14 Comments so far ↓

• Carsten // May 13, 2009 at 6:05 am

  Haha, you (majority of voting US citizens) voted for this communist, now you are getting these socialist laws (like having an extra tax on X in order to paying for Y).

  Let me know how this works out for you, we in Germany have about 50% direct taxes and charges on our income, overall fiscal burden with indirect taxes is at 70%. Look where you’re heading

• alyx // May 13, 2009 at 8:32 am

  Heh, this was the thing that annoyed me the most during the Obama campaign – the blithe insistence from voters that “Oh, he’s only going to raise taxes on the super-rich!” Yeah, direct income taxes, maybe, but I like to think it should’ve been pretty obvious that consumption taxes, energy taxes and taxes like cap-and-trade that would be passed indirectly to the consumer were coming.

• Jason // May 13, 2009 at 8:53 am

  I’d like to know whom to blame for the constant mixing-up of communism and socialism.

• alyx // May 13, 2009 at 9:30 am

  Communism v. socialism: insofar as the number of dollaz left in my pocket when they are done, is there a difference?

  I admit to also not knowing what the difference is. I try to not use either label, though.

• TGY // May 13, 2009 at 10:28 am

  Soda is worthless as a ‘food’, and does a lot of harm via weight-gain, diabetes, dental decay, all of which has been scientifically proven. Taxing soft drinks is comparable to taxing tobacco or alcohol products. So what?

• Jason // May 13, 2009 at 11:00 am

  I propose a high-fructose corn syrup tax.

• Carsten // May 13, 2009 at 4:13 pm

  About socialism/communism: According to Grandmaster Historicist Marx himself, socialism is the step before communism. First, in socialism, a dictatorship that has to expropriate everyone and everything, must be established. After this is achieved and nobody is left with more than his naked ass, the dictatorship will eventually wither away and give room for communism, in which somehow related people choose wisely and unanimously about the resources under their control (the commune in communism). So far OK with you?

• Jason // May 13, 2009 at 5:32 pm

  Communism hasn’t held that meaning in over ninety years. You’re using it in the McCarthy-ese pejorative sense.

  When it comes to basic human needs like healthcare, it’s going to be paid for by the people using it one way or another. Relying solely on the free market to set prices has, at least here, been an abysmal failure because as it turns out, the market will bear any price for goods and services required to keep someone alive. And the consumers don’t exactly win out in this arrangement, caught in the middle of a neverending blame cycle of the insurers calling out the healthcare providers and the providers saying the insurers are ultimately why their services cost so much as to make them prohibitive to anyone not taking part in the insurance racket in the first place.

  So if the burden is shifted from direct payroll deductions and onto some of the very products that are known to cause a person’s healthcare costs (and those of that person’s co-workers, because that is seriously how our system works right now) to rise to begin with, in a system that has actual price controls, I really fail to see the problem here once I get beyond the initial shock of taxing junk food. Call it socialism all you want, but don’t pretend that the alternative is working.

• Carsten // May 14, 2009 at 7:02 am

  First of all, I did not use a derivated meaning of socialism/communism but the utopist (that were his words) idea of Marx himself, reassured to me in German anarchist blogs.

  Second, I don’t think you see the forest within the trees. I do neither suppose that capitalism nor socialism is working perfectly when it comes to serve human needs, especially not in a sense that everybody gets what he wants.

  In any given market i.e. political system, the state can only make rules how people act with one another. The basic choice is either by force (socialism) or voluntary (capitalism).

  Even though I see your point that capitalism don’t always serves the individual perfectly, it leaves everybody (the doctors, the insurers, the patient, pharma industry) free, to trade voluntary with each other on mutual interest (insurance, doctor, pharma want to make a profit, patient will profit by receiving a treatment).

  In the US, one of the biggest concerns for being into health is the system of punitive damages, i.e. doctors and pharmas are getting sued big time for not delivering the perfect product. This means that health costs for the individual have to include this, otherwise, the servicers in this industry would go broke. The people in the US somehow love these punitive damages system (and I see good points for that, too as a – German – lawyer) and so they have to pay for it or have a broke industry.

  I still prefer this to a system, in which the state sets the service level and the price and surgeons are motived like lazy automechanicans (dont want to say that automechanicans are generally lazy but just to make a picture).

  A further argument regarding taxing of junk food: If everybody would pay for health directly, people would mind their body or if they don’t they are punished, too. In taxing special things, the state behaves like we, the individuals, are some minors not worthy of choosing for ourselves.

• Jason // May 14, 2009 at 8:07 am

  You say this while Germany has a higher quality of care in its health system, more doctors per capita, and lower cost all around. While I’m sure it’s not perfect, it’s a darn sight closer to perfect than what we have going here. And I say this as someone who works in the health insurance industry.

• Tony // May 14, 2009 at 9:54 am

  Yeah umm here’s the deal… if there is such a thing as a “free market”, I haven’t seen one yet, and based on what I have seen, I probably don’t want one. In a “free” market, nobody is free to do anything. Whatever company gets there first raises barriers to entry, poisons the market for other competition, uses legislation to promote lock-in, etc. After that, nobody (not even the jerks on top) is free to change anything. The “free market” is a myth designed to make the people promoting it rich. Now, if companies understood the concept of “enough”, a free market would work just fine, but since we’ve specifically chartered them NOT to understand that concept, they were doomed to failure from the start.

• Bill // May 14, 2009 at 11:51 am

  Tony, you said “Whatever company gets there first raises barriers to entry, poisons the market for other competition,”… how would a company do that, exactly? Then you said “…uses legislation to promote lock-in, etc. ..” Well, there you go. As soon as a company “uses legislation”, that means we are no longer in a free market. Corporations and congress being joined at the hip does not equal a free market.

• Tony // May 14, 2009 at 12:03 pm

  … hence my opinion that the whole “free market” beast is fictional. The agents who make up the market don’t want it to be free.

  But there are other ways besides legislation to promote lock-in. I can’t get music onto my iphone without using iTunes, for instance.

  If you want more examples, check out Microsoft. Or Apple. Or Wal-Mart. Or AT&T. Dear God, look at AT&T.

  No legislation is required to stifle competition in a market… that can be done quite well through other means. But buying a senator or two is usually the most cost-effective way of making conditions favorable to yourself, which is why they do it so often.

  My point is that anyone who tells you that complete laissez faire is a good way to run their particular market is a fox trying to convince you to let them guard the henhouse. The proper response is an emphatic “BULLSH*T!”

  Also, note that they only want laissez faire until they don’t… check out Time Warner Cable vs Greenlight to see just how committed they are to complete deregulation.

• PapaG // May 14, 2009 at 1:42 pm

  What next, a super duper Obamite sin tax on Kool-Aid?