Source; Anonymous
Washington is the primary insurer of Americans — 194 million — through Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare.
One of the triumphs attributed to BObamaCare was job growth. According to Goldman Sachs: “500,000 jobs were added to health-care sector under BObamaCare.” When the data are studied in detail, 47,000 were care providers, meaning that 453,000 (91%) were non-clinical jobs, people who did not provide patient care.
Mentally calculate the salaries for millions of bureaucrats, administrators, rule-writers, regulation compliers, compliance officers, overseers, mandate-enforcers (BARRCOME). This is the cost of healthcare associated with regulations such as BObamaCare, which cost $1.76 trillion. In fact, to cover part of this cost, $716 billion was taken from the Medicare Trust, money intended to pay for hospital care for seniors. According to the Trustees, Medicare will be insolvent by 2028 and thus unable to provide this care.
BObamaCare was merely one more money sump that diverts healthcare spending away from paying for care. In 2023, the U.S. expended $4.5 trillion on its healthcare system. It is estimated that 31% to more than 50% of U.S. healthcare spending goes to BARRCOME. That translates to $2 trillion’s worth of patient care Washington denies its citizens while paying itself.
Job growth in healthcare demonstrates a variation of the seesaw effect: as government takes over healthcare, BARRCOME goes up, patient care goes down, and Americans die. Washington’s takeover (by regulation) of healthcare has produced a Potemkin village. Grigori Potemkin, an 18th-century Russian statesman, built a façade of a prosperous village and hired actors so one thought the change had been a great success. In fact, it was a failure — and Russians continued to starve.
Washington has produced a Potemkin village called Federal Healthcare. The uninsured rate is the façade of success. Each reduction of this number is heralded as a new triumph. Another false building front is added and propped up for viewing pleasure. Behind the façade, there is reality: Washington paying itself with “healthcare” dollars, and Americans with BObamaCare waiting in line for rationed care.
The “net tax rate” is the statutory Social Security tax paid by workers (and what their employer pays to the government instead of to them) minus the benefits they receive from the program.
If you pay more in taxes than you receive in benefits, your net tax rate is positive
If you receive more benefits than taxes your net tax rate is negative.
The highest-earning top 20% of individuals—the fifth quintile—pay a positive net tax rate of 3% of lifetime earnings. They pay 3% more than they receive
The other 80% pay negative net tax rates, meaning that they tend to receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. (bear in mind that the program is insolvent.) The lowest-earning 20% of the population has a negative net tax rate of almost 27%, which means they receive far, far more from Social Security than they pay into the program.
Many Americans, mislead by a disingenuous liberal-biased media, think the Social Security taxes they’ve paid all their working lives are in a trust fund waiting for their retirement. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Since lbj that money has been spent by our government, for example by helping to pay for such things as funding for artists who place crucifixes in urine; or housing, educating, feeding, clothing, and for medical services for illegal aliens; or protecting the border of Ukraine; or funding failed windmill projects; or subsidizing rich people to buy expense electric cars. The result is that the trust fund is nothing more than a mountain of IOUs. IOU’s that will have to be repaid from higher taxes. Despite all the denials, our Social Security system will begin paying out more than it takes in. That deficit is accumulating to trillion$. The only way to avoid that crisis would require either a 25% reduction in benefits or an increase in Social Security taxes by 37%.
If businesses ran their pension funds that way it would be called deception and fraud. And those in charge, similar to the government bureaucrats controlling and operating Social Security, would face prison. The real scam, and it’s a huge one, is that there are no penalties for government officials who violate the same laws we private citizens are held accountable to. Any wonder why government officials do as they please?
The arithmetic link between economic growth, wages, and benefits is so strong that there is virtually no possibility of economic growth that can return the Social Security system to solvency. Jagadeesh Gokhale estimates that only long-term growth in excess of 8% per year would bring the system into balance — a virtual impossibility for a mature economy such as our own.
Growth is indeed a necessary ingredient for fixing our long-term budget problem, but it’s not enough. What’s more, the policies that left-wing/democrats have been touting as pro-growth — such as the boost in infrastructure spending— tend to conflate short-term stimulus and long-term economic growth. We need not just more people working, but also increasing the productive capacity of the U.S. growth is necessary too but, it’s not sufficient. The absolute necessity of reforming entitlements has no easy out.
Next time you review your expenses and find that you give government, at all levels, nearly half of everything you earn in taxes, fees, licenses, etc., consider the alternative to politicians who insist on taxing, spending, and borrowing us to death. As law and regulation become more centralized, they are more likely to have unexpected consequences.
Decisions on laws and regulations should be based on clear understandings of the costs and harms of them, not simply by the heady feeling of exhalation produced by particular agendas or desires. With exercised rights or entitlements, there is often a 2-way flow among those effected. And that means that those wishing to express them are not absolved from absorbing the impact of them on others, regardless of their desire for such. neo-liberalism denies that, advocating instead to social-engineer categories of people entitled to outcomes regardless of their inputs. And it often does this sub-rosa, by creating huge burdens of proof for any criteria that reveal the inequalities of capabilities and circumstances, while assuming with little or no evidence that only maligned intentions or systemic bias could explain unequal results.
Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program. It wasn't designed to provide over 2 decades of income. The current beneficiary isn't receiving their money paid in years ago. That went to the previous recipient. The money for today’s recipient is coming from tomorrow's recipient's paycheck. Pay-as-you-go is the definition of a Ponzi scheme. The crucial distinction between a Ponzi scheme and social security is that social security is mandatory. And though compulsion allows sustainability it does not guarantee it. Even a mandatory Ponzi scheme can fail if it cannot find enough new entrants.
Clinging zealously to the current design and increasingly obsolete structures of Social Security, (Medicare, and Medicaid too) is the very definition of a reactionary neo-liberalism. Today's radically different demographics and technology have rendered these programs, as structured, unsustainable. Everyone knows that unless reformed, they will swallow up the rest of the budget.
Consider minimizing the problem, which is government, for the solution—Privatize Social Security.
“I believe public approval ratings for Congress have fallen to single digit levels not because of the heightened partisanship, but because of blatant cowardice and dishonesty. Their dereliction of responsibility will not translate to respect or popularity. Real fiscal conservatives should continue to focus on the dangers that we continue to face and look to constructive solutions. Honesty, consistency and courage are the only real options. “—Peter Schiff
"Don't let anybody tell you that, ah, you know, it's corporations and businesses that create jobs. You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly."---Mrs. b.j. clinton
Interesting that one proclaimed to be so smart can't do something so simple as connect the dots that it takes an employer and their profit to create an employee to create wages and salaries(1).
That's how some 150 million Americans get paid every week. Mrs. b.j. clinton made her millions in the cattle futures market, probably on insider information, as a government employee & by giving speeches for fees of $250,000 a pop. The rest of us mere mortals actual have to work for a paycheck.
The scary thing is left-wing/democrats believe her ideology. Her sophomoric comment reflects a long-simmering ideologically driven war against business that has become a central platform of the left-wing/democratic party.
Her remarks were simply an extension of BObama's insane "you didn't build that" statement denigrating businessmen and women who have created companies — large and small.
In the neo-liberal mindset, economic output and jobs are achieved collectively and thanks to the beneficence of government (which can’t function and prosper, certainly not with freedom, without the efforts of private citizen), not because of the ambition, drive, vision, risk-taking and guts that it takes to start a new enterprise out of nothing.
It says a lot about the state of the left-wing/democratic Party that Mrs. b.j. clinton was viewed by many as "too moderate." Many of the euphemistically called "progressives" lean toward marx's more radical ideas — more redistribution from the earners to the non-earners by ever more government with stifling regulations, less and less freedom and more and more coercion and punishment.
“To say that all individuals are embedded in the product of society is banal... Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important feature of the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government; the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and the source of its energy and freedom. Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those left-wing/democrats who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective...What's variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes."--Charles Krauthammer
- Not to mention that Mrs. b.j. clinton subverted government laws and government servers while working for the government, exposed herself to blackmail, and was obviously engaging in things that she didn't want anybody to know about or ever to be able to find out about; or that she took what looks to be millions of dollars of bribes from foreign governments for her and her daughter's and her husband's foundation; or that hillary left her ambassador unprotected in Benghazi, left for dead, even though she knew about it; or that hillary lied saying that the video caused the terrorist attack that led to the death of the ambassador and watched a hapless nobody video maker thrown into jail to take the blame for her lack of action; or that she ruined innocent women's lives to protect her husband who sexually assaulted numerous women; or that she had botched the first attempt at nationalizing health care; or how horribly that Russian reset thing went, that fake reset button with Putin; or that she has no foreign relations qualifications--no experience; nor that her book was an absolute disaster, nobody showed up to see her book tour; nor that her Rose Law Firm billing records mysteriously, magically showing up, after having been lost for years in the Map Room of the White House; nor that she had 900 secret FBI records for blackmail use; nor Whitewater nor Travelgate.
Related info:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/agenda_2030_communicates_an_evil_agenda.html
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