Posted on 05/08/2018 12:59:37 PM PDT by reaganaut1
Almost always, when I point out the difficulties of enacting some social program much desired by the left, I am met with some version of the following rejoinder: “Other countries have managed to do this. We passed Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and most recently, Obamacare. It is obviously possible to do these sorts of things, even in America. The obstructionism of people like you is the only reason we can’t have nice things.”
The obstruction of people like me is, obviously, one of the reasons that we can’t have “nice things.” (Though, just as obviously, we obstruct because we think the not-nice aspects would outweigh whatever benefits might ensue.) But the obstruction doesn’t only come from the right. The American left has developed a fantasy that a large expansion of the welfare state can be financed by taxing only the rich — a term that is ever more frequently defined to exclude urban professionals earning well into the six figures. In fact, European welfare states pay for themselves by taxing ordinary people very heavily. If the U.S. income tax were designed along Scandinavian lines, its top tax bracket would kick in at around $90,000 a year per household. We’d also have a heavy value-added tax — a highly efficient, but also regressive, kind of sales tax.
It cannot be otherwise. The top quintile of households (those making more than about $115,000 a year) do take home an astonishingly large share of U.S. national income. But if you took every dollar they earned and left them to starve, it would not quite pay for a Danish-style welfare state. Obviously, starving your tax base is not ideal fiscal policy.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
This reminds me, of the notion that it is easy to be liberal.
On any conceivable societal issue, your default response as a liberal, is to say that the government should do more. Expand social programs, raise taxes if needed.
And money is a key matter. The liberal default response is that we don’t give enough “resources”, or money, to support our schools.
Shortcomings in every conceivable social program we have, is explained in terms of how we just don’t do enough, meaning, spend enough money.
It’s hard to have a conversation with the liberal side, in part because everything is explained in terms of how government should do more. And there’s a related liberal idea, that if we just raised taxes enough, there would be plenty of money to solve every problem out there.
Boy, that Leftist she referred to says that like those are good things.
If I had to choose three of the worst things in the history of this country for the financial well being of the nation, those three would be on the list.
And Social Security would be first on the list to be positively picked.
Uh...no. We can’t have “nice things” for the same reason Europe is losing all of it’s formerly “nice things”.
Some people aren’t “nice”.
bkmk
Ditto your #3.
While the Danes can be quite hospitable to foreigners who wish to adopt the Danish way of doing things, they can be quite the opposite to those who do not, encouraging them to move to Sweden, Germany or anywhere other than Denmark.
Did you every why you hear so little about Muslim immigrant crime in Denmark. For starters, they refuse to subsidize it as a permanent lifestyle. There isn't a lot of room for sluggards in Danish society.
And what they say about taxation in this article is true-- Everybody pays something and most pay heavily. That can work fairly well in a homogeneous society where the perception is that everybody takes and everybody gives. It works much less in a society divided between makers and takers.
I don't know much about this author, but that is a VERY IMPORTANT point.
Even the poorest people in these European "paradises" pay through the nose in taxes.
Imagine if it were proposed that the US adopt a VAT (as in Europe) to pay for all of the socialist goodies, you'd never hear the end of the screaming that it would hurt the poor.
Well, yeah.
That's how you can "afford" free healthcare and college for everyone.
When Joe six-pack is paying $8 per gallon of gas, and is paying 61% of his gross income in taxes, things can get kind of messy.
But Europeans have accepted their fate.
I doubt that the average American would accept it.
I encourage the democrats to propose this.
It will guarantee republican dominance for the next 30 years.
Even welfare parasites and illegals won't pay $10 for a Big Mac.
Reality tends to get in the way of fantasy.
I am a social security recipient but on balance I am totally unconvinced that it was a good idea.
I understand...I keep telling my wife that by the time we are ready (not so far away) we probably won’t see a cent of it, so I don’t think we should plan for it all. They will probably have means testing, or we will all be bankrupt anyway.
Like a good number of liberal ideas, they had good intentions, but Social Security was a road with good intentions to be paved to a very hot place!
Remember the phalanx of British police guarding the hospital with the little boy Alfie Evans? Even though the parents had a hospital in Italy ready to take him at their own expense of getting him there, the state wouldn't let him go. The British judge had condemned the little boy to die and somehow, if the hospital in Italy had saved his life, he might come back to the UK to cause them some expense later.
That's how these jackwagons really think and it should scare the hell out of any normal human being.
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