3 months since the last one? I guess the fact that the S&P didn't rally to all time highs has them spooked.
I thought you would never ask! There are both jobs we need to create and jobs we need to eliminate. We spend 2.8 Trillion per year on Health care. The next closest nation spends about half, or about 1.4 Trillion, with a better outcome. All the other nations we compete with have either single payer or a highly regulated medical insurance industry (Germany). If we went to single payer we would eliminate jobs in the medical insurance business-- 1.4 million workers. About half of these workers, 700,000, would be absorbed by medicare administration, and 700,000 jobs for the remainder would have to be created.. We would save about 1.4 Trillion per year, most of that due to greatly decreased paper work associated with medical billing. Why will this work? Because for profit insurance companies skim off the cream by insuring the young and healthy and then saddle the public with providing care for the old, sick, and infirm. Going to single payer stops this abuse and provides a 1.4 trillion savings to the public. By going back to State run prisons, decriminalizing drug use, and doing away with mandatory sentencing, we cut prison population by 2/3 and cut the number of prison and criminal justice employees accordingly. There will be huge reductions in the criminal justice system backlog. We have 2,300,000 inmates. That number will drop to 750,000. Of the 500,000 jobs in "corrections" about half to two-thirds would be lost. That's no more than 250,000 jobs that would need to be created. The amount saved would be 100 billion a year. There are 1.5 million active duty persons in the military and another 3 million in the defense industry. Cutting the defense budget in half, leaving the U.S. with ten times the military expenditure of other industrialized nations, should eliminate about another 1.5-2 million jobs that would need to be created in other areas and save roughly 325 billion per year. We then would have approximately 425 billion dollars to spend creating 700,000+250,000+1,750,000 = 2,700,000 jobs @ $157,000 per/job. At an average salary plus benefits of $90,000/year there would be about 180 billion per year excess savings that could be used in job retraining and to support job creation in public works and infrastructure. You may wonder why elimination of only 2.7 million jobs releases 425 billion, or such a large amount per job. It is because in defense there is 750 billion spent creating only 4.5 million jobs or $166,000/job. However 1.5 million of these jobs are relatively low paying, while 3,000,000 million of these jobs are relatively high paying. It is elimination of these high paying jobs that return relatively little of lasting value that results in a large savings to the public. Most of what is produced in this industry are wasting assets. The defense industry is as wasteful and as inefficient as the medical industry! Here are a few areas where useful jobs can be created to absorb 2,700,000 workers: 1) School construction and renovation, 1 million workers. 2) Enough foreign language, music, art, P.Ed., and classroom teachers added to all public grade schools to provide class sizes of no greater than 15 students, and 6 years of foreign language, music, art and P.Ed. education for all students. These are the areas where cutbacks have occurred in recent decades, and of course foreign language belongs in grade schools but has never been there because of a lack of funding. These simple measures alone will create at least 2 million new jobs in education. 3) Infra-structure repair and building of a national high speed passenger rail system provides 700,000 jobs. The scaled down defense industry would be a beneficiary of this initiative. Obviously, by revamping our national priorities there is plenty of money and and plenty of jobs, and we won't need to touch Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. I did not mention the savings and jobs lost by elimination, or nearly so, of the DEA, but the saving there must be used for drug rehab. Obviously there are going to be more than enough jobs to absorb the DEA workers laid off. All that's required to accomplish all of this is for the fruitcake wing of the Republican party to disappear. Only about a third of them are completely bonkers. The remainder are welcome to stay and help out. The best days for the U.S. are ahead of us!
Piezoe, I'm just curious about what age you are? 40's, 50's, etc... You're obviously intelligent enough to form serious opinions, but I just can't help overlook some of the naivete when you write the above post about how to enact cost savings.
they should have just said,"If we can't come to an agreement by Dec31, then pot will be legalized and we will raise taxes on it."
71 naive years old. I believe in what Soros, another old guy, said:" If you believe government is bad, you will create bad government." (I'm probably paraphrasing, but you get the idea.) The numbers I quoted come from BLS statistics. The details are not so important, and I think you meant " not overlook". The point I would like you to take away is this: There is enough money, but how you use it is what's important. What I wrote is not so much about cost savings as it is about moving in the right direction.
I noticed that I ignored the fact that while the U.S. spends 2.8 trillion, you can't just slice that number in half to get to what other nations spend because health costs have to be compared on a per capita basis. Here is the data for those interested: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown...how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html Bringing our costs in line with the per capita average of other nations would indeed save the U.S. about 1.4 Trillion per year as I have noted. That part is correct.
LOL! Yes, thanks for correcting me. Illinois just needs to legalize pot for a few years, tax the hell out of it and pay down the debt. No debt left? Repeal if needed.
no kidding, they are over commited in corn. I spent quite a bit of time down south and got addicted to grits. Then I had to do some business in Illinois. There all around me was corn, corn, corn and nothing but corn, but no grits in the restaurant. They are really messed up. Most of that acreage could grow some decent pot. The farmers need it and the people want it. Problem is, in Chicago (or Springfield) nothing happens until all the palms are greased. It's been that way since the days of Al Capone. When somebody figures out how a politician can make more money on legal pot than they are now making on illegal pot, the damn will break. And that will be good for farmers. And what's good for farmers is good for America.