71–80 of 573 posts
The actual labor share of income is significantly higher when you include employer contributions to employee health insurance premiums. Healthcare costs have been rising faster than overall inflation for decades, and while many of those costs are passed on to employees the employers have also absorbed a significant chunk. If we want to increase the labor share then we'll drive down healthcare spending. And no, there'…
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Why wouldn't a single-payer solution work? The margin that the insurance companies take for themselves seems like a good place to start. From there it would spiral out to the third to half of time that all of the clinical staff spend just dealing with insurance issues and insurance billing.
insurance issues are provider and insurer going back and forth detrmining if doctors assessment of necessity is agreed upon. i am not familiar with universal system. In that system if your doctor thinks something is medically necessary then thats the end of it and its gets done?
In most countries where there is universal coverage with a single payer, certain expensive treatments have long waiting lists or are simply unavailable at any price. Thus we see wealthy Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists and paying cash for procedures like MRI scans or joint replacements in order to avoid the queue back home. There are always trade-offs, it's just a matter of what we want to prioritize.
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I'm not necessarily opposed to a single-payer system but the margin that for-profit insurance companies take is a tiny fraction of overall healthcare spending. You could zero it out and it would barely move the needle. And many of the largest commercial health plans such as most Blue Cross Blue Shield Association members are non-profit. There is literally no margin. Provider organizations spend a huge amount of effor…
The mandated low margin is part of the problem. When your margins are regulated, the only way to increase profits is to just make everything more expensive. More revenue, same margin, more profits. Humane health care is incompatible with free market economics.
I think this is part of a long term development where technology and globalization slowly erode workers bargaining power. Basically you only build a factory in the US if you can keep labour costs low enough and the manufacturing automated enough so that you can still compete with other manufacturing hubs.
I think in the case of US literally killing workers and union people is a huge part of why US workers lack power and why US unions are so impotent.[0]
[0] see Battle of Blair Mountain and what work Pinkerton mainly did from its founding to WW2, as examples.
This is clearly heading in a direction where the USA is going to elect a huge number of socialists, who in turn are going to enact massive taxes on billionaires and break up the monopolies.[1] This is why I think the billionaire oligarchs are literally mentally ill. They've won the entire game. They control everything. They live like gods, they twitch a pinky and millions dance. But their response to all of this powe…
There will be a few who brand themselves as such. But actually seizing the means of production and handing them over to the people? -- The oligarchs will burn this country to the ground before they permit that to happen.
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Capital gains tax is clearly lower than income tax. So why did you change your mind?
Not the commenter you replied to, but one thing to note is that capital gains tax (at least in the context of investments in corporate equities) is applied after corporate taxes. Profits and reinvested earnings are taxed as profits, and they're two of the key components to valuing an equity. As such, when comparing income tax and capital gains, you should add the impact of corporate taxes. Incidentally, corporate tax…
Sure, the stock price should somehow be tied to the actual value of the company, but for a while now it's been mostly indistinguishable from a Ponzi scheme other than a few companies that do sometimes decide to buy back some stock, which makes it slightly less sketchy but if the value is from the company buying it back, it's a lot closer to debt or a bond, which is not at all how anyone treats it.
Yikes. Good to know that labor shares used to rebound after crises, but since the 2000s and the dotcom bubble it has basically been downhill only. So don't expect any of this to get better unless we roll back technology to the last millenium.
Ie, why can one guy who is insanely wealthy due to stock valuations take loans against that to pull various levers of power. We didn't elect him, we need a way to control that outsized influence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capital gains tax is clearly lower than income tax. So why did you change your mind?
Not the commenter you replied to, but one thing to note is that capital gains tax (at least in the context of investments in corporate equities) is applied after corporate taxes. Profits and reinvested earnings are taxed as profits, and they're two of the key components to valuing an equity. As such, when comparing income tax and capital gains, you should add the impact of corporate taxes. Incidentally, corporate tax…
this is relatively unremarkable for those with an understanding of wage, labor, profit, price and capital. capitalism will always seek to reduce labor cost. during the epoch of neoliberalism it achieved great strides in this by reducing labor power through union busting by both thatcher and reagan in the UK and US respectively. it has also effectively curtailed any increase in the minimum wage for nearly 20 years as…
Marx fails to imagine a world in which labor actually has little to no value. His worldview is primarily that capitalists 'steal' the valuable labor. However it doesn't seem that that is actually the world we are in. Instead the intrinsic value of human labor seems to be slowly trending towards zero. And it kind of makes sense, same has happened with oxen labor, horse labor, etc.