of government - “welfare” becomes its antithesis - “hardship”. Today, this is being illustrated in real time in Greece. But no nation can afford a welfare state in the long run.
It appears that the "Captain" is on to something here. A few short hours ago none other than Goldman Sachs was forced to come out with a report attempting to justify this most fundamental social illusion, in "Is Health Spending Unsustainable" - that only Goldman, and potentially the San Fran Fed, could put this question for serious debate when it is well known that the unfunded liabilities associated with such luxuries is in the triple trillion digit ballpark, speaks volumes. Yet, since even Goldman is now floating various "trial balloons", we can only assume that this is about to become a big issue for policy, especially ahead of the Supreme Court's hearings later this month on the constitutionality of the national health care law.
From Goldman Sachs
I. Is Health Spending Unsustainable?
Health spending in the US exceeds that of any other developed nation, topping the next largest spender by nearly half again as much (as a share of GDP). Spending has also tended to grow faster in the United States than elsewhere (Exhibit 1). Unchecked spending runs the risk of destabilizing public finances, reducing competitiveness with trading partners, and ultimately crowding out other productive uses of resources. This is particularly the case if health spending is inefficient (Exhibit 2).
However, the case that health spending is “unsustainable” isn’t as clear cut as the debate has sometimes made it out to be. After all, dedicating a larger share of future income gains to improving health could be a more productive investment than increasing other forms of personal consumption. Moreover, while health spending within federal programs is clearly unsustainable under current policies and growth trends, whether broader health spending should also be deemed to be growing too quickly depends on whether increased spending improves outcomes and whether it affects the ability of the rest of the economy to grow.
What Drives Health Spending?
From 1970 through 2010, nominal health spending grew at an average annual rate of 9.7%, well in excess of nominal GDP growth of 6.8%. Excess growth was greatest in the 1970s and 1980s, declined in the 1990s, and reaccelerated somewhat in the last decade (Exhibit 3). Continual growth in excess of GDP growth has led health spending to reach 15% of GDP (Exhibit 4). Notably, this has occurred while the out of pocket costs to patients and consumers have declined, replaced by indirect costs such as insurance premiums and taxes that fund public programs, as well as federal borrowing.
There is no single cause for excess growth in health spending, but a large body of research has focused on the drivers of growth and has reached qualitatively similar conclusions, as shown in Exhibit 5:

Technology. Advancement in the state of technology typically increases cost over existing products or procedures, though it may produce savings in other areas. Academic work has typically attributed residual spending growth to technology, after accounting for other measurable factors. More recent work has tended to find a slightly smaller though still large contribution from technology to total health spending.The exact magnitude is necessarily imprecise in any case, given substantial interaction between the availability of new technology and willingness to pay for it due to rising incomes and greater insurance.
Income. Differences in income explain a good deal of international variation in the health spending to GDP ratio (Exhibit 6). This implies that as societies become richer, they devote a greater share of additional income gains to health rather than other forms of consumption. We find that regressing excess cost growth through 2010 against real GDP growth with a one year lag produces a statistically significant coefficient similar to the estimates shown in Exhibit 5.

Insurance. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment conducted in the late 1970s found an insurance elasticity of 0.2, which implies that around 10% of the increase in real per capita spending growth since 1960 is attributable to increased insurance coverage. A more recent study examining the effect of coverage in Medicare found a much greater effect, suggesting increased insurance coverage could be responsible for as much as half of the increase in per capita spending. (See Amy Finkelstein, “The Aggregate Effects of Health Insurance: Evidence from the Introduction of Medicare,” 2006.)
Demographics. The contribution of aging of the population to spending growth is more certain but even here there are differences in estimated magnitude. Clearly, aging will become a more important source of health spending growth over the next two decades, but as spending on the “baby boomer” generation peaks, income growth and technology are likely to be more important factors over the long run.
What do official projections assume?
Despite chronic health spending growth in excess of GDP growth (an average of 2.1 percentage points on a real per capita basis since 1975) official estimates of Medicare solvency had until about ten years ago assumed a long-range growth rate essentially equivalent to GDP. This was eventually increased to GDP plus one percentage point, where it remained until passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Following enactment of that law, the official Medicare projections reported annually by program trustees are now based on growth of GDP minus 0.1 percent.
The ACA permanently reduced annual payment increases for Medicare providers and sets in motion a number of payment policy reforms that could lower utilization, so a reduction in future Medicare cost growth of this magnitude seems reasonable. However, these new lower projections have upside risk given that some of the reduction in growth stems from sizeable payment reductions that might eventually be reversed. Moreover, while the ACA improved Medicare finances, these savings as well as new taxes go to finance insurance expansion, which will raise total health spending in the medium term (Exhibit 7).
When Does Health Spending Become Unsustainable?
One of the difficulties in determining how long health spending is likely to grow as a share of the economy is that the US health care system has not existed for all that long in its current form. Commercial insurance companies only began to offer health insurance on a large scale around World War II (partly due to the employer response to wage controls), and federal health insurance programs (Medicare and Medicaid)were not established until the 1960’s. That said, some trends would likely prompt a reduction in health spending growth:
Public finances become strained. Since health spending totals about 15% of GDP but 23% of federal outlays, when health spending grows in excess of GDP, government spending as a share of GDP will necessarily expand. The demographic mix of publicly vs. privately insured individuals will add to fiscal pressures. Exhibit 8 shows the trajectory of spending assuming that historical excess cost growth gradually slows to zero and that certain cost containment policies are not maintained over the long term.
Whereas the private sector can gradually respond to increased health spending, the public sector—and particularly the federal—reaction is apt to be much slower, leading to deficit spending until changes are adopted. As shown in Exhibit 8, health spending if left unchecked would not only crowd out other spending but would also eventually exhaust all federal revenues.
Of course, we would expect the situation to be addressed long before this happens.
Health spending begins to crowd out real non-health consumption. This is not such a hard test to meet over the medium term, mainly because of the “low” base from which health spending as a share of GDP starts. Real per capita spending growth of around GDP+1.5% would slow but probably not reverse nonhealth consumption growth over the next 75 years, though this depends greatly on real growth and demographic assumptions (Exhibit 9).
Increased health spending begins to weigh on growth, creating a vicious circle. This appears quite distant, if it ever occurs. The main concern here would be that rising health spending crowds out other productive activities (for instance, fixed investment or education), reducing potential output and further increasing relative health spending. Alternatively, higher taxes (to pay for public programs) or insurance premiums (to pay for private insurance) would reduce workers’ take-home pay, with potentially adverse incentive effects at a certain level.
Finally, there is some evidence from businesses that excess health costs reduce employment and output. (Sood et al, find that a 10% increase in excess cost growth (i.e., about 20bps) leads to 121,000 fewer more jobs and $14bn in lost value added. See Neeraj Sood, Arkadipta Ghosh and Jose Escarce (2009) “Health Care Cost Growth, Employer Provided Insurance and the Economic Performance of U.S. Industries,” Health Services Research, Vol 44.)
When the Time Finally Comes…
If costs are ultimately deemed too great (or projected growth too fast) what can be done? The decision before policymakers, employers, and individuals falls along two lines: first, what share of total output should be devoted to health care instead of other goods and services, and second, what is the optimal mix of public vs. private payment for whatever share is decided. This leaves three options:
1. Limit growth in health care costs regardless of payor, because activities that would otherwise be crowded out by health spending are deemed more important. Reaction to rapid growth in the 1980s— health spending consumed around 25% of overall per capita real income growth—led to Medicare payment reductions and broader use of managed care. This, along with strong growth elsewhere in the economy,stabilized the health share of GDP temporarily. Future restraint in health spending is likely to come from elsewhere, particularly given that Medicare cuts were already used to finance new spending under the ACA, so those savings have already been captured. A reduction in the geographic disparity of health spending is one option for future savings—patients in some areas of the country receive much greater intensity of treatment at greater cost than patients in other parts of the country, but show little medical benefit. (See for instance “Health Care Spending, Quality, and Outcomes; More Isn’t Always Better,” Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, 2009) Use of information technology to increase medical and administrative efficiency is another.
2. Allow health spending to rise, but reallocate payment responsibility from the public sector to the private sector, in order to avoid the fiscal consequences that would follow, i.e., tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in the budget. Since most of the public policy discussion regarding the rise in health spending relates to Medicare, and to a lesser extent Medicaid, it is quite possible that policymakers will find it sufficient to shift the financing burden for health costs away from the federal budget. This could mean an increase in the burden on state governments (they already face growth in Medicaid spending under the ACA), and would almost certainly imply increased cost-sharing for Medicare enrollees, thus shifting some of financing burden back to the private sector in the form of higher out of pocket spending. Under some proposals, such as that offered by House Budget Committee Paul Ryan, Medicare spending would be capped at GDP+1. The Bowles-Simpson proposal would apply the limitation more broadly, limiting federal health spending and the tax exclusion for employer sponsored benefits to GDP+1, though it is not specific on how this would be accomplished.
3. Allow public health spending to rise and reallocate resources to pay for it. While it is unlikely that public-sector health spending growth would go completely unchecked, it is possible that additional health spending restraint could be modest, with a greater focus on reallocating resources to cover increasing state and federal health costs. The result would likely be higher taxes in this scenario, since in 2011 Congress already capped discretionary spending (annual appropriations by Congress) and automatic cuts set to take effect next year would reduce this segment further (we assume these will be pushed back past 2013). We estimate that the primary budget deficit (i.e., excluding interest) will average around 2% of GDP over the next ten years and it is politically unrealistic to imagine that such a large amount of savings can be found in the 13% of the budget that excludes appropriations, health, and Social Security. The upshot under this scenario would most likely be a tax increase of a magnitude similar to our estimated primary deficit of around 2% of GDP (roughly the size of the 2001/2003 tax cuts set to expire at year end). However, this would be the minimum under such a scenario, for two reasons: first, health spending would continue to rise, requiring additional tax hikes later on. Second, eliminating the primary deficit over the medium term is the minimum—a primary surplus is needed to bring down the ratio of debt to GDP.
The ultimate outcome is likely to be a combination of all three scenarios, though we suspect public policy will focus on the second and third options since they have less ability to influence the growth of privately financed health spending. It is also worth noting that health spending may naturally slow as its ratio to GDP rises; a simple regression of excess cost growth against the lagged ratio of health spending to GDP shows a coefficient of around -0.25, implying a gradual slowing in the growth rate even as the level of health spending continues to increase.
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A comment on the idiocy of some of the posters here.
Thanks for helping make the point.
Gee - and here I thought that having a profit motive in every single level of the healthcare business might - just might have something to do with the level of expenditure.
Then again, perhaps it had to do with the fact that these suck-heads all have to report quarter over quarter growth to Wall St. But no - that wouldn' account for it...
Or perhaps all of the wonderful drugs, procedures, equipment etc are exported to other countries that regulate their expenditures - but no - it couldn't be that.
Bottom line - everyone should just die when they are no longer healthy enough to serve as cogs in the wealth producing machine of their betters.
/sarc off
Gee, have you seen the cost of public education? No profit motive but there is sure a lot of government involvement. Otherwise great analysis.
More fabled past. And as usual distorted present.
Great. Again, the same scam that the majority vote themselves benefits.
So in the US, for major elections, 4 out of 10 of the electorate vote. 4 out of 10. 6 skip the ballot casting.
Connecting with the story on jobs etc... Once again, US citizenism at its best.
Charity in the past was voluntary. Really? In the West?
Charity was mandatory. It came with the religion package. Taxes were levied by the Church with one share going to charity.
Nobles had to name in certain cases almoners themselves with a contribution made from the nobles' revenues.
Distorted present, fabled past. Move on, another US citizen article.
STFU
At no time did churches hold a gun to be people's head and say pay or die or be incarcerated. Nice try but you fail.
Taxes are not what churches levy that is what governments do. Your misuse of defintions lends nothing to your already discredited arguments.
Exactly. There was no such thing as the 30 years war; or the spanish inquisition; etc...
You got me, kudos. I was responding to his claim of this happening in the US.
Really?
Churches did not tax people?
People could escape church taxation?
It must be some kind of semantics trick US citizens are fond of.
Tithing is not taxing or something like that.
Churches did kill & incarcerate people. Excuses were made but if you were too poor, a heathen / unbeliever, or the target of some plot, you were going to suffer horribly. Witch trials? Inquisition? Native "heathen savages"? Any of this ringing a bell?
Tithing to church is a tax, and in the older days it was mandatory so you'd be a heathen, maybe killed, if you didn't tithe & go to church.
Isn't there a polluted chinese roadside somewhere next to a steaming and fetid mountain of toxic garbage, an enforced abortion clinic, and a counterfeit consumer product sweatshop manned by conquered and displaced indentured Tibetans just waiting for you to come take a shit on while picking your nose and spitting?
If there is such a place, it looks like this site is the place that be.
Bear with it.
Racism, that vital component of US citizenism. What would be US citizens with their racism dose?
The Great Enabler - Education...
Let me tell you guys the unfortunate truth behind "healthcare."
Do any of you honestly want to be 90 years old, with two metal hips and knees, your chest cracked open for a bypass surgery, with a few more stents in your arteries, on 15 medications that make you crazy and prone to bleeding...and then after that go through a few rounds of chemo/radiation to "cure" you of a cancer...and, after all of this and a few intubations and dialysis rounds, to finally end up demented, blind, and peeing over yourself, in a retirement home, "cared" for by a know nothing, affirmative action nurse who steals every last bit of cash you have left? With your family bankrupted by your bills?
Beyond a certain point you have to start admitting that a quick and relatively painless death is preferable. Nobody on this planet can or should live forever.
Long morphine.
Ask me when I am 90 years old.
"I feel happy! I feel happy!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs
I had a friend, at 75, tell me the "Golden Years" aren't really that golden. The slow slide down is inevitable.
Long Fentanyl!
True, but shoving 55 year olds out the door to keep the govt numbers honest isn't healthcare any more than climatology is science.
The entitlements here have become so distorted. They went from a safety nets to free cell phones now. Puh-leaze! Where does it stops? Welfare is now a freak show in America.
Plus, if people saved more they would not have to rely on the Gub'mint.
Everyone wants a free lunch now, from Wall Street Bankers at one end, to the frivolous spenders at the other. This results in some who really need "welfare" not receiving it.
There are just too many brainless clowns in this country to take an honest look at ALL forms of welfare. The story always goes that we must stop the banksters OR the welfare queens but never ever both at the same time. As if the remaining evil would not steal and squander the totality of what was abdicated by the vanquished...
I have to admit I can't finish reading anything authored by Goldman.
Touch my welfare and I'll burn my neighborhood down! Remember LA?
Cowards get terrorized. Korean shopkeepers get even.
The government's job is two-fold being 1: To keep the peace and 2: by providing fair and equitable judgements on conflicts in society to dissipate tension.
As long as the perception of fairness and judgement is maintained, tension will be dissipated and peace will be kept.
When the perception is lost the peace cannot be kept not even with overwhelming police state tactics. In this scenario the government is part of the problem and supplies a negative feedback mechanism which accelerates the collapse. This ironically helps as it speeds up the ending so that a new system can rise from the ashes of that which once was. Its basic self reconstructing capitialism, which to quote Winston Churchill is the worst kind of government except for all the rest.
The question to be asked is , "Are you helping or hurting the cause to keep the peace".
Your answer may determine if a street light will be reserved for you.
Return government power to the States. The larger the entity the more wieldy the beast. The more inverted te pyramid the more synthetic its workings. War always results when Global social orders prevail. Create a revolution for the rule of the one. Peaceful revolution of the many on behalf of the one. Everyone wears the face of the economics for dummy's symbol - the inverted pyramid. Control from above died with its God's.
My litmus tests to determine if people truly understand freedom are:
1) Do you want far less government if any even at all?
(Read: do you want to take individual responsibility instead of having government take responsibility for you and do you want to use government in your favor to get something from others?)
2) Are you willing to accept inequality?
(Read: do you understand that freedom can only mean moral equality and outcomes of inequality?)
At the root of all society, its people must deal with and decide on whether to side on liberty and individual responsibility which leads to the acceptance of inequality or to side on socialism and the pursuit of equality which will fail 100% of the time as there is no such thing as equality.
Most people will not sit down and watch this 1-hour long video but it explains the key to freedom and equality:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zmGDbsf2Fk&feature=plcp&context=C4d6c1b2VDvjVQa1PpcFOcQOAGT3O2BkdzfrGrvirdXmr-mqIS6gs%3D
Here in Canada, people WANT the gov to take care of their health. The absolute most important thing for a person is his or her health and only he or she could take care of it properly, not a beaurocrat.
Once health care is nationalized, it's de facto totalitarianism DEMANDED and ACCEPTED by the people.
Churchill: Every nation deserves its leaders.
It's the people, it's not the leaders to blame. Leaders are a product of the people.
Excellent. I would only add it is the people's philosophy and ideas that are to blame not the leaders.
I would only add it is the people's philosophy and ideas that are to blame not the leaders.
Wait, what? I wasn't listening to your conversation.
/sarc on
Totally, bub. Blame the "people's philsophy" and not the leaders.
In fact, let's just settle into the new edition of Newsweek with David C on the cover:
http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=1366&bih=604&tbm=isch&t...
"Hi - I'm Dave. Since you are too stupid to know who I am, why doesn't Newsweek tell you who my favorite person from Jersey Shore is? Afterwards, you can feel like you understand international pollitics."
/sarc off
Did I miss anything?
Spacemonkeys, I swear that all we can do is be a good person in our own little universe yet try and exploit the rest of which that is "out there". 'Cuz this society as of today sure as fuk ain't worth saving.
I agree, lots of people can't even spell the work fuck right for fuck's sakes.
govenment support does not provide for society
.
It is comfort
Welfare is merely the compassionate way to treat the bottom 20% of society in a highly optimized capitalist system. The system does not have roles for the least productive among us ("productive" here being a combination of physical abilities, intelligence, and behavioral traits that are conducive to modern enterprise). It simply doesn't. Between automation and outsourcing, there will NEVER be a worthwhile role in modern society for the bottom quintile.
So what to do with them? Enslave them? Well no, we can't do that. Kill them? Hmph, but abortion is legal isn't it? Jail them all? Not practical, although we do jail millions of them. Ignore them? But they'll turn to crime...
What to do, what to do. Oh I know, let's toss them a few crumbs to support a meager existence. Food and shelter and a little bit more to keep them entertained.
Welfare was always a bribe to the lowest quintile of society to pacify them and prevent them from attacking/killing the more productive members of society. And it works.
Welfare was always a bribe to the lowest quintile of society to pacify them and prevent them from attacking/killing the more productive members of society. And it works.
Fuking welfare also works in terms of jacking up the price of my Southwest Jalepeno burger. If these fuks at Hardee's didn't take SNAP cards instead of cracking skulls on the welfare queens I'd be paying $2.29 a burger rather than this inflated $3.39.
See how easy it is to write meaningless complaints on the interwebs? Buy physical.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgT_us6AsDg
It works until it doesn't.
High level of production, to the moon.No limit to consumption.
Quite funny how US citizens design their story to be on the right side.
In the current situation, productive US citizens weigh much more than non productive US citizens.
Production is consumption. And the level of consumption induced by US citizenism is not sustainable.
The current crisis is the result of the middle class and its companion, that aggregative demand that gave birth to stuff like the corporations. Upper and lower classes are irrelevant.
Can we afford welfare? Obviously with the current debt load, we can afford very little 'welfare'. And let's face it, TPTB don't want the serfs to be in a position to be giving charitable donations, that would mean that there was too much disposable income, and when the Robber Barons are through, there will be very little disposable income left.
Big Pharma will keep getting paid retail by the government for their brand name patented drugs that their marketing dollars have convinced Americans, through their doctors, relentless TV commercials, and the 'research' being disseminated ad-nauseum through the mainstream media, that they need to be 10 different medications for life to treat every ailment. Millions of people are medicated for problems caused from a nutricional deficiency, food allergy or sedentary lifestyle, so a lot money will need to be extracted from the tax payers to pay Big Pharma's profits. There will be no attempts at trying to save the tax payers money, there never is.
Money will also continue to be extracted from the tax payers to maintain the biggest welfare recipients of all, the TBTF banks, on a the permanent teat of the tax payers and living in the lap of luxury.
More money will need to be extracted from the tax payers in order to continue to subsidize the businesses of companies like Exxon and BP, ext. Military bases and force will continue to be necessary in order to ensure that despotic regimes, like the one in Saudi Arabia, are kept in power. Sometimes a military take over and occupation are necessary to ensure that the refineries will be owned and controlled by the same Multinationals, after all, it is they that have paid off our politicans to use our military free of charge so that they can pump cheap oil out of places like Iraq and Uganda.
Luckily for these companies, they get all of the subsidies without even having to pay taxes in the US.
No wonder they want to shut off the internet. They are lucky that the mainstream media is under their control and that many Americans still think that we live in a Democracy. They are lucky.
It's a bit rich to talk of welfare being 'unaffordable' - when in the case of health care this is because the US allow private companies to supply the care - at a cost higher than ANY other western nation.
The 'unaffordability' of welfare comes from the morons who don't want to contribute because they think they will never need it (or will always be able to provide something privately)
The truth is - unless you have a totally egalitarian society then welfare will continue to exist.
The alternative is riots and civil disorder as people with nothing CHOOSE to overthrow their Government - as they have nothing to lose.
This is what the victorians discovered.
Maybe instead of an attack on welfare there should be an attack on the businesses and the whole irrational concept that people go into business to 'create growth' - when the truth is they do it purely for profit. The result of which is a more unequal society and a whole lot more waste.
I would also point out that the article is misleading in it's claim of "what drives health spending" - well the reason is not Government criven - but population driven as Americans stuff their faces with hamburgers which produce diabetes and other obesity problems at a great cost to the taxpayer (eventually).
MOST T-party tax haters blame the people for eating them - but considering McDonalds DELIBERATEY advertises to children - then I'd say 'free choice' is destroyed long before it's given.
...but then most T-party tax haters are probably employed by McD's anyway.
then why is the cost of a public university education exceeding inflation?
For the same reason real-estate appreciation for the past 30 years exceeded inflation.
Right on, government involvement/meddling. Not profit motive like a few on this thread have tried to claim.
That's only half-right, though.
The government passed stupid laws which made it very easy for profit-seeking businesses to game the system. Without the combination of the two, it couldn't have happened.
The Kleptocrat uberlords love it when the commoners are tearing at each other down in the pigpen. Anything that keeps the focus off the main problem.
Under the guise of really addressing the core issues around health spending all that Goldman Sachs have done is perpetuate the status quo. What is striking is how people who you would think would be advocates of the free market and the benefits that derive from it, seem to habitually forget about it when it comes to health care. Let's consider what Goldman says are driving health care costs; 1. Technology, Income, Insurance and Demographics?!? I find this unbelievably daft, when it is clear that what is really driving health care costs is THE LACK OF COMPETITION ACROSS DIFFERENT TYPES OF HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS.
When you have Homeopathy (which if one looks at the statistics for the major diseases in the 19th and early 20th century where orders of magnitude more effective than so-called conventional medicine), Naturopathy (which has treatments for so-called incurable diseases that have higher success rates at less than a 10th the costs in most cases) or other forms of medicine to say that what is driving health costs is the 4 factors mentioned is like saying that symptoms are the cause of the disease!!! These clowns need to wake up and realize that government facilitates this through the FDA and USDA who suppress successful treatments to major medical diseases (Do a search on "Dr. Burzynski's cancer") or even other innovators who came up with means of treating diseases with light, microwaves, etc all the while allowing for companies to grow and sell "food" laced with agent orange oops I mean glyphosate. Not only does government allow for the suppression of amazing treatments for fractions of the costs, but it provides almost blanket immunity to these companies to provide "treatments" that maim and kill the public as well as creating major birth defects in children (glyphosate). If ever a sector cried out for true free market competition and the elimination of regulation (so that companies would be required to use insurance companies to cover them for the risks associated with their products) it's the health care market.
D'oh
http://www.examiner.com/finance-examiner-in-national/president-obama-sig...