I don’t like income taxes or estate taxes as currently conceived by federal congress critters and I really don’t like the rediculous deficits that are being run up by the branch of the mob currently operating in DC and I’m really irked that it appears they may be raising taxes on the rest of us again.
isemmelweis finds the health care industry to be the lone victem of special interest corporate-government collusion:
In all other economic sectors free people drive production, and good things happen quickly. In response to the Atkins craze, sodas and even beer cut out the carbs to meet the wants of a fit society. But in healthcare, rather than serve ordinary citizens, producers court the people in power: big insurers, government officials, and academics.Yes, it should be much better but isemmelweis is mistaken to think that this problem is restricted to health care, e.g., consider communications and the FCC, agriculture, and education to name just a few areas. We would live in a much healthier world, physically and economically, if this phenomenon did not permeate both the American and the world economy.
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So who�s navigating this ship? While it may be enormous fun for managers, officials, and scholars to control how sick people get medicine, it would be much better if free people chose for themselves.
When w says:
In a new term, I will lead aHe apparently means to make room for more special interest loopholes:
bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the federal tax code.
…we’ll provide tax relief and other incentives to attract new business, and improve housing and job training to bring hope and work throughout all of America.Seems like more of the same old, same old to me.
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We will offer a tax credit to encourage small businesses and their employees to set up health savings accounts, and provide direct help for low-income Americans to purchase them.
The current edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Poliblog.
Browse through the links which include the practical, the radical and a throwaway or two. You decide which is which.
I’m not a big fan of the WTO. Amongst other issues I have the WTO seems to operate behind a mask of secrecy that might even make the bush administration blush. However, there may be some positives:
When the US government gives away some $4 billion to American cotton farmers in return for a crop that’s valued at only $3 billion, something’s amiss.
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And cotton subsidies are just a portion of the $19 billion that the federal government pays to boost US agriculture and its exports each year.
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This week, the Geneva-based World Trade Organization made a preliminary ruling that the United States must end cotton subsidies because they distort global trade.
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The WTO, which the US helped create as a way for consumers to benefit from open markets, has dealt a blow to the biggest stumbling block to expanded trade. Governments in rich nations need to use this ruling to persuade domestic farm lobbies that they can no longer delay the inevitable: no subsidies, only free competition.
It should not need WTO rulings to help persuade farm lobbies that the time for subsidies have ended. The people funding the subsidies should just say no!
Yep, that’s you and me paying these subsidies via taxes.
Update (4/29): Jane Galt has some good words about this ruling.