Technological productivity increases in communications, extraction, and manufacturing necessarily expand the relative sector share of GDP dedicated to education, healthcare, and services. Technological progress increases the relative size of the public sector. All things being equal the government's role in the economy should appear to expand, because it takes the same amount of resources to provide police protection and childhood education as it did a generation ago while it takes considerably less to build and power, say, home appliances.
Deficits are constrained by inflation. We shouldn't worry about the one unless there is evidence of the other.
Inflated drug and administrative costs are first order contributors to healthcare inflation, because the market incentives are structured around rent seeking (patent monopolies and service retention). The simplest way to fix the market is a single payer insurance system, which a super majority of Americans have supported for over a generation. If we can't do it the simple way we could at least fix the market in a less convoluted way than throwing victims into the path of the present monstrosity created by a century of "reform".
The 1% are the only ones running ponzi schemes.
Taxation on income generated from squatting over a pile of bonds, options, stocks, and derivatives, which makes up most of the income of the top fraction of the 1%, is abhorrently, disgustingly regressive.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-10-19 17:32:03 CST |
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