Quote:
Originally Posted by wind_magic
Health care
One thing that strikes me about the new health care bill is that if you assume a conservative 200$us/month health care bill for the average poor person and add in 100$us/month in food stamps, that gets you to about 300k$us/month or 3.6k$us/year in benefits. For a working poor person to have a retirement income of 3.6k$us/year would mean that they need to save up 120k$us at a 3% interest rate, or approximately 10% of a 30k/year salary for about 20 years, assuming the rest goes towards the cost of working (vehicle, gasoline, etc).
That begs the question, if the government is going to give you free health care and 100$us/month in food stamps for doing absolutely nothing, and you are a poor person who only makes 30k$us/year, why bother working at all ? Assuming you have a roof over your head, you're no better off in retirement if you make 30k$us/year (without the new health care bill) than you would be if you just quit your job today and sit in the park and feed pigeons (with the new health care bill).
I'm all about people having affordable health care, but at some point it seems like you are creating incentives for people to sit on their butt doing nothing all day.
|
Windy...you're well on the way towards explaining the low-growth, high-unemployment society that is Europe. It's of course interesting that we should elect to emulate such policies just as the Europeans are confronting the fact that their birth rate is going to make the maintenance of such polices questionable. Immigration is touted as a possible solution but not one without it's own issues; there is no equivalent tradition of assimilation within Europe to that of the US. And the latest evidence from Canada, which faces similar issues, is that immigration will not be the answer.
Canada's big problem -- too few babies
Demographics, an historically boring exercise in statistics, is likely to be the science of new found respect in the next half century. For instance, we've spent some thirty years worrying about having our lunch handed to us by the Japanese. Reading the following article, one might question as to why this is an economy were worried about other than it's disappearing.
Gross: Why Japan's Economy Won't Grow | Newsweek Voices - Daniel Gross | Newsweek.com
I'm hardly against emulating other country's successes, but we seem to be focused on emulating their failures instead.
It might not hurt for someone, anyone, to state that there is no health care crisis. There is a concern about the health care system and it's funding but there is not the implied lack of health care. We face a battle that is far more likely to devastate our economic dynamism than it is to effectively reform health care as we know it.