Re: OT your tax returns



witfal wrote:

On 2008-03-10 12:27:30 -0700, "larry moe 'n curly"
<larrymoencurly@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Unemployment isn't at taxpayer expense.

Unemployment insurance isn't, usually, but every 1% point increase in
the adult unemployment rate causes federal revenue to drop something
like > $100 billion.

If true, we know who's responsible for that. Don't we?

That's about the way the US economy and tax system have worked for
decades and decades, and that's a major reason why the federal deficit
shrank so much in the late 1990s. Of course we could avoid such
revenue shortfalls through sensible policies such as a 100% tax on
poverty or a really flat tax of $10,000 a year per person.

Social security is only getting back a portion TO YOU of what
YOU paid. Not someone else.

It depends on the recipient's income, but a significant amount of the
SS retirement benefits are funded by current workers, not just the
retirees' contributions.

Cite

You haven't heard of this? When Roosevelt sold SS as a pension plan,
one of his advisors privately told him it wasn't one. FDR replied
that he knew it but had to convince the public otherwise so that it
couldn't be dismantled by the Republicans after he was gone.

Former Communist and current Republican economist Thomas Sowell
criticizes SS for being a pyramid scheme:

www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1505

Time magazine, Mar. 20, 1995, "Social Insecurity":

"Many people flatly refuse to believe Social Security was sold to the
populace as social insurance, with disastrous effect. Legions of
people take it as an article of faith that each person gets back in
benefits exactly as much as he or she has paid in contributions during
the working years. Some seem to think that somewhere in the depths of
the system is an account bearing each person's name and number,
containing the exact amount of taxes paid over a lifetime, in cash or
readily cashable securities, to be paid back penny for penny on
retirement. This idea lends a note of moral fervor-almost fanaticism-
to the demands that benefit formulas never be touched.

"But it is a mirage. To finance Social Security, Congress set up a pay-
as-you-go system that is still in operation: each year's pensions are
paid out of the taxes contributed by workers that year. In the early
days it was a fabulous money-and-votes machine. Workers paying taxes,
even at what now look like phenomenally low rates, so heavily
outnumbered retirees that Congress could raise benefits every few
years, to the glee of pensioners and the ballot-box profit of their
representatives. Even when the money began to run out in 1983, a
bipartisan commission saved the day--for the next 75 years, it was
then thought--by recommending rather minor cutbacks in benefits and
very major increases in taxes, the last of which took effect only in
1990."

Medicare and Medicaid are classic examples of
inefficient dollar input to output ratios.

How inefficient, compared to the private sector, for the same level of
coverage?

You can answer that yourself.

I'm sure the GAO can give you the overhead figure.

Yet you told me to cite a source for my claim about SS. >:(

Around here, the hospital in the retirement community of Sun City
tended to have lower than average costs than other private hospitals
in the area for the same procedures, and that hospital received a much
higher proportion of its payments from Medicare. About the only
overall cheaper hospital here was the county's, which also received a
higher percentage of Medicaid and Medicare than normal. In fact it
used to be such a cash cow that the county used its profits to cover
the county's revenue shortfalls.

I don't think any innovations in health coverage have been created by
the private insurance system in the past 20+ years; it's basically
just copied the federal government's cost controls while cherry
picking patients.


.

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