I'm gonna make a prediction even before Obama and the dems put on the golden ring. I look for a national healthcare plan before 2010' and this time is will be welcomed unlike the 93' Hillary fiasco.
Here's why IMO.
#1 reason? The auto makers themselves. They wanted it in 93' and even advocated for it even to my naive shock at the time. GM especially understood the high cost of healthcare and related benefits and at the time they wanted National Healthcare because it would shift that cost to taxpayers and free up enormous amounts of money that would go direct to the bottomline. I watched on CNBC at the time where they even admitted as much. I knew then that corp. America wasn't opposed to socialism at all and in facted welcomes it.
Over the years since, I've watched more and more socialism via nationalization take place with the most recent obvious being Wall Street and the banking industry so you can't say Wall Street is opposed anymore on free market principles. That old lie is out of the bag.
#2 reason? The economy is contracting and prices are dropping. As a result, layoffs are occuring and what is one major thing these laid off workers have in common? No healthcare coverage! This will be another pressure to push towards a nationalized healthcare system.
#3 reason? Economically healthy companies (at the moment) will accept it. As the contracting continues with pressures on falling prices of commodities and services, at some point the pressure will fall on wages. Companies can't continue to pay the same wage scale for workers when their products or services are being sold for less and less in an ever shrinking market. As this happens the concern will become that citizens who previously had no mortgage/debt problem will now have because the company for which they worked decreased they wage/salary in light of market deflation. Their wage to debt ratio will have shifted weight to the debt side, making the economy worse with what little spendable income left is shifted to purely debt service to stay afloat. UPSers (management/hourly alike) are not going to be immune from this either but a taxpayer healthcare plan shifted from the employer to the gov't would free up enormous sums of money to the bottomline and keep the whole chirade afloat for the time being. For those of you saying the employers would have to pay taxes for this so where's the saving? That's what we have the federal reserve and the fiat money creation for. You didn't get taxed $5 trillion dollars over the last 8 years of Bush for all their expansion that you defended, did you?
#4 reason? Stop, this is a laissez faire, free market, capitialistic system! Our form of constitutional gov't won't allow it. Oh so sorry little one but we haven't been that for so long it's doubtful now that an American High School graduate can count that high backwards.
We've been entrenched on various ideals of socialism for years depending on the political party in power so that dillusional thinking should be long gone for any rational person willing to study economic truths and history and then use their brain to think rather than follow the masses and let them think for you.. As for the constitution, if the democrats have walked all over it in their time, (they have) the republicans put a torch to it so that argument is by our own hand irrelevant. The gov't is now free to do as it pleases at any time it chooses and you have no say. The Wall Street bailout should have been as loud and gross to this fact as a flashing neon sign of "All You Can Eat Buffet" outside a strip club! Just gives you the willies don't it!
The auto makers can't do like they did in the old days and get Washington to impose tariffs and trade restrictions because everyone is to embedded in the global economy. Those nation sovereign actions are now regulated by international law so we couldn't engage in such national interests even if we wanted too. Remember what I said about trampling over the Constitution?
The best solution (no my idea of best) for the moment is to shift healthcare and even retirement totally to the taxpayer side of the general ledger and at least in healthcare I do believe this will happen. Also as the wage pressures hit more and more employers, all levels of gov't will see the effects of falling tax revenues and the last thing they want is that. In fact, the desire will be to inflate the economy (it will as even this Bernacke and da boyz can't hold back forever) in order to maintain that magical GDP to debt ratio so the gov't can in fact continue to borrow even more money instead of raises taxes because we all know they won't cut spending and heaven forbid neither side wants to cut the size of gov't.
The real bailout the big 3 want is to shift all health and welfare of it's employees to the taxpayer so lookout people because mark my word, here it comes!
As I close I would make a comment to AV's point about over-regulation. I happen to agree with him and in principle support many of what he suggests. However and this doesn't negate his point at all but there's a lot of regulation out there that the Big 3 support and may well have instigated in the first place as at the time it was used to keep out imports that didn't meet those regulations. In other words, the Big 3 used gov't to engage in anti-Free market practices in order to create a type of monopoly market for themselves. In many cases, the union helped as well as this was also in their own interests. This whole process has it's own term known as "regulatory capture"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture and one of the first overt examples in American history outside Alexander Hamilton's early banking interests is the ICC or Interstate Commerce Commission which was enacted in 1887' (if I remember right). This regulatory body set up for the so-called public interest was in fact a monopoly mechanism of the big railroad owners to consolidate and squeeze out the smaller, independent railroads. The idea of the ICC was to regulate flow and pricing but it killed the small railroads and left the big boys who then dictated flow and price at will.
There are those here who decry big business so to speak and speak of how the middle class is being killed off and truth is they do have some valid points. Where they get it wrong however is not realizing that the very gov't oversight they preach for leads to more of what alarms them within our economic society. Gov't regulatory powers even in this republican era has in fact grown and the truth is since FDR's New Deal, the middle class has taken it on the chin and Small Town America is being eaten up by BigTime America. Their own goodhearted, noble ideals are literally turned against them and become servant of the very sinsiter forces they seek to keep in check. Those same forces now literally trade regulatory legislation and politicains at will like some commodity to be bought and sold. They sold most of their stock holding in the republicans and now are heavily invested in democrat stock. They expect good dividends for that investment too!
As for the automakers, if the Big 3 are suffering from over regulation, I'd contend much of it was by their own hand! Intervention in any form always has unintended consequences!
BTW AV, you don't need a regressive tax either. Income tax was created same year as Federal Reserve (1913') to service the fiat money debt created by same. Get rid of fiat money and central banking and the need or rather unneed for an income tax would become obvious and it will go away on it's own. Fair Tax in the end won't work either because of the underlying need/relationship to debt service for fiat money central banking. This is also way the Federal Reserve needs to be audited to expose this relationship to the American people.
Also concerning "regulatory capture" check out this International Monetary Fund PDF on the subject. Read down through PDF page numbers 4 through 6 on regulatory capture and consider this in banking in light of the recently exposing economic problems.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2006/wp0634.pdf
For you big gov't types, this IMF peice openly admits regulatory capture in banking is a problem so what does that mean elsewhere? Still wanna let the Fox guard the henhouse?
You know, I'm starting to wonder what grows first and the other follows, gov't regulation and bureacracy or "K" Street!
I'm thinking it's the latter.
