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The real problem is that spending wins votes, austerity does not.
by hehhehaha 3y ago
The real problem is that spending wins votes, austerity does not.
- zrn900 3y agoThe real problem is that none of that spending actually goes to the people.
- rayiner 3y agoVirtually all of it goes “to the people.” Even the military budget is mostly payroll or operations (only 18% is procurement going to defense contractors). Social security is checks to individuals. Medicare is checks to healthcare providers.
- zrn900 3y ago> Even the military budget is mostly payroll or operations (only 18% is procurement going to defense contractors) Not in a privatized defense environment where things are marked up 4000%. Yeah, you read that right.
- tptacek 3y agoA lot of those 4000% markup stories are apparently not real, but rather accounting artifacts; they're cases where, like, a wrench bills out at $20,000, but what's actually happening is that the procurement was for a whole stealth bomber, and the cost gets spread across all the line items pro rata.
- zrn900 3y ago> but rather accounting artifacts; That is how money disappears. Like the $3 trillion that the Pentagon 'lost' and still 'cant find'.
- rayiner 3y agoThe 18% is at those marked up prices.
- olliej 3y agoThat and of course every implementation of austerity seems to do long term damage to the economy of countries that apply it. I recall a few articles even saying that the maths that supported austerity was the result of a spreadsheet error, though whether that’s true I don’t know. What we do know is that tax cuts for businesses and high earners has never demonstrated any gains for the majority of citizens but has resulted in increasing disparity and reduction in the rate at which people can move up the economic ladder. It remains weird to me that there’s an entire cohort of people who look back with yearning to the 50s-70s where that tax rates were reasonable, but then aggressively complain about any attempt to move even slightly in the direction of restoring those tax rates. Instead we get “we will fix the economy with austerity” in which we reduce the taxes for people and companies with no cash problems, but drastically increase the costs for everyone else. If need be we will also use the taxes paid by the group that isn’t getting tax cuts to bank roll the people getting tax cuts.
- 8note 3y agoMoreso than austerity, taxes need to be raised across the board, but that's even less popular
- rayiner 3y agoEspecially taxes on upper middle class people. The biggest difference between US tax rates and say Germany or Sweden is not corporate taxes or taxes on capital gains, but income and consumption taxes on people above the median income. We had an au pair from Germany, who had an entry level administrative job before coming to the US. Her total tax rate in Germany was 40%, about the same as what we had in Maryland with a top 1% household income. If you want universal healthcare and college, that’s what it costs.
- willcipriano 3y ago> universal healthcare The US spends more, per captia on socialized medicine than Germany. Why do we need to spend even more?
- rayiner 3y agoBecause Americans don’t want a healthcare system that tells grandma they’re too old for expensive surgery.
- willcipriano 3y agoIf it was too expensive the time to say something isn't after a lifetime of cashing insurance premium checks.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoWe also don't want a healthcare system that focuses on prevention. A significant percentage of what the USA spends on healthcare could be mitigated with prevention. But there's no profit in prevention, and the general population doesn't want to sacrifice comfort and convenience. "What do you mean change my diet and lifestyle??"