Unfortunately, Republicans, with the help of a few Democrats, persist in voting behaviors intended to “starve the beast,” or otherwise cut government resources, which deliberately reduce the efficacy and success of any government-funded (e.g., social safety-net) program.
The major purpose of the corporate-funded right-wing is to deny any benefit the federal government might provide to the people. Doing so increases the hold that business maintains on us, forcing us to fund our own economy and stratifying our society along class lines. The main tool it uses in this effort is the falsehood that “we” fund our government and any spending it legislates.
Taxation hasn’t “funded” the government since FDR ended the domestic convertibility of the currency to gold in ’34, as was explained by a former chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, Beardsley Ruml, in a paper he titled “Taxes For Revenue Are Obsolete” in ’45. This was also proven by a multi-year deep dive into Fed and Treasury functions by Dr. Stephanie Kelton found here. Dr.Kelton has been a respected advisor to many business and government entities and a long-time advisor to Bernie Sanders. She is also a major contributor and advocate for Modern Monetary Theory that provides an accurate lens through which to view federal funding and taxation. It is how our economy currently functions, albeit poorly due to the misapplication of outdated and outright false concepts.
Our contribution to this funding is the “real” resources needed to provide benefits, not the money. The money is always available in infinite quantity to the currency-issuing government, regardless of its revenue. In fact, it has zero need for revenue and simply deletes any it receives after reducing the national debt that created it. Federal spending creates new money and taxes destroy that money, using the debt as a tracking/accounting entity only.
Positioning the monopoly creator of the currency as just a competing “user” of that currency that must somehow “find” it before spending, either by taxing or borrowing, enables the perpetuation of the concept of federal debt as an obligation to taxpayers against future productivity instead of the unspent and untaxed result from past productivity. It is our national savings represented in Treasury instruments, not an obligation we pass onto our children.
It also represents the currency the government leaves us to provide compensation for our commerce, a store of value. Without this deficit in government spending the government essentially steals the resources and labor it uses via a balanced budget, which is only another way of stating 100% tax rate. Taxation is necessary to establish/preserve value in the currency, as well as providing a need for the currency in the economy to allow the government to provision itself without needing revenue. Note that the “pay for” question never arises when military funding is the topic.
Don’t tell me that we can’t afford to provide high-quality healthcare including mental, dental, vision and long-term care for all of us.
The unique position the federal government holds as the monopoly issuer of the currency, including that it “borrows” via Treasury debt, means it can “afford” anything that exists and is for sale priced in its currency, regardless of its revenue. It can, and should, fully fund America’s healthcare, taxing only as needed to avoid inflation from no longer having the economic drain of premiums and out of pocket expenses.
However, as you noted, eliminating an industry as large as health insurance means dealing with a large number of involuntarily unemployed that will have to be retrained and re-employed. M4A could actually be deflationary and require even more spending, or tax cuts, to mitigate. It presents an excellent use of a federally guaranteed job program that would offer those unemployed a better shake than meager state unemployment benefits.
