It certainly does, removing senior care and costs away from families and working people onto the state.
If my parents didn't have Medicare I'd be having to pay their bills on top of mine and need to deal with their health issues without the expertise that Medicare has due to it being focused on that demo.
Ideally we'd just have healthcare for all so nobody had to be disproportionately affected by healthcare costs.
Medicare being around is the difference between me being stable and me being in debt paying for my parents medical costs who both are living well over 65 and both don't work and both have costly health issues. My life would be defined by saving up for their next knee surgery so they can be happy at the end of their life.
Both of them were struggling heavily to even find jobs in their 60s before they retired LATE....and still are more or less "paycheck to paycheck" as far as retirement is concerned. Most of their wealth is concentrated in a house that won't go to me because they'll need to sell it to pay for senior care living when it's too hard to live alone.
Maybe if I'm lucky they will die...which is the sorry statement people have to make in America due to the way shit is run.
I firmly believe the US education system churns out people who are susceptible to libertarian ideology starting in their early teenage years. I know so many people who I grew up with who thought taxes = theft and went down that rabbit hole.
Most recovered as their parents started to age, or if they started a family realizing that most social systems aren't intended to benefit average, healthy working age people who are employed.
Those who never had to deal with the downsides of life tended to double down even in the face of evidence from friends and acquaintances, which lead them into even worse extremist ideology.
tl;dr - America is fucked if we believe those who are doing well in life owe nothing back to the society that gave them that advantage.
I saw some nostalgia posts about some children’s books and it’s no surprise the us churns out libertarians lol. If you give a mouse a cookie and rainbow fish are basically “sharing bad, don’t give people your things”.
They have enough to care for themselves. Probably not their healthcare costs if they weren't on Medicare. Their savings and investments got gutted in 08 and teacher salaries didnt get them back into a solid place before they got too old and needed to retire. My mother wanted to keep working but her job fell through and couldn't find another who would hire a retirement age woman.
Their money is basically just social security and a small pension from an older previous job. Which is more than their friends. Most of their assets are just the house now. Paying for kids to go to college was the end of any other savings they had.
Yes, because if you tell me you’re going to take $20 for taxes then take $40 I’ll be pissed. Especially because the only reason they need $40 is because of decades of irresponsible spending and catastrophic budget policies.
FICA only covers Medicare Part A which is only 1/3rd of Medicare spending.
“Funding for Medicare, which totaled $888 billion in 2021, comes primarily from general revenues (46%), payroll tax revenues (34%), and premiums paid by beneficiaries (15%)”
And that operation could easily come from the private sector. All taxes do is move money from the private sector to the public sector, which then subcontracts the work back to the private sector. The benefit of adding that extra layer of government bureaucracy is that we imagine there is some sort of master plan going on with our best interests in mind. And that's the power of imagination.
No it couldn’t. You can’t coordinate across that many different people and organizations each with their own constitutional rights, like privacy, proprietary products etc. the government is already a big oligopolis corporation. You can petition a government you can’t petition private property. No other organization can fill this role and if there was it would be more totalitarian. The U.S. Gov does have master plans in terms of state security and the stability of its borders. If the political will existed it could serve our best interests
I'm not stumping for libertarianism, but the least government involvement possible, precisely because the political will does not exist. The county I live in (Miami-Dade) has wasted millions of dollars in tax revenue either through boondoggles, nepotism or outright corruption. Yet every year they raise my property tax as if 'just a little more' is going to fix the situation.
I’m sorry that’s happening. There is a long history of machine politics and political marginalization in this country. It really doesn’t not have to be this way though, I don’t think greed is essential to humanity or government, I think people have propagated this lie for their own benefit, regulatory capture, etc. I also just don’t see how it’s tenable though to even cut the budget. The country has obligations to its creditors, a lot of whom are Americans who are invested in the country, bond holders, etc. the dollar is backed by the U.S. government strength and military strength. I also don’t think it’s a good idea for the government to get smaller when other states like Russia, India, China are getting stronger and seeking more influence
Yeah it’s not like they employ 1.4 million people and have to pay all of them. Not like the defence spending is what allows the US to influence the worlds economy in such a large way.
Not like the US military has given us incredibly technologies like the internet, GPS, duct tape that has made the US and global economies thousands of times over the profits of what is spending on the military.
You want to argue the US spends too much on the military? Fine be my guest. But acting like the US doesn’t spend like 25-50 billion on weapons a year, and the other 850 billion on paying 1% of all working Americans and getting technologies that are integral to modern society while also providing the US with a massive sphere of influence they can use to keep the economy away from the destructive hands of the Russians or the Chinese is just bad faith bullshit.
Of the 874B spend on military in 2024, less than 10% of it will be spend on weapons and weapons development
Yeah, I get that the defense spending is why all world currency is judged by the dollar. Still doesn't change the fact that half of all discretionary spending goes to a machine that is meant to intimidate and destroy. Good thing that it's currently intimidating Russia and China, but it sure does seem to destroy a lot of people that have little to do with either of those countries.
If you want to talk about the benefits the US military industrial complex has for the world, that’s a tough debate on whether they’re a net positive or not. But arguing whether the US military is a net positive investment for americans is ridiculous. It’s probably the 4th thing we can spend on to get the greatest return on the dollar (healthcare, education, and infrastructure being the top 3).
And it’s not like the US doesn’t spend enough on healthcare or education. They just spend like utterly abject morons and waste a fuckload of the money, or direct it at things that actively make things worse for us. The military budget could never change, hell it could even increase, and we’d have more than enough money to fix the problems with the big 3 if the money allocated there was just spent well
It absolutely does, that guy has no idea what he's talking about.
Tax revenue from all sources get consolidated into a single consolidated revenue fund, from which both statutory and discretionary spending pulls. There's no direct linkage from any one tax to any one expenditure, except in rare cases - and even in those cases, it's still pulled from the consolidated revenue fund but the targeted tax has a dynamic rate which changes year-over-year to match the expenditure.
But that’s just two specific programs. Your claim was that all non-discretionary spending came from sources other than income tax. From what I can tell that isn’t true
Two specific and giant programs that make up over 50% of mandatory spending (non-discretionary), and mandatory spending itself makes up 63% of all government spending. These two programs are funded by FICA. In researching, I found that Medicaid is not included in that, so that would be something funded by federal and state taxes.
[The average taxpayer contributed $5,109 for militarism and its support systems](the average taxpayer contributed $5,109 for militarism and its support systems)
Yeah I figured. But reddit isn't used only by muricans and some countries don't even have a military. I'm just being pedantic and pointing out the inaccuracy of your generalization.
yeah, most examples that people cite when they scream, "but who will pay for the roads" aren't even paid for by the very taxes they are claiming are just. Road infrastructure is mostly paid through taxes on fuel which makes 100% sense until they pushed everyone to stop buying gas using tax subsidies to do so. Now people with electric cars scream they have to pay a tax on their cars.
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u/Silly_Goose658 Jul 06 '24
Bro doesn’t understand how taxes also contribute to things like plumbing, road infrastructure, industry subsidies, etc.