CHAPEL HILL — A lecture on government spending, which highlights the high cost of progressive programs, will be taking place next month as part of the ICON Lecture series.
Adam Michel, a senior policy analyst on tax and debt with the Heritage Foundation, will be giving a talk titled “The progressive roadmap to soak the middle class.”
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative D.C. think tank that advocates for limited government, free-market economics and expanded individual opportunity.
The lecture comes along just as socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has gained steam towards becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee
“The progressive agenda, as it is articulated by any of the prominent Democrats and some on the left — taken in whole or in segments — is an incredible departure from fiscal sanity,” Michel told NSJ.
“It is arithmetically impossible to fund the progressive agenda with taxes on the rich alone,” said Michel.
Sanders’ recent publication of a fact sheet on how he plans to fund his agenda items is largely a list of steep tax increases. Michel saw this coming and warns that taxes on the rich will not be nearly enough to pay for Sanders’ wish list.
“If you were to confiscate every dollar earned by every taxpayer with incomes over $200,000 a year, you would only pay for about half of what is being promised by the progressive, left agenda,” said Michel.
Michel warns that if corrective actions aren’t taken, government expenditures will require much larger tax increases on middle-class Americans and even higher taxes on a much larger number of taxpayers.
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — Congressman Steve Scalise introduced a panel discussion called “Prescription for Failure: The Ills of Socialized Medicine” at CPAC on Thursday. He established what was at stake in 2020: “2020 will be a contrast election,” he said, between Trump’s freedom agenda or socialism.
“You don’t want socialism, you surely don’t want socialized medicine,” he said. “Tens of thousands of Canadians come to America for life-saving treatment. Do you see Americans going to Canada for life-saving treatment?” he asked rhetorically.
“Healthcare is only one example of what’s at stake in this election,” he said, before concluding that individual freedom will win out in 2020 and predicted that Republicans will keep the Senate and win back the House.
Author Dr. David Schneider, an orthopedic surgeon from Colorado, explained how with socialized medicine, wait times for care “are disastrous.” In Canada, the wait time to see a specialist is two years, and then another two years to get the procedure.
“People in this country would go crazy if you were told you had to wait four months,” he said.
Then he explained how Princess Diana would be alive today, if not for socialized medicine. “Princess Diana was in the car accident in France,” he explained. “They actually don’t have any trauma specialists in France.”
“For the first hour after that accident, she was still in that tunnel,” he continued. “And after an hour, they took her to a nearby hospital and she was alive for another three hours and they couldn’t control the bleeding from her pulmonary artery.”
Schneider explained that “there were no trauma-trained people there.”
He continued, “I really believe, knowing what I know about her care and comparing it to what Congressman Scalise had, Princess Diana would have lived had that accident happened here in America.”
Now that Bernie Sanders—once an obscure socialist senator from Vermont—is officially the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, it is time to confront what that means.
It does not mean the U.S. is flirting with socialism. That’s not going to happen. The meaning of Bernie’s ascent is that the Democratic Party, older even than he is, has simply run out of gas.
The Democrats resemble Europe’s aging political parties—Britain’s Labour, France’s Socialists, Germany’s Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. All have simply deflated with voters.
Signs of public fatigue with the Democrats could be seen in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Besides incompetence, the big story out of Iowa was low turnout. In New Hampshire the story was voter indecision. Once past Bernie’s 25% cement-block base, many voters were flipping a coin in the voting booth to pick from the other candidates.
What does it mean that Elizabeth Warren, by now a household name, got dropped to fourth place? Joe Biden’s humiliating fifth is a personal disaster, but what does that say about the party itself?
She’s the candidate with a plan for everything: That’s Elizabeth Warren’s brand. But even that sells her ambitions short, as we discovered after a tour of her 60-some policy papers. Ms. Warren is proposing a transformation of American government, business and life that exceeds what the socialist dreamers of a century ago imagined.
Her standing in the polls has fallen after missteps over Medicare, but she is still in the top candidate tier. Her ideas deserve to be taken seriously because they show where the American left wants to go:
• Wealth tax: Tax net worth over $50 million at 2% a year, and 6% above $1 billion. To prevent the rich from yachting off, add a 40% “exit tax” on assets over $50 million upon renouncing U.S. citizenship. Estimated revenue: $3.75 trillion over a decade from 75,000 households. Most economists, including many Democrats, call that number a fantasy. Courts might also find the tax unconstitutional.
• Medicare for All tax:Charge companies with at least 50 workers an “Employer Medicare Contribution,” equal to 98% of their recent outlays on health care, while adjusting for inflation and changes in staff size. These varying fees “would be gradually shifted to converge at the average health care cost-per-employee nationally.” Estimated revenue: $8.8 trillion over a decade. If receipts fall short, add a “supplemental” tax on “big companies with extremely high executive compensation and stock buyback rates.”
• Global corporate tax: Raise the top business rate to 35%. Apply this as a world-wide minimum on overseas earnings by U.S. companies. Businesses would “pay the difference between the minimum tax and the rate in the countries where they book their profits.” Apply a similar minimum tax to foreign companies, prorated by the share of their sales made in the U.S. Estimated revenue: $1.65 trillion over a decade.
• Corporate surtax: Tax profit over $100 million at a new 7% rate, without exemptions. This would go atop the regular corporate rate. Estimated revenue: $1 trillion over a decade from 1,200 public companies.
• Slower expensing: “Our current tax system lets companies deduct the cost of certain investments they make in assets faster than those assets actually lose value.” Closing this “loophole,” she says, would raise $1.25 trillion over a decade.
• Higher capital gains taxes: Tax the investment gains of the wealthiest 1% as ordinary income, meaning rates near 40% instead of today’s 23.8%. Apply the tax annually on gains via a “mark to market” system, even if the asset hasn’t been sold. Estimated revenue: $2 trillion over a decade.
Google Amasses Personal Medical Records
Company teams up with one of the U.S.’s largest health systems in ‘Project Nightingale’
Google is engaged with one of the U.S.’s largest health-care systems on a project to collect and crunch the detailed personal- health information of millions of people across 21 states.
The initiative, code-named “Project Nightingale,” appears to be the biggest effort yet by a Silicon Valley giant to gain a toehold in the health-care industry through the handling of patients’ medical data. Amazon. com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are also aggressively pushing into health care, though they haven’t yet struck deals of this scope.
Google began Project Nightingale in secret last year with St. Louis-based Ascension, a Catholic chain of 2,600 hospitals, doctors’ offices and other facilities, with the data sharing accelerating since summer, according to internal documents.
The data involved in the initiative encompasses lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, including patient names and dates of birth.
Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data on tens of millions of patients, according to a person familiar with the matter and
the documents.
In a news release issued after The Wall Street Journal reported on Project Nightingale on Monday, the companies said the initiative is compliant with federal health law and includes robust protections for patient data.
Some Ascension employees have raised questions about the way the data is being collected and shared, both from a technological and ethical perspective, according to the people familiar with the project. But privacy experts said it appeared to be permissible under federal law. That law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, generally allows hospitals to share data with business partners without telling patients, as long as the information is used “only to help the covered entity carry out its health care functions.”
In a word, rationing. And that’s no surprise, since she credits the advice for developing much of her plan to Donald Berwick. He was an advocate for ObamaCare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board—known uncharitably as the death panel—that Congress repealed last year in a bipartisan vote.
Start with the overall fiscal math, which by itself is staggering. She concedes that her plan will cost only “slightly” less than the $52 trillion that the U.S. is expected to spend on health care in the next 10 years. She deducts from that what the feds now spend on Medicare and Medicaid, plus $6 trillion that the states contribute to Medicaid, the state-federal children’s health program and government worker benefits.
That leaves $30 trillion to finance, but Senator Warren waves her wand and says the bill will really be $20.5 trillion. She makes the rest vanish by positing magical savings from things like “comprehensive payment reform.” One of her ideas is the hardy perennial known as “bundled payments,” which have failed to reduce costs as promised by Obama Care.
HEALTH CARECOMMENTARY
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was recently on comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show to discuss, among other items on his agenda, his vision for health care in America.
In one interesting statement, Sanders described the rollout of his plan: “I want to expand Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids, and eyeglasses, and then what I want to do is lower the eligibility age the first year from 65 down to 55, then to 45, then to 35, then we cover everybody.”
There is a sleight of hand here.
What Sanders seems to be describing is the gradual expansion of the existing Medicare program, which currently covers Americans 65 and over, to include everyone eventually. In reality, Sanders’ signature bill, “Medicare for All,” is anything but Medicare.
The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? Find out more now >>
Medicare comes in several forms, including Parts A and B, which pay for inpatient and outpatient visits along a fee schedule with premiums and deductibles, and Part C, also known as Medicare Advantage.
This is the system that covers 60 million Americans and enjoys high satisfaction ratings.
Medicare for All would scrap all of this.
One of the most misleading aspects of Medicare for All is that it is not Medicare at all.