I saw this article a couple of days ago and it piqued my interest so much, I had to buy the e-book (it’s only 1.99!). I haven’t yet read it, so I’ll give my full review later, but the top 10 takeaways from Ezra Klein were true enough to make me want to comment already…
#1: This is the crux of the problem. Americans want Social Security, Medicare, and the most powerful military in the world by far. We also want low taxes. We can’t have both. It’s that simple.
#2: It’s a cliché to say that we can cut government by cutting “fraud and waste”, but that’s not the issue. Is there fraud? Is there waste? Of course, the same as in the private sector. But there isn’t nearly enough to allow us what we want without having to pay for it. As a former employee of the state government, there wasn’t as much “fraud and waste” as “woeful under-investment”.
#3: Top marginal rates are next to nothing. Cutting them won’t induce the wealthy to spend more on groceries and toilet paper. You can only have so many iPads in a household.
#4: As I’ve harped on repeatedly, interest rates are nothing, we have people out of work, and our infrastructure sucks. Let’s take advantage of that to invest in thins that need constant upkeep, like water, sewer, and transportation.
#7: Health care is the issue. If people receive far more in Medicare benefits than they pay for (an issue not seen in Social Security retirement benefits), what do you expect to see the deficit do?
#8: This is even more key than #7. This isn’t about death panels. This is about the fact that we pay obscene amounts of money for ineffective treatments that do not work. Frankly, for prostate cancer, if it’s not aggressive the best treatment is usually nothing.
#9: The market is about rationing. We can either ration based on ability to pay, or we can ration based on effectiveness. I’ll happily choose the latter.
#10: The answer isn’t that hard: if we raise taxes by a couple percent of GDP, and stop paying for ineffective medical care, we can have all we want. Seriously. It’s that simple.
I’ll read the book and give my full review, but just based on these bullet points, it seems like this is something that is a no-brainer for fixing our budget issues.