Chris Pope
@CPopeHC
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Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute. Opinions my own.
Joined July 2017
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#السعوديه_البحرين
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England
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Bloomberg
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سالم
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Tuchel
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Ronaldo
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Fields
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مانشيني
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Jimmy Carter
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Portugal
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Browns
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Amari Cooper
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Krypto
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Córdoba
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كاس العالم
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المنتخب السعودي
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James Rodríguez
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علي المنتخب
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#GHLímite6
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Tapia
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#TemptationIsland
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#فزعه_الشعب_السعودي
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LISA VSFS PERFORMER
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Russ
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Elsa
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EU TE TRATO MAL
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Durán
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Dávila
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Lucho
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The United States is one of the few developed countries where the rich pay a higher share of their income in taxes than the poor:
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In France, retirees now have higher incomes on average than working adults:
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These numbers are surely less shocking to people who follow criminal justice issues closely, but wow.
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Food as a share of household spending:
1800: 75%
1900: 39%
2020: 9%
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The welfare state mostly redistributes from young to old, rather than from rich to poor.
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The average disposable income in most European countries would be considered poor in the United States:
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The poorest fifth of American working age households are better off than those in Canada, Denmark, Britain, and Germany because their market income is higher and their taxes are lower, after accounting for all monetary benefits:
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The House Ways and Means committee claimed Medicare would cost $1.3bn in its first full year. It actually cost $4.4bn.
W&M predicted Medicaid would cost $0.15bn; it actually cost $1.8bn.
This is precisely *why* we created CBO.
Fun fact: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security didn't have a CBO score when they were first signed into law.
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The United States in 2019 had the highest levels of disposable income of G7 countries for 9 out of 10 income deciles.
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The recent OECD report finding that several other developed countries have higher healthcare prices than USA has attracted surprisingly little attention:
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There's been a lot of negativity about this country's performance over the past year, but history will mostly remember that the virus began in China and American capitalism ended it.
Pfizer and Moderna expect to have a combined 70 million doses of vaccine by the end of next month, enough to inoculate 35 million people.
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People assume that healthcare accounts for the difference in the cost of government in Europe from USA. They're wrong. It's pensions:
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An astonishing amount of Social Security's popularity is due to voters misunderstanding how the program works.
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Payroll taxes to finance pensions mean the poor in France really do pay more of their income in tax than the rich. A huge difference with USA, where taxes are highly progressive.
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In 2021, the 17% of Americans aged 65 and older held 35% of the nation’s assets, received 66% of its entitlement spending, but contributed only 11% of its tax revenue.
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The 20th Century expansion of government was largely because WW2 excused a gigantic tax hike. Beyond that, it's barely grown.
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Anti-car public policy means Europeans spend longer commuting every day than Americans:
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10-year aggregate figures in trillions mean nothing to people, but this is $46,000 per household per year in new spending and $23,000 per household per year in new taxes.
Sanders: “I can’t rattle off every nickel and every dime” ... regarding his $60 trillion ish spending agenda and $30 trillion ish revenue agenda.
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The nationwide number of recorded new cases per day is significantly declining for the first time ever:
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@asymmetricinfo
Getting mad at the Queen seems a bit like concentrating your outrage on the fife and drum corps.
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The way everyone is finding creative ways to make the vaccine rationing rules work for them is making me realize how communism survived for 70 years.
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I spent 2021 being surprised that we polarized over vaccines, and 2022 surprised that we *didn't* polarize over Ukraine.
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America's welfare state is relatively small, but does more to help the poor:
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The fertility rate is largely unchanged over the past 50 years, given marriage rates. Any policy which doesn't alter the career/educational/lifestyle reasons causing people to marry later, is unlikely to change the birth rate much.
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The richest seniors benefit more from redistribution than the poorest young Americans.
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It shows the proportion of people in UK/USA/Ger/Ita with each level of disposable income. USA doesn't have more very poor people, but the non-poor people here earn a lot more.
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Sci-fi always portrays the future as looking radically different to the past, but a striking feature of technological progress is that people often want to use it to live in simpler older ways.
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Private insurance accounted for only 34% of $3.5trn U.S. healthcare spending in 2019.
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The value of neoliberalism is hard to appreciate from US history, where policy changed little in the grand scheme of things. But the difference in UK economic performance of 1946-79 and following Thatcher's radical reforms is hard to deny.
My review of George Orwell's essay, "The Lion and the Unicorn" -- an essay with deep and important lessons for modern times.
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Private healthcare consumption has risen as a share of GDP, but it's public spending on healthcare that's really soared:
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The projected increase of Medicare spending accounts for 3/4 of the increase in the primary deficit over the next 30 years. Merely slowing the growth of Medicare fixes most of the problem.
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There's something deeply toxic in the assumption that if people are working in the private sector they're not part of a community.
Something I truly believe after seeing it in action around the world. A lot of 🇺🇸 problems would get better with compulsory national service. At 18 you’re required to give 2 years to military, Peace Corps, Americorps, JobCorps etc. It’d be an equalizer, give people purpose & help
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US out-of-pocket healthcare costs aren't out of line with most other countries. Insurance in USA is very comprehensive, even with substantial cost-sharing. In other nations, many services need to be bought fully out-of-pocket:
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In 2017, only 39% of Americans lived in households with disposable incomes under $30,000, compared with 48% in Germany, 56% in the UK, and 65% in Italy.
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Promoting an idea that you know to be bad in order to make more moderate versions seem more palatable -- a bad idea in substance, and a political gift to fear-mongering opponents.
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The person in the article is a single parent of two with an income of $54,000. In all countries such a person would be a net taxpayer, but in US her net taxes are significantly lower.
One of the more ‘exceptional’ things about the US (among the many amazing things) is how hard and merciless life is for the American working class. In no country of comparable wealth are the working poor treated so badly and harshly.
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@AlecStapp
Major drug makers didn’t want the political optics of Tuskegee-style experimenting on the third world
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@Noahpinion
The FT's data also seems to have been assembled from a variety of different sources with inconsistent definitions. With consistent data, it's a different picture:
The United States in 2019 had the highest levels of disposable income of G7 countries for 9 out of 10 income deciles.
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The main objective of union power is to raise compensation in an industry by colluding to restrict its output below the competitive level. That may benefit those in the particular sector, but if done across all industries clearly leaves everyone worse off.
@karlbykarlsmith
@ModeledBehavior
@paulgp
I don't think anyone, including you, really believes the working class is better off in a world without unions than in a world with unions.
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The claim that Democrats are rigging elections is not going to be particularly convincing if Rs spend the next few years winning in all kinds of places.
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The variation in federal TANF grants by state per child in poverty ($3,876 to DC; $276 to MS) is so enormous, it barely makes sense to talk about it as a single program.
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It's surprising how many liberals have completely reinvented the 1980 election in their own minds.
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I think this might be when people finally go back to referring to the year as a two digit number. “Twenty twenty two” is a mouthful.
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Anglophone countries have done a pretty good job keeping state pensions from eating up their economies over the past 40 years. Mediterranean countries haven't.
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They find that high U.S. healthcare spending is mostly the result of the fact that it consumes more than double the volume of medical care than the OECD average.
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@benjaminhaddad
Politics is necessarily a big part of life for many in DC. This is living with, not just meeting. Doesn't seem crazy to want to avoid a roommate situation which would involve friction on a daily basis.
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Americans prefer to reduce the deficit by cutting spending (47%) than by raising taxes (8%), if forced to choose.
Even true of most Democrats (25% v 14%).
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Medicare is planning to establish bonus payments for physicians who "create and implement an anti-racism plan"
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The evidence suggests working class voters across races are going R because they liked the Trump economy and dislike the Biden one; not due to cultural issues.
@jbpoersch
@simon_bazelon
@davidshor
@mattyglesias
The debate over how Dems can/should improve their appeal to working class voters is a complete mess.
The "Dems must run from wokeness" argument is weak and undertheorized. And the working class isn't monolithic.
I talked to
@gabrielwinant
about this:
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People think of the 19th century as a time of state power, but states lacked resources and local government was far more prominent.
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The limited number of GOP pickups in the House is partly explained by Rs starting from a relatively high base.
Midterm election pickups where opposition party started off with >210 House seats:
2022: +8(?)
2014: +13
1998: -4
1990: +7
1986: +5
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The difference in Social Security benefit generosity between countries achieves little other than crowding out private provision for retirement:
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The “American health care system” is not one thing. Rather, it is five very different things. And these five health-care systems each have more in common with health-care systems in other countries than they do with one another.
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Congress should let licensed physicians practice across state lines.
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A curious feature of American politics is that while Republicans often talk about cutting Medicare, only Ds have unilaterally done so (in 2010 and 2022), while unilateral GOP legislation has only ever expanded the program (2003).
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Impressed by the effort everyone is making to fit the GameStop short squeeze into their culture war ideologies. It was a tough challenge, but you gave it a great shot!
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If you compare just cash benefits and direct taxes, the US welfare state does about the same net redistribution to the poor as Germany or Denmark.
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Danes from every income level paid more in taxes than Americans -- *except* for the richest decile.
#LafferCurve
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You'd never guess this from the debate we're having on prescription drug costs:
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European welfare states that provide the most generous public pensions to affluent retirees provide the smallest net benefits to the working age poor.
Hohe
#Sozialausgaben
sind verbunden mit starker Umverteilung zu reichen Pensionisten, nicht mir besserer Unterstützung der einkommensschwachen Bevölkerung.
Genau das zeigen wir auch in diesem (Working-) Paper:
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It says a lot about the political power of labor-intensive sectors of healthcare that *drug* prices are being singled out as a problem:
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@RocCityBuilt
@RussoEcon
Subsequent generation of workers.
If there's enough of them producing enough, the program has enough money to pay benefits promised. If it doesn't, then it will fall short.
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What’s justifies the administrative hassle of restricting it to 75%, rather than just make it available to everyone?
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Whatever its faults, U.S. healthcare payment is structured very progressively. Expenditure varies little by income quintile; but the rich bear more of the cost out-of-pocket and through insurance.
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No federal law stops states from unilaterally fixing hospital rates and establishing a public option or single-payer plan—but not even the bluest of blue states have done so.
You can still want to abolish private insurance to get rid of administrative costs, etc. But the biggest savings in single payer come from setting prices, and it's providers who are going to be the main opposition.
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Rereading Irving Kristol, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that if he were alive today he might be politically aligned with Donald Trump rather than with his own son.
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Trump approval rating is now pretty similar to Obama at this point of his presidency:
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Approval of Obamacare (whatever that means to voters) is back down again now that Trump is out of office:
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There’s little evidence of any realignment on economics in the recent
@ManhattanInst
poll on the upcoming presidential election:
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Government bloat was mostly state/local from 1952 to 2019.
Direct federal spending fell from 18.5% to 18.2% of GDP.
State+local spending rose from 7.1% to 14.1% of GDP.
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Second wave in Israel but not in Europe seems to confirm that combination of indoor gathering and air conditioning is a problem:
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Single-payer waiting lists meant 250,000 Brits paid for major procedures entirely out of pocket in 2021:
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Pre-1990, US healthcare relied disproportionately on out-of-pocket payment. That's no longer the case.
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Why does the United States spend so much on healthcare?
1. It uses more high-end technology and specialists
2. There is less rationing of costly procedures
3. Equipment is used more wastefully
4. Americans are more obese and have more chronic conditions
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How generous is Medicare?
Seniors contribute less to paying for healthcare than people in their 30s.
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Social conservatives thinking their agenda would make more progress if bureaucrats and regulators gained power at the expense of private consumers and market mechanisms, is one of the more puzzling aspects of today's politics.
This isn't an old brand of conservatism, it's new kind of leftism.
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Maintaining existing Medicare benefits is not a problem. The retirement of boomers and aging of retirees isn't a problem. To restrain Medicare cost, you only need to slow the *addition* of new services and volumes (esp Part B):
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I never feel more like a millennial than in failing to completely understand how Ds in 1988 won an 85-seat House majority downballot from HW Bush's 40-state landslide.
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Keynes was clearly wrong, and contributed to the German sense of righteous indignation at the Versailles Treaty and encouraged Britain to be soft on Germany into 1930s.
WW1 reparations were based on the amount Germany imposed on France in 1871, which it quickly paid off.
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High taxes are the product of war to such an extent that every other factor pales into insignificance:
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Outside rising interest payments, three-quarters of CBO’s projected deficit increase is due to Medicare alone. The program’s projected growth as a share of GDP is driven entirely by the addition of new procedures and services to the program.
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Medicare For All advocates imagine they're advancing egalitarianism, but in practice they likely would be establishing a two-tier system where the rich get good care and the middle class miss out.
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"Why doesn't America have a European-style welfare state?"
Government spending per capita (2017):
France $20,960
Germany $19,550
Spain $10,865
UK $17,202
USA $20,674
It isn't lack of spending.
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Why it's important for liberals to be tough on crime and for conservatives to prioritize fixing healthcare.
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People made a lot of fuss about the FDA being a week behind the UK on the Pfizer vaccine, but the delay until April on AstraZeneca approval (USA has ordered 300m doses) matters much more:
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Accidentally pasted the source links wrong. They should be:
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American exceptionalism is in many ways overrated, but the implications of the fact that US politics was not transformed by having 2 world wars on its soil (as almost all European countries did) is likely underrated. So much of the “European social model” is a legacy of war.
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