Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Are you still living in the 70's and 80's? Tell me again about Reagan's welfare queen -- that one never gets old.
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Please. You know damn well that's not what I'm saying.
My argument was not that welfare or safety net programs are sapping the treasury. Here's what I wrote:
Democrats have been more fiscally responsible -- toward obligations to the unproductive poor. The GOP has instead favored unproductive wealth. Neither is of much use.
Giving money to either has a limited multiplier effect. The poor just piss whatever they get away at big boxes, or to rentiers (landlords, student loans, etc.) perpetuating their marginalization. And the Ds and Rs generally serve the same corporate masters in the end through subsidies, etc.
The best policy is to find a way to create non-rent economic activity. This is done by relaxing taxation on the $150k-1.0k crowd. These folks drive the smaller economic events that power the economy in aggregate.
My point was that the parties focus on groups that have poor multipliers. The rich save it all, the poor spend it all in businesses (increasingly monopolies) that are harming the broader economy like Wal Mart and Amazon.
Neither party caters to the people who run smaller businesses, which create more economic events (multipliers). The Democrats' signature legislation was the ACA, which creates more economic events in health care, a parasitic sector with miserable multiplier effects outside itself. The GOP's signature legislation was tax cuts for the wealthy, an utterly mindless policy with no multiplier effect. (They claimed it was all about corporate taxes, but if that were the case, then why was it not exclusive to corporate taxes, as many wealthy individuals who didn't need the money argued it should have been?)
The parties talk a big game about wanting to create growth, and to the extent the corporate tax cut created some growth, it was a decent idea. To the extent it sought to the decouple HC from employment, the ACA was a decent idea. But neither was directly focused on growth. They catered ultimately, most significantly, to groups that don't create much growth (the .001% and the desperately poor who can't afford health insurance).
I assume the ACA has pared the rate the of HC cost growth, but the premiums are still going up at a robust rate. And while my wealthiest friends are loving the Trump tax cuts, they're not plugging that money into business expansion. They're putting it in the market and making a fortune sitting on their asses, and saving their gains.
