Congressional Budget Office warns of debt explosion – The Washington Post.
So raise taxes. Across the board. Let everyone share the pain of keeping a military deployed on multiple fronts.
These Republicans seem to forget that when a household runs into budget problems the option of increasing income is also on the table, not just reducing expenses. Sometimes you have to do both.
This looks like an interesting desktop app… If only they had it for Linux
Well, we jumped off the deep end today and dropped our landline connection. We got the Ooma Telo a few weeks ago, tried it out and thought it worked and sounded OK. Then we requested to port our current phone number to Ooma. I figure that the Ooma will pay for itself in less than a year if we dropped Qwest. Today I went out to the box on the side of the house and disconnected from the phone network. I plugged Ooma into the house wiring and now all the phones in the house are running through Ooma.
After a lifetime wired into the network, it will be interesting to see what happens. We are on a MMDS broadband wireless connection to the internet so the only physical connection to the grid is the electricity. Ooma will redirect calls to our cell phone if the network connection is down so I am expecting a some redundant connectivity. Of course, if a power loss drops our MMDS tower, it may drop the cell phone tower as well, and then where would we be? And all the electricity in the phone lines will be laughing at us.
If you don’t hear anything more from me on this then everything is going so smoothly I have forgotten all about it.
Short finance – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
I often get the feeling that Republicans are trying to short the United States. Something about their attitude that a nation is like a corporation. So it is in their interest to lower the overall value of the US so they can make a profit.
Of course, a nation is not a corporation, it does not have stock, it has people, and selling them short will quickly lower the value of the nation.
Daily Kos: Profits soar as oil companies victimized again by high gas prices.
Such a great headline.
Historical National Health Expenditure Data.
What I was actually trying to put together was a comparison of the US Health Care Costs with the payroll income. My idea is that we have $2.5T annual health care and $6.5T payroll – Health Care is 38%of payroll.
Of that $2.5T I don’t know how much is for basic health care, as opposed to advanced or elective health care. We set up a Medicare or National Health Service that covers all Americans with basic health care. Put in a payroll tax of 20% that covers Health Care and SSA. With employers matching the payroll tax, and the taxes being dedicated to health and SSA and off the federal books, we should be able to manage the costs without involving the federal budget. The States get out of the Medicaid business and folks can move from state to state without worrying about their coverage.
Of course the big problem is to determine what is ‘basic’ health care. Are heart transplants basic or advanced? Let a panel of medical professionals and former health insurance executives determine what we will cover with our system and go from there. The insurance companies can stay around to cover the advanced and elective medical needs.
PS – Since a 20% payroll tax will put a big drag on a lot of take-home pay packets, I would suggest that personal income taxes only be applied on income above the median household income, ~$50K . And then only gradually progressive.
Wage and salary disbursements A576RC1 – FRED – St. Louis Fed.
Took me a while to find this. I was trying to find the total annual US payroll. I found it rather quickly a few years ago but now the payroll services are obfuscating the search engines. Plus it appears that I was looking for payroll and should have been looking for disbursements.
But there it is, $6.54T a year.
In the course of my googlings I came across the Personal consumption expenditures for the US and they run $10.37T. Interesting discrepancy between wages and salary and spending.