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Must stop reading Pournelle's "Blog"
Aug. 4th, 2009 10:39 amThe offending part is in here. The money quote being:
We can look at other governments and their health care plans. Someone should study Sweden, which has a program that many say works fairly well. I don't know enough about it to comment. One would think that if the Swedish or any other health care program worked very well, that would be at the forefront in the discussions.
There are SO FECKING many studies which compare how health systems work that this is the dumbest thing I've read in a while of reading very dumb things on line. Yes, you have to do some work to filter out all the hits you which say why public healthcare doesn't work. But then, why don't these people look at international comparisons of healthcare systems. HINT: The US doesn't come top in those either.
But I should have known better. There's another rant Pournelle reprinted that shows that the tax BURDEN has grown for the top 1% now exceeds that of the bottom 95%...
The raw data is here.
The problem? That isn't actually showing the individual tax burden, and specifically the individual after taxation impact on disposable income which is the more conventional use of the phrase "tax burden". Gosh, the rich pay most of the tax? NEVER! NEVER I SAY!
As I had to point out to a rather underpaid Libertarain once. My income tax could have been doubled and I'd still be taking home more money than he got paid in a year. (In my defence I was having a really good year with commission). Warren Buffett said this best when realising that his secretary was paying a signficiantly higher marginal tax rate on her incomes than he was.
We can look at other governments and their health care plans. Someone should study Sweden, which has a program that many say works fairly well. I don't know enough about it to comment. One would think that if the Swedish or any other health care program worked very well, that would be at the forefront in the discussions.
There are SO FECKING many studies which compare how health systems work that this is the dumbest thing I've read in a while of reading very dumb things on line. Yes, you have to do some work to filter out all the hits you which say why public healthcare doesn't work. But then, why don't these people look at international comparisons of healthcare systems. HINT: The US doesn't come top in those either.
But I should have known better. There's another rant Pournelle reprinted that shows that the tax BURDEN has grown for the top 1% now exceeds that of the bottom 95%...
The raw data is here.
The problem? That isn't actually showing the individual tax burden, and specifically the individual after taxation impact on disposable income which is the more conventional use of the phrase "tax burden". Gosh, the rich pay most of the tax? NEVER! NEVER I SAY!
As I had to point out to a rather underpaid Libertarain once. My income tax could have been doubled and I'd still be taking home more money than he got paid in a year. (In my defence I was having a really good year with commission). Warren Buffett said this best when realising that his secretary was paying a signficiantly higher marginal tax rate on her incomes than he was.
