Apple News Insideapple.apple.com, Fri, Feb 28 at 9:02 AM: Even as health officials warn the spread of the virus is all but inevitable, developments suggest the U.S. is underprepared for the threat. Diagnostic kits sent to local health providers aren’t working, and the CDC’s testing criteria meant an infected patient in California wasn’t screened for the coronavirus for days. REUTERS
CNBC, Kevin Breuninger, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Friday, 2/28/20, suggested that Americans should ignore media reports about the coronavirus amid fears of the deadly disease spreading into the U.S.
FOX News: Pete Hegseth: It’s a shame Dems and media are using coronavirus to score political points. Democratic leadership has called out the administration for an “anemic” response to the outbreak, including accusing them of not requesting enough emergency funding. Hegseth. “Frankly, at this moment, the difference between $2 billion and $8 billion…what’s the difference in the face of this crisis?”
It takes only two things to keep people in chains: The ignorance of the oppressed and the treachery of their leaders.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Before you read yet another article about Medicare-for-All and the “Who Will Pay For It” question, please take some time to think about, and answer, just two questions:
Do you believe every American should have medical care, or should some Americans be forced to do without medical care?
If you believe every American, rich or poor, should have medical care, who will pay for it?
Peter Suderman, the features editor at Reason.com, writes regularly on health care, the federal budget, tech policy, and pop culture. He believes the government should not pay for health care.
I don’t know why; he never says. He is a libertarian, so he doesn’t like “big” government. Why? Again, he never says. How big is too big? Yet again, he never says.
But if the government doesn’t pay, all who’s left is you.
You pay if your company pays because your company figures the cost of health care insurance as being part of your salary.
You pay if your insurance company pays; it’s in your premiums.
You pay if the hospital emergency room pays because that forces the hospital to raise prices for all other services.
You pay if no one pays, and some Americans lack health care; their ill health means they can’t be productive contributors to the U.S. economy.
You pay if your city, county, or state pays for health care because these governments rely on your taxes to fund all their spending.
In short, there is no magic. You always have to pay, directly or indirectly. Except, there is magic. It’s the magic of Monetary Sovereignty.
The U.S. federal government is Monetarily Sovereign. About 240 years ago, the new U.S. government created the U.S. dollar — millions of them from thin air — simply by creating laws from thin air.
Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.” Ben Bernanke: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” St. Louis Federal Reserve: “As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e.,unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.”
Since then it has continued to create laws and dollars, all from thin air. The very first dollars were not funded by taxes. They were created by laws.
And ever since then, the tax dollars you send to Washington, DC, willingly or grudgingly, still pay for nothing. Even if you don’t send a single tax dollar or even a tax penny to Washington, the U.S. federal government still could continue spending, endlessly.
So you, as a voter, have two choices:
You can continue to pay for your healthcare, either via direct payment from your checking account, or via indirect payment through your company’s insurance plan, or via indirect payment via higher hospital charges, or you can pay by being sick without care, or
The federal government can pay, and it would cost you nothing.
That’s it. Just two choices. There are no other options.
All those people who complain about the cost of Medicare-for-All really are telling you that you should pay, directly or indirectly.
Keep that in mind as you read the following excerpts:
How to pay for Medicare-for-All. Multiple estimates have found that the single-payer plan, which would eliminate virtually all private health insurance, would require more than $30 trillion in additional governmentspending over a decade, a historically unprecedented sum.
Additional federal government spending costs you nothing.The federal government already has spent more than $20 trillion dollars, and it has cost you nothing.
How do I know? Because the federal debt is more than $20 trillion dollars, and the federal debt represents federal spending you clearly have not paid for.
Further, the taxes you paid don’t even fund any federal spending. Unlike state and local taxes, federal tax dollars are destroyed upon receipt. (The federal government creates brand new dollars, ad hoc, every time it pays a recipient.)
And if an additional $30 trillion really is needed for healthcare, that means Americans currently are doing without $30 trillion worth of healthcare.That’s way too much sickness not being treated in this, the world’s wealthiest nation.
Bernie Sanders cited a a study “that just came out of Yale University, published in Lancet magazine, one of the prestigious medical journals in the world.”
The study purports to show that Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan would save $450 billion a year, and 68,000 lives.
A detailed article produced by Kaiser Health News and Politifact, however, (disagrees).
The Lancet study assumes, for example, that the Sanders plan could pay Medicare rates across the board.
Medicare rates are far lower than private insurance rates, and the hospital lobby is a powerful political force that has successfully fought off payment reductions in multiple venues.
Suderman ignores one simple fact: The “hospital lobby” has existed a long time, and Medicare exists — and “its rates are far lower than private insurance rates.” How did that happen?
Could it be that past left-wing Congresses were more caring and moral than today’s right-wing Senate?
Not that it really matters, for as we have said on numerous occasions, the federal government, being Monetarily Sovereign, can afford anything. In fact, the more the federal government deficit spends, the more economic growth dollars enter the private sector.
That is how economies grow.
The Lancet study Sanders cites also lowballs the likely increase in utilization that would come from eliminating copayments and other cost-sharing mechanisms, as Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan calls for.
Although it allows that the newly insured would use more care, it assumes that the currently insured would not seek to use more health services.
As Harvard health policy researcher Adrianna McIntyre points out, that’s deeply unrealistic.
Yes, utilization would increase, and that is a very good thing, indeed.
It is quite doubtful that people would make unnecessary visits to the doctor or hospital, just because they are free. So the additional utilization would benefit healthfulness. That is the whole idea: To improve America’s health.
There are other problems as well, most notably that the study simply doesn’t account for about $4 trillion in expected long-term care spending that would be part of the bill under Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan.
Is this supposed to be a bug or a feature? The lack of long-term care, particularly for the elderly, is a real disgrace in America. Visualize yourself without long-term care insurance and having to choose between care at a facility, and no care, dying alone at home.
The heartlessness of Suderman’s position is truly stunning.
The study handwaves away research suggesting that its headline “lives saved” figure is substantially overstated.
Is 68,000 lives saved too high and estimate? Suderman never says what the “correct” number is. How about 50,000 saved lives? 40,000 saved lives? How many saved lives are too few for Suderman to be concerned about?
The question of how to pay for Medicare-for-All has come up quite frequently in the debates, and the repetition may even be having a substantial impact on the race.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.)struggled with the (payment) question. Her stumbles probably contributed to her declining position in the race, and she eventually left the field.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) released a complex financing scheme. This generated substantial criticism and helped demonstrate how she relies on a veneer of wonkiness to avoid tough questions.
Eventually, Warren released a second plan that called for a delayed implementation of full-fledged Medicare for All, which many (understandably) read as a sign that she wasn’t serious about the idea.
In both cases, we learned something essential about the candidates and how they respond to pressure: Harris didn’t have a firm initial grasp of the policy mechanics, and she flailed and flip-flopped in search of a politically palatable answer. Warren bandwagoned with the most progressive candidate, eventually releasing a dubious (but detailed) plan that suggested she wasn’t serious, then followed it with another one that undercut the first, all while pretending it didn’t.
The same is now true of Sanders. And his response, it appears, is to point to an obviously unsound study conducted by a sympathetic voice, and then lie about the rest of the existing research.
The Medicare for All financing question is not just a policy question. It is a test of character—and Sanders failed it.
No, Mr. (Libertarian) Peter Suderman, the Medicare-for-All is not just a test of character. It also is a test of economic knowledge, and you failed both tests.
You failed the test of character by giving the back of your hand to all the sick people who are or will, lead lives of misery or die early because they can’t afford proper care. You throw compassion to the wind, and prefer to talk about money.
And you failed the test of economic knowledge because you don’t understand the difference between federal financing vs. state and local government, business, and personal financing.
You also don’t understand the effect that illness has on America’s economic growth. (Perhaps the coronavirus will teach you.)
And while the Democrats may favor Medicare-for-all for compassionate and economic reasons, they too display a stunning ignorance of federal financing.
And that ignorance will kill a program the people of this nation so greatly need.
Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.” Ben Bernanke: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”
The Treasury Department reported last week that the federal deficit swelled to more than $1 trillion in 2019 for the first time since 2012.
Even more alarming was the report from the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicting that $1 trillion deficits will continue for the next 10 years, eventually reaching $1.7 trillion in 2030.
That means that the total federal debt will balloon to $31.4 trillion over the next decade, pushing the debt-to-GDP ratio to 98 percent, or the highest since World War II.
The influential know-nothings will continue to pump the same nonsense into the minds of the populace, who have been trained to fear something — federal deficit spending –that actually is beneficial.
And this wave of red ink is hitting us during boom years, when the country’s deficits should be shrinking so that we can borrow and spend money to stimulate the economy during the inevitable recession to come.
In short, the author of the above paragraph doesn’t understand the difference between a Monetarily Sovereign government (i.e. the U.S. federal government) vs. monetarily non-sovereign governments (i.e. state and local governments).
The former has a sovereign currency, which it can create endlessly. The latter do not have a sovereign currency, so they often run short of whatever currency they use. It’s Economics 101.
There’s little doubt who’s to blame, said John Cassidy in NewYorker.com.
After campaigning on a promise to pay off the entire deficit, Trump has run up “vast amounts of new debt” to finance a military buildup and the $1.5 trillion tax cut in 2017.
Unfortunately, this relentless fiscal stimulus has achieved little, despite the president’s claims of stewarding “The Greatest Economy in American History.”
Last year, GDP grew 2.3 percent, nowhere near the 4 percent Trump promised, and the CBO now predicts a steady decline to 1.5 percent by 2025.
Let’s stop to examine Cassidy’s strange doubletalk. He admits that “vast amounts of new debt” amount to “relentless fiscal stimulus”— which is correct.
So, if increasing the debt stimulates, what would decreasing the debt do? Right. Decreasing debt recesses. It causes recessions and depressions.
Cassidy doesn’t dispute that. He admits the economy grew. He merely complains that the new debt didn’t grow the economy enough. Doesn’t that indicate there wasn’t enough debt, not that debt should be reduced?
His solution seems to be to stop doing what grows the economy in order to . . . what? Grow the economy less? This is the kind of “logic” to which the public is treated every day.
Americans should be “absolutely furious,” said Jordan Weissmann in Slate.com.
Republicans preach frugality with a Democrat in the White House, but burn money every time they’re in power.
Just watch: If Trump loses, Republicans will “rediscover their old-time faith in fiscal prudence and start shrieking about how the U.S. is on the road to becoming Argentina or Zimbabwe.”
Yes, Americans should be furious about many things — for instance, having a criminal President backed by a Congress filled with Sgt. Schultz wannabes (“I see nothing; I know nothing; I hear nothing”) who turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the criminality.
But Americans should not be furious about the increased economic stimulus. And there is zero possibility that federal spending will cause another Argentinian or Zimbabwean hyperinflation.
Don’t blame the Trump tax cuts, said Jake Novak in CNBC.com. The U.S. Treasury just booked a record quarter in tax revenue: $806.5 billion. “If tax revenues are rising, then tax cuts can’t possibly be the reason for rising federal debts.” It’s out-of-control spending that’s the cause.
Still, when the deficit bill comes due, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial, there’s little doubt that the poor will end up paying for our profligacy.
Rather than cut defense or “the vast tax giveaways and subsidies” for the rich, fiscal conservatives will target “safety net programs” like Medicaid and food stamps.
That would be redistributing wealth in the cruelest possible way—“from the impoverished to the well-to-do.”
Total gibberish from Novak. Tax cuts and increased spending both led to increased deficits. But the word “blame” is misused.
Since increased deficits are stimulative, the word “credit” would be more appropriate. The combination of tax cuts and spending increases can be credited for the continuing economic growth.
The Los Angeles Times is correct that the poor will wind up paying, but not because that is a necessary result.
The federal government, being Monetarily Sovereign, does not need to raise taxes on the poor, nor does it need to cut safety net programs. It can create all the dollars it needs, forever.
It will raise taxes and/or cut social programs only because that is what the richest Americans (who run America) want.
By 1960: the debt was “threatening the country’s fiscal future,”said Secretary of Commerce, Frederick H. Mueller. (“The enormous cost of various Federal programs is a time-bomb threatening the country’s fiscal future, Secretary of Commerce Frederick H. Mueller warned here yesterday.”)
In 1984: AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said. “It’s a time bomb ticking away.”
In 1985: “The federal deficit is ‘a ticking time bomb, and it’s about to blow up,” U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. (Remember him?)
Later in 1985: Los Angeles Times: “We labeled the deficit a ‘ticking time bomb’ that threatens to permanently undermine the strength and vitality of the American economy.”
In 1987: Richmond Times–Dispatch – Richmond, VA: “100TH CONGRESS FACING U.S. DEFICIT ‘TIME BOMB’”
Later in 1987: The Dallas Morning News: “A fiscal time bomb is slowly ticking that, if not defused, could explode into a financial crisis within the next few years for the federal government.”
In 1989: FORTUNE Magazine: “A TIME BOMB FOR U.S. TAXPAYERS”
In 1992: The Pantagraph – Bloomington, Illinois: “I have seen where politicians in Washington have expressed little or no concern about this ticking time bomb they have helped to create, that being the enormous federal budget deficit, approaching $4 trillion.”
Later in 1992: Ross Perot: “Our great nation is sitting right on top of a ticking time bomb. We have a national debt of $4 trillion.”
In 1995: Kansas City Star: “Concerned citizens. . . regard the national debt as a ticking time bomb poised to explode with devastating consequences at some future date.”
In 2003: Porter Stansberry, for the Daily Reckoning: “Generation debt is a ticking time bomb . . . with about ten years left on the clock.”
In 2004: Bradenton Herald: “A NATION AT RISK: TWIN DEFICIT A TICKING TIME BOMB”
In 2005: Providence Journal: “Some lawmakers see the Medicare drug benefit for what it is: a ticking time bomb.”
In 2006: NewsMax.com, “We have to worry about the deficit . . . when we combine it with the trade deficit we have a real ticking time bomb in our economy,” said Mrs. Clinton.
In 2007: USA Today: “Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen.”
In 2010: Heritage Foundation: “Why the National Debt is a Ticking Time Bomb. Interest rates on government bonds are virtually guaranteed to jump over the next few years.
In 2010: Reason Alert: “. . . the time bomb that’s ticking under the federal budget like a Guy Fawkes’ powder keg.”
In 2011: Washington Post, Lori Montgomery: ” . . . defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode.”
June 19, 2013: Chamber of Commerce: Safety net spending is a ‘time bomb’, By Jim Tankersley: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is worried that not enough Americans are worried about social safety net spending. The nation’s largest business lobbying group launched a renewed effort Wednesday to reduce projected federal spending on safety-net programs, labeling them a “ticking time bomb” that, left unchanged, “will bankrupt this nation.”
In 2014: CBN News: “The United States of Debt: A Ticking Time Bomb”
On January 27, 2017: America’s “debt bomb is going to explode.” That’s according to financial strategist Peter Schiff. Schiff said that while low interest rates had helped keep a lid on U.S. debt, it couldn’t be contained for much longer. Interest rates and inflation are rising, creditors will demand higher premiums, and the country is headed “off the edge of a cliff.”
Feb. 16, 2018 America’s Debt Bomb By Andrew Soergel, Senior Reporter: Conservatives and deficit hawks are hurling criticism at Washington for deepening America’s debt hole.
[The following were added after the original publishing of this article]
April 10, 2019,The National Debt: America’s Ticking Time Bomb. TIL Journal. Entire nations can go bankrupt. One prominent example was the *nation of Greece which was threatened with insolvency, a decade ago. Greece survived the economic crisis because the European Union and the IMF bailed the nation out.
SEP 12, 2019, Our national ticking time bomb, By BILL YEARGIN
SPECIAL TO THE SUN SENTINEL | At some point, investors will become concerned about lending to a debt-riddled U.S., which will result in having to offer higher interest rates to attract the money. Even with rates low today, interest expense is the federal government’s third-highest expenditure following the elderly and military. The U.S. already borrows all the money it uses to pay its interest expense, sort of like a Ponzi scheme. Lack of investor confidence will only make this problem worse.
JANUARY 06, 2020, National debt is a time bomb, BY MARK MANSPERGER, Tri City Herald | The increase in the U.S. deficit last year was about $1.1 trillion, bringing our total national debt to more than $23 trillion! This fiscal year, the deficit is forecasted to be even higher, and when the economy eventually slows down, our annual deficits could be pushing $2 trillion a year! This is financial madness.there’s not going to be a drastic cut in federal expenditures — that is, until we go broke — nor are we going to “grow our way” out of this predicament. Therefore, to gain control of this looming debt, we’re going to have to raise taxes.
February 14, 2020, OMG! It’s February 14, 2020, and the national debt is still a ticking time bomb! The national debt: A ticking time bomb? America is “headed toward a crisis,” said Tiana Lowe in WashingonExaminer.com. The Treasury Department reported last week that the federal deficit swelled to more than $1 trillion in 2019 for the first time since 2012. Even more alarming was the report from the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicting that $1 trillion deficits will continue for the next 10 years, eventually reaching $1.7 trillion in 2030
Eighty years of wrong-headed “ticking time bomb” predictions, and still they come. Why are the thought leaders incapable of learning?
My belief: It’s intentional. The rich, who run America, do not want the not-rich to learn that the government can provide all the things described in the Ten Steps to Prosperity (below), without raising taxes.
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.
Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps:
“They are laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friends, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.And some, I assume, are good people.
“But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not theright people.
“It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East.
“Why are we having all these people from s—hole countries (Haiti and Africa, and (the middle east) coming here?”
Some translations:
” . . . they are killing us economically.” Poverty-stricken little Mexico is killing big, rich America economically? Get real. This is a flat-out, fear-mongering lie.
” . . . dumping ground . . .” Translation: These aren’t people; they are garbage.
“They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you.” Said twice for emphasis. They look different and they act different, so don’t have compassion for them. They are sub-human.
“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Another fear-mongering lie. Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than are native-born Americans.
” . . . what we’re getting.” Another dehumanizing comment, made especially repugnant by his use of the word “what” rather than “who.”
” . . . theright people. This is a continuation of the desire for more immigrants from countries like Norway (read: rich and white) and not from “s—hole” countries like Haiti and much of Africa (read: poor and black or brown). Note the references to Mexico, South and Latin America, and Middle East.
People tend to support people who are like them. Blacks tend to support blacks. Jews tend to support Jews. White Christians tend to support white Christians. Gays tend to support gays. Muslims tend to support Muslims. Educated people tend to support educated people.
People from a geographical area tend to support others from that same area (aka “favorite sons”). Democrats tend to support Democrats. Republicans tend to support Republicans.
And bigots tend to support bigots.
His appeal is not only to the xenophobic fearful. Being a bigot, his primary appeal is to bigots.
But while bigotry may provide a comforting and quasi-logical appeal to other bigots, bigotry also has its penalties.
One penalty is that bigotry prevents much-needed people from entering, or even trying to enter, America. Bigotry prevents economic growth.
“I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in,” Trump told the Regional Reporters Association. “We need people.”
Asked if he was changing his stance on legal immigration, Trump said “yes” because the US needs more workers in a booming economy.
“We need people in our country because our unemployment numbers are so low and we have massive numbers of companies coming back into our country – car companies, we have seven car companies coming back in right now and there’s going to be a lot more,” Trump said. “We’ve done really well with this, and we need people.”
And:
Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had described our country at a private gathering in England as being quite the opposite of “full.”
Instead of having too many newcomers, Mulvaney told the crowd that we have too few.
“We are desperate — desperate — for more people,” Mulvaney said. “We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.”
Well, what exactly does Trump and his team believe?
A report released Monday by the National Foundation for American Policy projects policies like Trump’s recently-expanded travel ban or the public charge rule preventing immigrants who may rely on welfare assistance from entering the country will alter legal immigration to the U.S. for quite some time.
But change may also be noticeable rather quickly. Legal immigration had already declined by 11 percent between the 2016 and 2018 fiscal years, and the NFAP report predicts the decline will have reached 30 percent by 2021.
That could have long-term consequences for U.S. economic growth, which will NFAP says will slow because the average annual growth rate of the U.S. labor force will also sputter as a result of the immigration decline.
The report says the rate will slow somewhere between 35 percent and 59 percent going forward if the policies remain in place.
“The significant decline in the annual level of legal immigration means lower long-term economic growth may be Donald Trump’s most lasting economic legacy,” the report reads.
Here is the predicament for bigot Trump and his bigot followers.
Last year, the immigrants were “rapists, murders, and job-takers.” Now, they are “consumers, workers, and job-producers.”
The haters had rallied around a hate-mongering leader.
They hate gays, Latinos, Central Americans, Africans, people from the middle east, people of color, Muslims, most foreigners (from “sh-t hole countries”), and even, to some extent, women.
Trump and his party created “Fortress America” with a Wall behind which his haters could hide.
But Trump and his party love money, big business, economic growth, and the jobs that immigration produces.
So what is a confused bigot to do? Support the economic growth, job-promising Trump, or vote for the immigrant torturing, big Wall, bigot Trump?
‘Tis a quandary for the GOP. ‘Tis a quandary for bigots.
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.
Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps:
Here is the predicament for bigot Trump and his bigot followers.
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 