Thursday, September 6, 2012

Obama, Tax Populist

Won't ask middle-class taxpayers to give up their deductions to pay for another millionaires' tax cut.

"I will never turn Medicare into a voucher."

"Or turning Social Security over to Wall Street."

3 comments:

Reagan's Disciple said...

Without reform, those programs will eventually fail.

JB said...

No one denies that changes are needed in Medicare and Social Security. But the Romney/Ryan proposals are not the needed changes.

What the country needs is a genuine discussion on funding: for instance, applying FICA on income above $103,500 (or whatever the limit is, it's somewhere around there) to some higher limit, to bring more revenue into the program. Or discussion on gradual increase of the retirement age, slow enough so people can prepare for it.

For Medicare, of course we need to bring down the cost of health care as a whole, including prescription drugs, reducing the number of unnecessary tests, and, yes, talking openly to people of advanced age and/or illness about end-of-life planning, since such a large portion of the Medicare budget is spent on the last month of life. Palliative care can be so much better for families and patients than critical or emergency care as someone nears death. It's time to have an adult conversation about this without resorting to rhetoric.

Are these conversations possible in our lifetimes? If not, the ship of state will run aground.

Unknown said...

May be he populist the tax but however to run a government better these steps must be taken to see the nation go high. "Did you see Obama's DNC speech?"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgHnqcq4eS0