Krugman needs to get into a car, spend a year traveling across the nation, and grasp that his imaginary America doesn’t really exist.
Sales taxes and income taxes....only relate to what the community figures is their “take” or requirement to spend. So you open up the book, examine spending, and come to eventually figure that thirty percent of a normal cities expenses are wasted. Bad pension ideas, poor police management, fire department mismanagement, corrupt visions for infrastructure, etc.
Then you turn to the medical care business (note, it’s a business operation, not a charity or foundation operation). Business operations tend to lower costs when in competition. If you make rules to limit competition or stifle competition...prices reflect that and escalate. If you allow lawyers to run among the thugs and sue at their heart’s desire....then that reflects in the pricing of medical business enterprise.
Ask Krugman if he’s ever run a business in his entire life....with more than a dozen people. We can guess the answer.
Ask Krugman if a death panel establishes a death package upon one single individual....how quick will the legal profession act to render the death wish invalid. Lawyers are waiting in the shadows and will dissolve any death panel operation within weeks. We would double and triple the national judges...just to stay ontrack with this stupid death panel operation. It’d last barely six months before dissolving.
Krugman is simply an academic who got a Nobel Price for something....think’s he’s an intellectual....and hasn’t talked to a real guy in years. He hangs out with intellectuals, journalists, and political figures. He can’t think beyond his little sphere....end of the story.
So now all we really are is a number that productive or non-productive fr the government and they get to decide if we live or die. Great.
If economics is the physics of money...
Krugman is an economic alchemist.