February 2, 2018

Three ways to make things better

Robert Reich

1. Lift the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax. Currently, top earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $120,000 of their yearly income. So the rich end up, in effect,  paying a lower Social Security tax rate than everyone else. Lifting the ceiling on what wealthy Americans contribute would help pay for the Baby Boomers retirements and leave Social Security in good shape for Millennials.

2. Allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower prescription drug prices. As the nation’s largest insurer, Medicare has tremendous bargaining power. Why should Americans pay far more for drugs than people in any other country?

3. Finally, reduce overall health costs and create a stronger workforce by making Medicare available to all. There’s no excuse for the richest nation in the world to have 28 million Americans still uninsured.

2 comments:

Greg Gerritt said...

yup

Anonymous said...

Reich, being an economist, has no answer to the question, how do you get that to happen? Such dreams do not come true in the absence of basic democratic institutions such as the freedom from political bribery. Since our system has been redesigned by the Supreme Court with bribery as its essential feature there is exactly zero chance of Reich's wishes coming true without radical restoration of constitutional protections, particularly the first amendment protection of speech as speech, but that money is not speech. The US is not even a little bit a democracy, although the blueprint is there for people who care to reinstitute democracy as Reich and Sanders used to talk about. Citizens United is no longer viewed as the first order of business, the Court is no longer viewed as the oligarchy, and both parties would apologize for FDR's attacks on the court in 1937 that gave us a brief era of democracy until Buckley v. Valeo shut it down.