Where Have You Gone, Dave Barry, and Why?

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

25 October 19

miss the old days when newspapers used to publish humor columns, like Dave Barry’s — why did he go away? In Dave’s column, you learned things the New York Times didn’t print, stuff about exploding badgers or a man with a blade of grass growing out of his ear, or a story about the amount of methane created annually by dairy cows.

Dave pointed out the fact that men will never ask for directions and that this is a biological fact, which is why it takes several million sperm to find one female egg even though, compared to them, it is the size of Wisconsin. I laughed so hard at that, I almost coughed up a hairball.

Dave Barry once made fun of Grand Forks, North Dakota, for its tourism campaign, whereupon the city fathers invited Dave to Grand Forks, and Dave — this shows you what a classy guy he is — Dave flew to Grand Forks where he was feted and dined and taken to the dedication of a municipal sewage pump station named after him. The plaque reads “Dave Barry Lift Station No. 16.” Talk about a tourist attraction. (Who knew a small city needed so many lift stations?) You could go visit it if you were in Grand Forks.

Dave gave up writing a weekly column in 2005, and in 2019 we need him more than ever. Back in the day, humor was a relief from the serious, but now with our first preteen president, comedy has become the news itself. When the man twittered, “If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!),” this was taken up by somber opinionators though it was pure methane. The fact that a man is the Leader of the Free World is no guarantee against his making skid marks in his shorts. A serious journalist is unable to point this out.

Likewise, the acting chief of staff standing behind a lectern and telling the press that, of course, politics was a consideration in withholding aid from Ukraine, and it happens all the time, and it’s appropriate, and then two days later, saying he had said no such thing. Lying into a microphone under bright light is an exploding badger, if there ever was one.

The Times is a great newspaper that gives you a daily crossword, reviews tons of books, offers expert advice on child-rearing, covers Congress, but it absolutely refuses to tolerate humor in its august pages. And so it reacts to White House whoopee cushions and exploding cigars with disapproval, dismay, disappointment, dread, which is exactly the reaction every preteen who pretends to york up his broccoli is hoping to get.

I was taken with the recent headline in the Washington Post, “Excessive brain activity linked to a shorter life,” reporting a finding by Harvard neuroscientists that diminished brain activity can be a good thing in regard to longevity.

Of course, it was much more complicated than that, as anything from Harvard would need to be, acres of footnotes and tossing in words like “aberrant” and “deleterious” and “prefrontal cortex,” and what the left-wing hippie socialist Post chose to take from the study is the idea that Meditation Is Good and we should all kneel with our foreheads to our ankles and murmur mantras mindfully, but what I take from the story is that the thousands of folks in the red caps who pack the arenas to shout their approval of every belch, every barf, every Bronx cheer are going to outlive us all. Their brain activity is only slightly higher than that of REM-level sleep. They love him, the withdrawal from the Syrian border, Judge Kavanaugh, the G-7 conference at the Trump resort (what’s the problem?), the quid pro quo, the whole kit and caboodle.

Our country is now in the hands of a man who takes care, several times a day, to comb those little skid-marks into the hair behind his ears. He lives on the Internet, which, as Dave once said, is the greatest advance in human communication since call waiting. He grew up in a real-estate family in Queens and learned that you can charge top dollar for tiny apartments made out of plywood if you put big chandeliers in the lobby and metallic wallpaper that is painted to look like gold. Good luck, everybody. Sleep well.

Make No Mistake: Medicare for All Would Cut Taxes for Most Americans

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, Guardian UK

25 October 19

Not only would universal healthcare reduce taxes for most people, it would also lead to the biggest take-home pay raise in a generation for most workers

he debate about healthcare has been at the center of the Democratic primaries, yet it is hard to make sense of the conversation. For some, public universal health insurance – such as Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill – would involve massive tax increases for the middle class. For others, it’s the opposite: Medicare for All would cut costs for most Americans. Who is right?

The starting point of any intelligent conversation about health in America must be that it’s a cost for all of us – and a massive one. The United States spends close to 20% of its national income on health. Elderly Americans and low-income families are covered by public insurance programs (Medicare and Medicaid, respectively), funded by tax dollars (payroll taxes and general government revenue). The rest of the population must obtain coverage by a private company, which they typically get via their employers. Insurance, in that case, is funded by non-tax payments: health insurance premiums.

Although they are not officially called taxes, insurance premiums paid by employers are just like taxes – but taxes paid to private insurers instead of paid to the government. Like payroll taxes, they reduce your wage. Like taxes, they are mandatory, or quasi-mandatory. Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, it has become compulsory to be insured, and employers with more than 50 full-time workers are required to enroll their workers in a health insurance plan.

A frequent objection to calling health insurance premiums a tax is that people have some choice. Can’t the poor, the argument goes, enroll in cheap health plans? If you start calling health insurance premiums a tax, then shouldn’t we also call spending on food and clothes a tax?

This argument, however, is wrong, because cheap healthcare does not exist. There are cheap meals, there are cheap clothes, but there is no cheap way to treat your heart attack, to cure your cancer, or to give birth. Cheap health insurance means no healthcare when you need it. All wealthy nations, even those that try hard to control costs, spend 10% of their national income on health – the equivalent of $7,500 a year per adult in the United States. The view that healthcare services are like haircuts or restaurant meals – services for which there is a product tailored to any budget – is a myth. Healthcare is like education: everybody needs it, regardless of their budget, but it’s expensive. That’s why all advanced economies, except the United States, fund it through taxation.

The main difference between the insurance premiums currently paid by American workers and the taxes paid by workers in other countries is that taxes are based on ability to pay. The income tax has a rate that rises with income. Payroll taxes are proportional to income, at least up to a limit. Insurance premiums, by contrast, are not based on ability to pay. They are a fixed amount per covered worker and only depend on age and the number of family members covered. Insurance premiums are the most regressive possible type of tax: a poll tax. The secretary pays the same amount as the executive.

Many people believe that the United States has a progressive tax system: you pay more, as a fraction of your income, as you earn more. In fact, if you allocate the total official tax take of the United States across the population, the US tax system looks like a giant flat tax that becomes regressive at the very top. And if you add mandatory private health insurance premiums to the official tax take, the US tax system turns out to be highly regressive. Once private health insurance is factored in, the average tax rate rises from a bit less than 30% at the bottom of the income distribution to reach close to 40% for the middle class, before collapsing to 23% for billionaires.

The health insurance poll tax hammers the working class and the middle class. At the bottom of the distribution, it’s not as onerous as sales and payroll taxes. But that’s because many low-income Americans rely on a family member to cover them, enroll into Medicaid, or go uninsured. For the middle-class, the burden is enormous. Take a secretary earning $50,000 a year, who has employer-sponsored health insurance at a total cost of $15,000. In reality her labor compensation is $65,000 (that’s what her employer pays in exchange of her work), but the secretary only gets $50,000. The executive earning $1,000,000 also pays the same $15,000 for his healthcare. This is a terrible funding mechanism.

Funding healthcare via insurance premiums would be acceptable if this private poll tax was small. When the system of private health insurance developed initially, the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance was moderate, the equivalent of 0.5% of national income in the 1950s. Today, however, it is huge: 6% of national income, almost as much as payroll Social Security taxes. The Affordable Care Act increased the pool of Americans eligible for Medicaid and subsidized the purchase of private insurance for low-income people not covered by their employer. But it provided no relief for workers who fund their healthcare through a huge and growing poll tax.

This situation is not sustainable. Most countries have understood this a long time ago. Health and retirement benefits started, like in the United States, as negotiated arrangements between employees (represented by their unions) and employers. But the task of funding health and retirement was then gradually entrusted to the government. Private premiums morphed into regular taxes, based on ability to pay. In the United States, this transformation has not happened yet for healthcare – leading to the crises we are in now.

This is the context needed to understand the current debate at the heart of the presidential elections. Proposals such as Medicare for All would replace the current privatized poll tax by taxes based on ability to pay. Some believe that it would result in a big tax increase for America’s middle class. But the data show that it would, in fact, lead to large income gains for the vast majority of workers.

Take again the case of a secretary earning $50,000 in wage and currently contributing $15,000 through her employer to an insurance company. With universal health insurance, her wage would rise to $65,000 – her full labor compensation. With an income tax of 6% – which, if applied to a base large enough, would be enough to fund universal health insurance – she would have to pay about $4,000 more in tax. But the net gain would be enormous: $11,000. Instead of taking home $50,000, the secretary would take home $61,000.

On TaxJusticeNow.org, any interested reader can simulate the effect of replacing private health insurance premiums by taxes – progressive income taxes, wealth taxes, consumption taxes, or broad taxes on consumption or all of national income. This simulator that we developed is open-source, user-friendly, and based on a systematic exploitation of all available statistics about who earns what and pays what in taxes and health insurance in America.

As one illustration, it’s possible to see how the tax plans of the leading Democratic primary candidates would affect tax rates for each group of the population. For instance, Bernie Sanders’s tax proposals would be enough to replace all existing private insurance premiums, while leaving 2.6% of national income to cover the uninsured and spend on other programs. Under such a plan, the 9 bottom deciles of the income distribution would gain income on average, as would the bottom of the top 10%. With smart new taxes—such as broad income taxes exempting low wages and retirees—it is possible to make the vast majority of the population win from a transition to universal health insurance.

Supporters of Medicare for All are right. Funding universal health insurance through taxes would lead to a large tax cut for the vast majority of workers. It would abolish the huge poll tax they currently shoulder, and the data show that for most workers, it would lead to the biggest take-home pay raise in a generation.