Hence, I'm arguing that instead of just blind wealth transfers from one group to the collective we should focus a lot more energy on bringing the cost of care down.
Just like we should be focusing a lot more energy on bringing the cost of college down.
Cost of care goes down when you stop wasting money on advertisement, CEO bonuses, and people whose job it is to deny claims. Cost of care goes down when you provide preventative care that's necessary and affordable. When you dont have people without insurance wandering into the ER at the last possible second who could have been treated for pennies on the dollar earlier on. All the data we have on Medicare backs this up, even though its an awful example for reasons I cited above.
Further if you claim that we can't afford to cover everyone, you're going to need to back up your claims because every other country in the OECD would disagree with you.
tl;dr: Income/wealth inequality is a good incentive, when the poor don't die, starve and can live well, and have the opportunity to move up. Socialized medicine enables this.
I'm definitely not saying that. What I am saying is that their talent had to be coupled with an immense amount of luck, being in the right place at the right time, and things falling in line just right for them.
> Again, I'm not wealthy, so these taxes would not affect me. But I'm not sure you're correctly modeling transmission vectors for communicable diseases.
They would absolutely affect you -- you'd get medical care. It's also not fair to say you don't pay taxes even if your marginal tax rate is 0% as your employer pays ~15% of your salary on top in payroll taxes, and your employer could also be taxed to provide healthcare as some countries do. Even San Francisco follows such a model with Healthy SF.
> You're saying rich people should pay really high taxes because poor people getting an education will cause the stock market to go up? Uh...not sure that's how it works.
A quick google search yielded all sorts of great reading material on how that could work [1], [2] and [3].
Of course correlation is not causation and if you reject that data, the reality is you participate in a society -- would you rather your peers be uneducated or educated? Healthy or sick? Terrible roads or good roads? Drinkable water? On fire? Ultimately those of the highest means have the highest responsibility to that society to give back.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/08/12/edu...
[2] http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/27820...
[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp