The inability to pass any additional stimulus is absolutely the fault of our current congress.
I would say the problem is government. They keep changing regulations, taxation, and all other types of things that affect employers.
I would say if they just left things alone, everything would stabilize.
Once again, government intervention is not the solution. They need to get out of the way of progress, and anyone who wants government help, should just move back in with their parents. At least I equate such desires as wanting the nanny, or being taken care of by others.
Ok. We disagree on how to address economic issues.
Start by letting business be able to plan for the future, that doesn't keep changing with a political whim. Start bringing employment back here. Too much has been outsourced because it can be make elsewhere for less. Make the changed in this area. Too many of our policies keep us from being compe ive in the world.
Unless we start importing chunks of roads and brigdes, infrastructure projects in America can't be outsourced. There's simply no political will to invest in that, or at least have government directly invest in that, as coyotes_geek pointed out.
Yes, certain jobs simply cannot be outsourced. However, when everything else is, at what tax rate will the working have to be taxed to subsidize the poor and non working?
"infrastructure projects in America can't be outsourced."
google: "bay bridge imported"
Move Over Simpson-Bowles... There's a New Plan in Town
Raises significant revenue, and does so progressively.
Simplifies the codes (repeals the AMT!) again in a progressive manner (e.g. turns some deductions into credits, which is a) more plausible than ending said deductions, and b) more fair than the current system).
Disposes of that artificial250,000 threshold line-in-the-sand.
Some preferential treatment of investment income but closer to goal of equal treatment.
Lowers the corporate rate, something many businesses and their think tanks have clamored for (paid for by closing corporate tax breaks).
Builds on the1.5 trillion of spending cuts on the books, but without hurting vulnerable beneficiaries of the safety net and social insurance.
Protects domestic programs (non-en lements) from further spending cuts; generates Medicare savings from specific reform to the delivery system.
$100 billion to preserve the payroll tax cut, or something like it, in 2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jared-...comm_ref=false
Repugs have NOTHING specific in their proposal. It's a joke.
We've had this conversation before. It's not a taxing issue. You could reduce taxes to effectively zero and the cost of living in the US would still be much higher than China, India, etc.
While certain things like vehicles or gas are cheap in the US comparatively, things like housing are not. There's no "supply side" or "free market" solution to that problem.
In an interview with PBS' Gwen Ifill on Tuesday, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman tore into the GOP's fiscal cliff proposal and launched a spirited defense of President Barack Obama.
Krugman explained that Obamacare has done more to bring down en lement costs than anything Republicans have proposed. "In Washington, that is considered not serious because he's not actually taking benefits away from people who need them. It's a really weird thing. It's only considered serious if you inflict pain on vulnerable people," he said, referring to the recent GOP proposal to raise the Medicare eligibility age.
That proposal is "cruel" and would save a "trivial" amount of money. He also said that reducing the inflation adjustment for Social Security benefits, as Republicans have proposed, would inflict "some serious hardship for very little money."
Krugman hammered home the jarring point that the Republican proposal only "sounds serious because it hurts vulnerable people."
He is not the only economist noting that raising the Medicare eligibility age wouldn't significantly reduce en lement costs. Austin Frakt, a health care economist at Boston University, wrote in a blog post Wednesday that "the savings are too small" and "it does nothing, absolutely nothing, to increase the efficiency of Medicare or the health system."
Qualifying for Medicare at age 65 is a critical lifeline for many seniors; 16.3 percent of Americans age 45 to 64 lacked health insurance last year, according to the Census Bureau. The government's adjustment of Social Security benefits for inflation also helps prevent the elderly from finding essentials to be more unaffordable as they age, according to the Associated Press.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...n_2243625.html
Republicans have proposed reducing the cost of Medicare by raising the eligibility age. Currently, Americans can enroll in Medicare when they turn 65. Some Republicans have proposed increasing the eligibility age to 67 or 68.
But Krugman said that proposal wouldn’t bring much savings, because most seniors between 65-68 years old are relatively healthy.
“It makes almost no difference to the financial outlook,” he said. “But it’s cruel.”
Krugman said it was wrong to focus on Medicare and Social Security to reduce the federal deficit.
“All of these things that have occupied all our attention are not actually where the big bucks are. The big bucks are in making high-income people pay higher taxes and in actually addressing health care costs, which the Affordable Care Act does and none of the things that we’re talking about now will actually do.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/0...erable-people/
Conservatives Whine: This Fiscal Debate Is So Unfair!
Peggy Noonan thinks our current fiscal battle is so unfair to Republicans, who are cons utionally banned from making an appealing case to the public (or something like that). Now we find John Podhoretz also arguing that we should shed a tear for Republicans, who have the deck stacked against them, largely through cir stances they couldn't possibly have controlled:
Now, as the Right tries to pick itself up and dust itself off and start all over again, it finds itself in the heat of a battle for which it is learning it is rhetorically and emotionally unprepared.The "fiscal cliff" coming on Dec. 31 will automatically cause everyone's taxes to rise and draconian defense cuts to go into effect. That leaves Republicans and conservatives having to fight a very public battle on these matters only weeks after a national defeat.
And they've somehow been maneuvered into arguing that benefits must be cut and taxes on the wealthy must not be raised -- without having a single populist argument in their favor.
Yes -- Republicans and conservatives were "unprepared" to do battle over the sequester -- which was signed into law sixteen months ago!
And they've been maneuvered -- somehow! -- into saying benefits should be cut and taxes on the wealthy not raised! What scoundrels did this to them?
http://www.alternet.org/media/conser...tter757186&t=7
Repugs figured, having listening to all their thought dictators that Bishop Gecko would win in a 300+ electoral vote landslide, they'd destroy the Dems. Medicare, Medicaid, SS, AND the 99% by controlling all 3 branches of govt. Are these mofo's EVER right about anything?
http://www.medicalprogresstoday.com/...st-disease.phpYou may have heard that the U.S. is about to plummet off of a fiscal cliff. Policymakers may disagree about how to bring the nation's finances into balance, but one thing they don't disagree about are the forces pushing us towards the abyss: in a word, runaway health care spending.
As former Obama OMB and CBO director Peter Orszag quipped in 2010, "it is no exaggeration to say that the United States' standing in the world depends on its success in constraining this health care cost explosion; unless it does, the country will eventually face a severe fiscal crisis of crippling inability to invest in other areas."
What is true at the federal level is also true at the state level. State Medicaid expenditures account for almost a quarter of state budgets today, second only to education funding. Medicaid expenditures are also projected to rise faster than state revenues, increasingly crowding out funding for other critical state priorities. Addressing the shortfall may require sharp tax increases, painful budget cuts, or both.
You'll also get little opposition from either side of the aisle that America isn't getting the best value for our outsized health care spending, currently at 18% percent of GDP and rising. According to a 2011 article in JAMA, "in just 6 categories of waste, over treatment, failure of care coordination, failures of execution of care processes, administrative complexity, pricing failures, and fraud and abuse, the sum of the lowest available estimates exceeds 20% of total health care expenditures." The same report estimated annual loses from fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid at up to $98 billion annually.
There are two basic arguments about how to tackle the problem of rising costs, and they split largely (but not entirely) on ideological lines.
One, approach, generally favored on the left (and largely embraced in the Affordable Care Act), is to attack the problem on the supply side by increasing government's role in setting prices and defining insurance packages, along with driving delivery system reforms. Supply side reforms include bundled payments for Medicare and Medicaid; Medicare's new Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB); price controls on reimbursements for health care goods and services (Medicare's DRG pricing system; ACA cuts to provider reimbursements); stringent rate reviews for insurance carriers; and even heavier-handed market controls like bans on physician-owned hospitals, and requiring state pre-approval for new health care related facilities through certificate of need laws.
The other approach, generally favored on the right, is to focus on improving the functioning of health care markets on the demand side. This means increasing consumers' "skin in the game" for routine health care costs through consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs); capping or eliminating the tax exclusion of employer-provided insurance and replacing it with a standard deduction or tax credit for health insurance; and shifting other public programs, like Medicare, towards a defined contribution approach where seniors would shop from a competing menu of health care plans with a defined level of public support. Proponents of more consumer involvement in health care also support efforts to improve transparency on provider prices and quality, so that consumers can seek out the most effective and efficient providers (or in the case of insurance, the most efficient networks).
Whatever you may think about the Affordable Care Act, our recent election guaranteed that it is going to be implemented, more or less. The choice before the country now is how that implementation will be structured, and how to make that implementation sustainable given the massive cost explosion that the ACA - whatever its other merits - has done little to address. As we've argued elsewhere, many of its key provisions will likely make the health care cost problem worse, because it heavily subsidizes consumption of traditional, first-dollar insurance for families making up to about $92,000 a year, or four times the Federal Poverty Level.
But implementation, and America's mounting fiscal woes, also provides an opportunity for genuine dialogue and compromise. We're beginning to detect a growing acknowledgement on the center-left that more consumer side reforms are needed and inevitable, particularly in the ACA and, on the right, that mitigating the ACA's worst flaws could turn out to be both good policy and good politics - especially for an electorate that is increasingly frustrated by Washington's inability to tackle America's most serious challenges.
That conversation should be helped by a thoughtful and balanced paper from Richard P. Nathan, a senior fellow at the Rockefeller Ins ute in New York. The paper, How to Rein in Health Care Costs: Empower Consumers, is a concise tour de force in health economics and public choice theory that makes the case for incorporating more consumer-driven insurance choices into both public and private insurance programs, including the ACA.
First, Nathan recognizes that we'll need "at least one more round" of health care reform to truly tackle the cost problem.
Taken together, Medicare and Medicaid account for 25 percent of federal spending; they are projected to account for one-third in 2021. Medicaid also accounts for a huge and growing share of state budgets, and in some states local budgets as well. Focusing on Medicare, Jonathan Gruber estimates that in order
"to put the program on a solid footing for the foreseeable future would require imposing a 15 percent payroll tax. Every person in America would have to pay 15 percent of their wages to the government, basically doubling the tax burden on American families. ...
An analysis by Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Ins ute shows the share that Medicare taxes and premiums cover "of the care provided to the average recipient ranges from 51 to 58 percent over time." Steuerle says "[for] the rest we borrow from China and elsewhere, and we use up ever-larger shares of income tax revenue, leaving ever-smaller shares for the government functions. Bottom line: without reform, current workers would continue to shunt many of their Medicare costs onto younger generations."
Nathan is right on the mark. And to paraphrase Stein's law, if something can't keep going on forever, it won't.
While broadly supportive of the ACA, Nathan is skeptical that supply side reforms can adequately grapple with the endemic cost problems in American health care:
Provider-value social engineering shouldn't be the main line strategy for dealing with the fiscal imperative of fast-rising health care costs. Politicians are good at giving social benefits but not so good at taking them away. Likewise, leaders in government public health care programs tend to come to their jobs with a concern about and belief in the programs they are responsible for. Government
does not have the necessary penetration -- nor the leverage commitment, or clout needed-- to reform the huge health care industry.
This is a variation on Mancur Olson's famous theory of collective action. In a nuts , it's very hard for large groups of individuals to organize for broad social aims - even when that organization would produce large gains for society. On the other hand, small, highly motivated special interest groups have powerful incentives to organize and lobby government for wealth transfers. In the case of health care, this means that providers (hospitals, nursing homes, physicians, home health care workers, etc.), consumer groups (like the AARP), and public sector unions (like the SEIU) are well positioned to push for increases in health care spending, with politicians reaping the rewards from campaign contributions and energized voting blocks.
Although Democrats are more associated with the welfare state, both parties have facilitated the expansion of public funding for the medical-industrial complex from a mechanism to help the poor and disabled to get access to care, to an en lement program for the middle class and older (and more affluent) consumers. Republicans, after all, created the Part D Medicare drug benefit, and Republican governors, like George Pataki, in New York, have worked hard to leverage federal dollars to support local state Medicaid providers.
Unsurpringly, when it comes to meaningful reforms of Medicare and Mediciad, the track record of the federal government has been mostly disappointing. (And when it comes to weeding out fraud and abuse in those programs, the record is downright disgraceful.)
While supply side reforms are necessary, Nathan believes, "in the long run creating and managing compe ion in the health care marketplace is the better approach for achieving health care cost control by mobilizing price-consciousness in a way that at the same time protects consumers from having to pay the high costs of catastrophic care."
GOP’s Latest Fiscal Cliff Offer: Permanent Extension Of Bush Tax Cuts For The Wealthy
BASH: I talked to a Democratic source who said that Republicans sent back to the White House late yesterday included a call for a permanent extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the top 2 percent.
Now you know we’ve been talking constantly about the fact that the biggest divide between the two when it comes to taxes is that tax break for the wealthiest. So this Democratic source who I talked to familiar with the proposal said this was a sign to the White House that the Republicans are either unwilling or not capable of offering something that can pass the House and the Senate and, more importantly, that the president can sign, because he has said he does not want to — he wants to raise tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. I will tell you, Republicans who I spoke with countered that that doesn’t make sense to them, that the Republicans’ whole intention is to deal with the Bush era tax rates right now because you have to deal with that, but that down the road they want to reform the tax code.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...t-reports-say/
Boner: Don't make Christmas plans, 'serious differences' remain in 'fiscal cliff' talks
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-...All+Stories%29
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