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Originally Posted by dalem
I'd cut the crap out of all of them, across the board. Let the people and the states keep more money, let failing industries fail, let people pay more of their own way or rely on private industry instead of copycat government industry golems.
I'd do it in a scheduled rollback to ease the pain.
-dale
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Private industry won't step in to provide those services though. Its been seen in the past, ie. before the depression, which is what made social security necessary. Social security is an insurance program, not a tax. It would be able to fund itself if politicians hadn't treated it like an extra source of government revenue.
And interestingly, medicare and medicaid have a lower overhead cost (11%) than private insurance companies (30-35%). My source for those figures was an AMA representative that came to speak to us about their health plan (which, by the way, doesn't involve socialized medicine). Sure, you have to pay for people that don't put as much money in as they receive, like the disabled, but a private system would have the same drawbacks, in addition to having higher overhead.
I'm not totally defending business subsidies and corporate welfare. I think there is a certain good to trying to prop up a business that may have just had a bad year and has a large social good. But providing constant subsidies in the long run will distort the way the market operates.
I do disagree with the way we get taxed though. I can't figure out how it makes sense to tax companies on the money they earn, then tax citizens on the money they earn, and then tax citizens and companies on the products they buy. I would think taxing companies on the resources they use and pollution they generate makes sense, but not just a generalized tax. And for products it would seem that a value added tax would make a lot more sense. That way only the extra value that a business adds to its products is actually taxed, not every single transaction.