Dean Baker reminds us, once again, that installing a Medicare-for-All health insurance system is not going to break anyone's bank. In fact, upon hearing that corporations pay about $2,700 per citizen for private health insurance in America, that employer-side payroll tax looks even smaller (and, ah, those co-pays that have been coming out of your check might even stop coming out of your check). The main problem, of course, is that "we pay twice as much for everything," but with Medicare negotiating on everyone's behalf, we could bring a lot of those prices down. Better that than throwing up your hands or intoning the words "free markets" ad nauseam.
Aw, poor wittle Howard Schultz doesn't wike being called a "billionaire." I call you what you want to be called when you're part of a historically oppressed group, but no reasonable person would find billionaires "oppressed." And, seriously, "people of means"? Clearly I need to amend what I said the other day about Mr. Schultz maybe stealing more votes from Republicans than Democrats in a Presidential race -- I mean, sure, the super-rich might prefer Mr. Schultz to our President, and maybe convince a few other folks to do so, but "people of means" is a phrase guaranteed to offend Presidential votaries.
Netflix somehow made over $800 million in profits last year but paid zero dollars in federal taxes. Less than zero, actually -- they got a $22 million rebate. Nice work if you can get it! So whomever tells you that the Republican tax "reform" made it harder for corporations to get goodies from loopholes can explain how Netflix paid 13.6% on their profits over eight years and then paid a negative 2.6% rate the first year after the tax "reform" passed. BECAUSE TEH RATE IS LOWER STOOPID LIBRULZ!!!! is not the answer, not when they told us for years we could lower the corporate tax rate and close loopholes at the same time.
Surprise, surprise, our intelligence apparatus is starting to get sick of briefing our President, so often does he act like an entitled brat, and they've even stopped telling him things he doesn't want to hear, which admittedly doesn't look particularly courageous but then we haven't been banging our heads against the wall for upwards of two years. So I guess when terrorists attack, he'll just say THEY NEVERZ TOLDZ MEZ TEH THINGZ!!!!! But you know what we'll say? We'll say, you failed to protect our country.
Finally, and ho hum, our President squeals about TEH ILLEGULZ VOTINGZ!!!! by using statistics that don't tell anything close to the whole story. When Mr. President complained about "58,000 non-citizens voting in Texas," he forgot to add "over a 22-year period" because of course he did, and that's important, not just because Texas's lists of potential non-citizen voters hasn't actually revealed even one actual citizen non-voter, but because the lists certainly don't take naturalization into account, and over 180,000 folks became citizens in Texas between 2016 and 2018 alone. Also, Florida's Republican government tried to pull similar shenanigans in 2012, whining about TEH 180,000 ILLEGULZ VOTINGZ!!!, and then the number actually turned out to be "100." Which is, I feel compelled to remind you, 100 more than Texas's Republican government has found so far. But why wait for actual facts, when there are rage-addled votaries to be set off?
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