In Health Care Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality

The New York Times ^ | March 23, 2010 | DAVID LEONHARDT

[Cincinna]

For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.

Speaking to an ebullient audience of Democratic legislators and White House aides at the bill-signing ceremony on Tuesday, Mr. Obama claimed that health reform would “mark a new season in America.” He added, “We have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care.”

The bill is the most sweeping piece of federal legislation since Medicare was passed in 1965. It aims to smooth out one of the roughest edges in American society — the inability of many people to afford medical care after they lose a job or get sick. And it would do so in large measure by taxing the rich.

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com

[VeniVidiVici]

[Reeses]

Here's an interesting article on the game Second Life and how they almost launched a new economy, and how the government shut that part down. What's clear is they could have succeeded if there was no physical business or servers that could be shut down. What's needed are peer-to-peer virtual computer servers that act like the real thing but are dispersed and encrypted so that no court order could stop them or punish the owners, being none. Anonymous Internet communication techniques are growing and the next level is anonymous virtual storage space and application processing. This is an interesting but solvable technical challenge, made more important by the current political climate. The day may come when Free Republic is shut down because it exists on a real server.

[WOBBLY BOB]

I thought LBJ ended poverty.

[Touch Not the Cat]

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bump

[Leonardo DiCrapio]

Article says median household income has risen
less than 15% since 1980 (and blames this on reagan). of course median household income dropped from 1980 to 1981 (carter’s last year in office), and median household income was up approximately 25% from 1967 to 2008. typically misleading statistics that don’t give you any idea of how fast median household income was growing before reagan took office. from the graph, it looks the yearly percentage increases in median household income actually increased after reagan took office.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p60-236.pdf