Tag Archives: political economy

Wages or Benefits

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Every month, the Labor Department’s jobs report helps shine a light on the growth of overall wages, which has been slow in recent years. But what gets far less attention are the other components of compensation—health insurance, paid leave, retirement benefits—that in recent years have generally outpaced wage growth, as shown in new Labor Department data released Friday.

And isn’t that a travesty?  Used to be, in the ’50s and early ’60s, these benefits—including the pensions that were those retirement benefits were perks an employer used to induce top performers to work for him and not someone else.  Remember when “full dental” was such a big deal?

It needs to go back to that.

I’d rather have the pay, and I’m happy to be responsible for my own outcomes.  Depending on others for my benefits leaves me…vulnerable to those others, from changing attitudes of those others to the ability of those others to continue paying the benefits.  See, for instance, all the public pension bankruptcies and impending bankruptcies and all the private company pension plans that are underfunded.

Note here, too: it’s not the 401(k) plans and other defined contribution retirement plans—plans for which the individual contributor is solely responsible—that are going broke.  If they’re underfunded, too, that’s the choice of the plan holders; it’s not inflicted on them by their employers, their unions, or their government “pension” legislator/managers.  Furthermore, the failure of an individual defined benefit plan affects only that plan’s holder; it has no effect on others.  The failure of a retirement plan managed by others for entire groups hammers everyone in those groups dragooned into participating.

General Reform

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25% of us don’t see doctors because that costs too much.

32% of older millennials (is there such a thing?  Gad) skip the doctor.  13% of Americans don’t have any health coverage plan at all—paying the penalty is more valuable to them.  Half of us don’t think we’ll have affordable health insurance much less Obamacare’s health coverage welfare.

This, together with today’s other post, just illustrates the fact that no single part of our economy—or of our Federal government—can effectively be treated in isolation: not Obamacare alone, not Federal spending alone (especially not by “cutting” through reducing the rate of growth in spending), not taxing alone, not debt handling alone.

They’re a system, and the system as a whole must be reformed, not convenient parts of it.  That’s Systems Management 101.

Losing Health Coverage

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The CBO and Progressive-Democrats in Congress loudly claim that millions will lose their health coverage plans under Republican plans to repeal and replace Obamacare.

What the Progressive-Democrats are carefully ignoring (the CBO not so much; they weren’t tasked with comparing the Republican plans and Obamacare) are the real millions that already are losing or are about to lose their health coverage plans because Obamacare is collapsing now.

The nation’s second largest health insurance company, Anthem, will extract itself from the majority of the ObamaCare market in the state of Ohio by 2018, the company announced Tuesday, raising questions about the future of its exchange participation.

And

The decision could leave 20 counties within the state without access to coverage under the Affordable Care Act[.]

Anthem is considering leaving Obamacare altogether in the not-too-distant future.

Anthem handles over a million customers in the health coverage market, now considerably fewer under Obamacare, and perhaps shortly none at all.  Nor is Anthem alone in being unable to continue under Obamacare.  Aetna and Humana will be leaving next year, and those customers will be losing their coverage.

Those people actually, not speculatively, are losing their coverage.

The Rich Are Out Of Money?

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They are in Connecticut, anyway, or at least out of trust in the State’s government regarding their money.  Or the State is out of rich.  Aetna, Inc, one of the giants of health and dental coverage that’s headquartered in Connecticut is looking hard at joining the exodus from the State, having grown tired of being the State’s tax piggy bank.

Governor Dannel Malloy (D) says he’ll match other states’ financial incentives—not exceed—if only Aetna will stay, but as The Wall Street Journal put it, “taxpayer money can’t buy fiscal certainty and a less destructive business climate.”

The result of the Left’s assaults on the wealthy’s pocketbooks?  The Left has shattered its own rice bowl.  The State’s Office of Fiscal Analysis

reduced its two-year revenue forecast by $1.46 billion. Since January the agency has downgraded income-tax revenue for 2017 and 2018 by $1.1 billion (6%). Sales- and corporate-tax revenue are projected to fall by $385 million (9%) and $67 million (7%), respectively, this year. Pension contributions, which have doubled since 2010, will increase by a third over the next two years. The result: a $5.1 billion deficit and three recent credit downgrades.

The remaining rich are bugging out, headed for States that appreciate the jobs—and resulting expanded incomes and revenues for those States—that these guys and their companies bring with them.

[emphasis added] In the past five years 27,400 Connecticut residents…have moved to no-income-tax Florida, and seven of the state’s eight counties have lost population since 2010. Population flight has depressed economic growth—Connecticut’s real GDP has shrunk by 0.1% since 2010—as well as home values and sales-tax revenues.

Hmm….

Another Hypocrisy of the Left

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Among the tax reforms in the current plan before Congress is the elimination of the state and local tax payments as deductions from individuals’ Federal income tax returns.  Who actually benefits from these deductions, though?  Taxpayers in New York, California, and a couple of others.  States dominated, for the most part, by the Progressive-Democratic Party.  There’s an ox being gored.

Who else benefits from these deductions?

…88% of the benefits in 2014 flowed to taxpayers who earn more than $100,000, while 1% went to those who earn less than $50,000….

That’s not quite the Progressive-Democrats’ hated 1%, but they’re included—and the poor, whom the Progressive-Democrats pretend to want to help, get almost nothing for the deduction: they don’t have enough income to be able to use it—even if they live in those Blue States whose governments so loudly pretend to be on their side.

The Progressive-Democrats aren’t even consistent in their opprobrium.

The deduction is worth about $100 billion a year—the sixth largest individual income tax break. The Tax Foundation estimates that eliminating the write-off would raise $1.8 trillion in revenue over a decade.

Not even the prospect of all this money for Federal coffers—$180 billion per year to offset those $100 billion of deductions—is enough to draw the Progressive-Democrats in.

Heaven forfend that they take an alternative course.  They could jump on that large increase in the Federal take with both feet, and in parallel (especially since the deduction goes away) those Blue State governments could lower their own tax bites….