Author Archives: Yves Smith

Randy Wray: Forget Taxes for Redistribution – What to do About Inequality

Yves here. A lot of people argue for redistributive taxes, contending that they were very successful in the golden age of the American middle class, from the end of World War II through the Reagan era, in constraining the concentration of income and wealth at the top. However, that tax structure reflected a broad social consensus in favor of fostering prosperity for ordinary Americans, in no small measure to keep Communist impulses at bay.

In Yankee terms, Wray’s argument against using taxes to create a more egalitarian distribution of income is “You can’t get there from here”.

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How Obamacare Policy Holders and Big Pharma Lose Out from Insurers Gaming Plan Designs

At one level, it’s vastly amusing to watch Big Pharma, through its powerful lobbying group PhRMA, complaining that its ox is being gored by insurers through how they’ve designed Obamacare plans. On another, though, the analysis prepared for PhRMA confirms what this site has long argued, that the Obamacare plans represent a deliberate effort to extract more rents from the public at large on behalf of the medical-industrial complex.

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