Poverty Paradoxes

• Poorer Americans have more children than richer Americans but when the economy is weak the birth rate falls. 
• Poorer Americans are fatter than richer Americans but when the economy is weak and people lose weight and BTW they get healthier (except the elderly who get less healthy in a recession).
• Poorer adult Americans are less likely to married than richer Americans but it is much cheaper to be married than single and the poor economy has reduced divorce.
• Poorer Americans commit more crimes than than richer Americans but when the economy is weak crime falls. Further crime does not pay. 

Some have said the diseases of poverty in the USA are diseases of wealth. 

Why Tax Consumption

Why tax consumption rather than income. 

1. We are trying to shift some consumption from the rich to the poor or from personal consumption to a public good.
2. We are not trying to shift investment or reduce investment  because we all benefit from investment.

SS and Medicare not a Quid Pro Quo

In this election season I am seeing a lot on political ads saying that this or that group payed into Social Security and/or Medicare and so they have a claim on the system, therefore the Social Security and/or Medicare system must not be changed to help with the deficit.  But the programs are not a case where people voluntarily bough a specified future benefit.  Rather people where compelled to pay and they will receive what the democratically elected officials decide the benefit should be.  The programs have been changed before and they can be changed again.  There are no Guaranteed Social Security and medicare benefits.

Here is Ross Douthat on the payroll tax.

One Doctor on the Doctor Shortage

From the comments here.

 There is a huge international pool of capable, English speaking, newly-minted foreign-trained medical school graduates every year. Many would be happy to immigrate, do their residency training and raise their families in the US. Many are leaving countries where the monies paid under US government healthcare price controls are a relative fortune. Some leave a country like Canada, because they want to escape a socialized system where private insurance is outlawed.

HHS has total federal agency discretion to control funding and expansion of physician residency training programs. They can quickly expand the nation’s physician pool.

Furthermore, the medical profession has dramatically extended the required post-graduate training years since I graduated from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1976. It unconscionably forces young women doctors to delay starting their families at child birth ages we recommend as optimal for our patients. . . or prevents these young women physicians from entering the medical field best suited to their talents because they don’t want to outsource raising their children.

As physicians, we have always known and discuss with each other that one of the primary reasons that training time was extended so dramatically was to delay young physician entry into the marketplace.

Dorothy Calabrese MD
Allergy & Immunology, San Clemente, CA

Often the blog comments are better than the post.