November 2019 Current Events: Blade Runner happened this month

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Internet VFW > November 2019 Current Events: Blade Runner happened this month

redneck nazgul: Apr 25, 2013

Warren's plan is bad. It's real bad.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/11/01/warrens-perpetual-medicare-head-tax-is-unworkable-and-bad/

Have some charts and numbers. And some excerpts:

quote:

The proposal is as follows:

Employers will be required to pay an �Employer Medicare Contribution� equal to 98 percent of their per-employee health care costs in the year prior to Medicare for All�s implementation. This will mean that initially some employers pay more than others since that is already the case in the status quo. But over time, each employer�s contribution will be gradually converged to average Employer Medicare Contribution until every qualifying employer is paying the same amount per employee.

Employers with less than 50 employees would be exempt from the Employer Medicare contribution both initially and forever.

Independent contractors (and the companies who hire them) will also be exempt from the Employer Medicare contribution both initially and forever.

What Warren is proposing here, in ordinary fiscal language, is a Medicare Head Tax. This is a departure from the normal Medicare Payroll Tax proposals. The distributive difference between them is that the Medicare Payroll Tax charges a specific percentage of each worker�s earnings, while the Medicare Head Tax charges a specific dollar amount per worker.

quote:

Separate from the distributive problems of Warren�s head tax, the two exclusions also make the proposal clearly unworkable and easily gamed. All companies have to do to avoid rather large head tax charges is spin off workers into independent contractor status or spin them off into firms with less than 50 employees that they then contract with for services.

Once some employers start doing this, the average Medicare Employer Contribution will have to go up to keep revenue stable, which will push even more employers to restructure their labor into independent contracting or outsourcing to small firms. And, at that point, the death spiral is off to the races.

It's proposed because she has plans as the planning plan candidate, she wants a plan that screams "YOUR TAXES WON'T GO UP, I PROMISE", and because she can't actually support a single-payer system.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2019 16:58

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 02:20

redneck nazgul: Apr 25, 2013

You don't build those caveats into a system like this unless you want it to fail. Unless you're going to address the independent contractor thing, actually define a small business beyond "Has less than 50 employees", and say "If you're employed by a company, you're employed by them, none of this 39.75 hours and you're still part-time", this plan is going to fail.

It doesn't matter how many people Google or GM employ/convert over to independent contractors because the problems are structural and it's a tragedy of the commons situation: Eventually, companies will start gaming the system and paying less, which means that everybody else pays more until it breaks and we go back to where we are today if we're lucky.

This entire plan is built to fail because it's first and foremost a "I'm not gonna raise your taxes!" plan. Coming up with numbers is a secondary concern, actually having something that would work wasn't in the equation.

None of this is in any way better than a payroll system.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2019 17:53

redneck nazgul: Apr 25, 2013

Acebuckeye13 posted:

Politicians don't campaign on policies they don't want (usually). Warren isn't proposing this because she somehow wants to cripple Medicare for All, she's clearly doing it because she wants to campaign on not raising taxes on the middle class. This is politics, not rocket science.

Well, hopefully she'll campaign in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania this time because this is sounding awfully familiar.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2019 19:09

redneck nazgul: Apr 25, 2013

bulletsponge13 posted:

Can someone give me a quick dirty on Bolivia?
Googling the events seems pretty polarizing.

leftist politician in south america

comes from the indigenous people in bolivia, fought to reduce the country's reliance on the IMF and world bank, instituted a bunch of leftist and socialist reforms and firmly stated that bolivia was a nation of both bolivians and indigenous people. most recently, he worked to nationalize the lithium production.

ran for two terms and won, said he wouldn't run for a third, ended up running anyway and won. the conservative opposition starts to protest here.

earlier this year, the constitution said he couldn't run for a fourth term. he lost a national referendum asking if he could run for a fourth term but his party nominated him anyway.

the supreme court came down and said "actually, term limits are dumb and we can't say if the vote hadn't been tampered with".

he wins the election anyway, his conservative opposition protests even more, the OAS steps in and says that the election was fraudulent.

the conservatives get the military and police on their side and protest even harder, morales declares new elections, the military say "nah, not good enough" and remove him entirely.

he's now in asylum in mexico.

edit: this is all from wikipedia, i'm trying to stay as apolitical as possible here. twitter and other places are being overrun with a metric fuckton of bots all chanting "THERE WAS NO COUP".

redneck nazgul fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Nov 12, 2019

# ¿ Nov 12, 2019 08:08

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Internet VFW > November 2019 Current Events: Blade Runner happened this month