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0 pointsrayiner6y ago0 comments

Jimmy Carter told people the truth. (And he got promptly voted out, and so subsequent politicians have hidden the ball with the truth.) With respect to the environment, for example, he told people to put on a sweater. Because the truth is that almost all GHGs result from consumer-facing industries where consumers are the primary beneficiaries of pollution being artificially cheap.

Concrete example, since you mention the oil industry: Exxon makes about 22.5 cents when you buy a gallon of gas at $3.00. Meanwhile, an analysis has found that gas should be taxed an extra $4.36-7.62 per gallon to fully reflect the environmental and other harms of driving: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/01/the-real-reas.... So when the government doesn't impose that tax, who benefits? Exxon benefits a little because it sells more gas and collects the $0.22 of profit on each gallon. But the consumer saves $4.36-7.62 by avoiding those taxes. Exxon's profits, about $20 billion last year, are a rounding error compared to the trillion+ dollars that consumers would pay in extra taxes to address the negative externalities of driving.

Transportation, heating, agriculture, consumer products--these are the industries responsible for the fast majority of GHGs. And these are also highly competitive, commoditized industries where most cost savings get passed onto consumers. (Facebook makes more profit than Exxon, even though Exxon's revenues are more than five times as much.) That means the savings of making pollution cheap also accrues mostly to consumers. The industries where lack of competition allows corporations to command huge margins--banking, tech, advertising, etc.--are not the ones that are primarily responsible for GHGs.

"Access to healthcare" is similar. Why do people in Sweden have universal healthcare while people in America do not? Is it corporations? No, Sweden's corporate tax rate is quite a bit lower than ours. (It's similar to the current federal rate, but in the U.S. most corporations also pay a state rate. In Delaware, for example, it's an additional 8.7%.) So who benefits by Americans not having universal healthcare? It's middle-class Americans who don't pay the high middle-class taxes that middle-class Europeans pay.

Warren's focus on corporations is a total red herring, intended to make people falsely believe that you can have universal healthcare and a cleaner planet without decreasing your material quality of life. As Jimmy Carter told us, that's not in the cards. How do we know that? Because we can look at other countries who do better on these measures, and see what they do! France has much lower GHG emissions than the U.S. and universal healthcare. How do they do it? They live in houses that are half the size; they drive tiny fuel efficient cars, and have fewer of them per household; they deal with the challenges of nuclear power; their payroll taxes on the middle class are double ours; they take public transmit more often and therefore have significantly longer commutes. But their corporate taxes are even lower than ours!

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metamet6y ago· 1 in thread

> "Access to healthcare" is similar. Why do people in Sweden have universal healthcare while people in America do not? Is it corporations? No, Sweden's corporate tax rate is quite a bit lower than ours. (It's similar to the current federal rate, but in the U.S. most corporations also pay a state rate. In Delaware, for example, it's an additional 8.7%.) So who benefits by Americans not having universal healthcare? It's middle-class Americans who don't pay the high middle-class taxes that middle-class Europeans pay.

I believe that the argument here is that insurance companies are the unnecessary middleman gumming up American healthcare. Making $21b in 2018, insurance companies exist to make as much money as possible--by denying coverage when they can and paying out as little as possible. They complicate the process by requiring both the providers and consumers to get tangled up in paperwork, also slowing the process (and quality) down. Her argument there is that we could provide a better experience for all and invest that $21b of profit being leeched out back into actual coverage by going to Medicare for All.

> intended to make people falsely believe that you can have universal healthcare and a cleaner planet without decreasing your material quality of life

I don't think that's what she's intending. Her plan for cleaning up the planet involves scientific investment in clean/green industries and becoming a leader in providing those services commercially throughout the world. The US is only 20% of the problem, which is why we need an industry to really push this throughout the rest of the world--something that other countries are currently leading in.

In case your curious about Warren's approach here: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/my-green-manufacturing-plan-f...

tptacek6y ago

People are fond of blaming health insurance companies for our (demonstrable) health economics woes, but the evidence suggests that they --- in fact, the payer and benefits management side of the equation in general! --- aren't nearly as big a contributor to costs as the provider side. We pay more than Europeans do for health care administration, but we get walloped on costs for outpatient and hospital procedures.

It doesn't help that there are lots of circulating analyses about insurers and management overhead that are probably just false; for instance, a popular chart depicting a 4x increase in admin costs starting in the 1990s was debunked by Kevin Drum and others, who observed that it was probably accounting for people like MRI operators on the payer rather than the provider side.

Two things pundits say that are red flags for me that they haven't really studied health economics:

1. Blaming pharmaceutical companies and prescription drug costs, which are one of the smaller overall drivers of health care expenses in the US.

2. Blaming health insurance companies for taking an outsized and material chunk of health spending.

You could $0 out pharma and insurance companies, indenturing everyone who worked for them, and we might not be meaningfully better off. We'd be paying less, but not, like, a huge amount less; people who can't afford silver-class health insurance for a family of four today still couldn't afford it in that alternate reality.

vinay4276y ago

I really like this and agree with virtually all of it. To add, however, there's no absolute need to raise taxes or expenses depending on what Americans feel they prioritize. Countries can also have lower personal income taxes in addition to corporate taxes by reducing other expenses, for example by choosing a partially privatized universal health insurance system instead of single-payer health insurance, or a smaller military that might be slightly less up-to-date.

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