Health Care Reform: A Penny For Your Thoughts?

[Anthony '58]

(01-19-2020, 08:08 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-05-2017, 05:45 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(07-05-2017, 04:33 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(12-10-2016, 11:09 AM)Anthony Wrote: What if we abolish the penny, which costs the U.S. Mint 1.6 cents to produce, as Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc. have already done, round up all retail purchases to the next higher nickel (and round all paychecks etc. down to the next lower nickel) and use the resulting breakage to reimburse health care facilities for giving charity care to the poor?

No mandates, no penalties, no unwieldy bureaucracy, and as they would say across the pond, it's jolly regressive - a 96-cent cup of ramen noodles becomes $1.00, while a $4,999.99 diamond ring becomes $5,000.00 - taking the right's #1 argument away: That it would "redistribute wealth."  Plus it would maintain the "charity" paradigm that the moral judgmentalists require.

-- how bout rounding paychex up to the next higher nickel too? I'm tired of getting screwed

Think big.  Chucking pennies saves money.  That means "image is everything" is something old that be new again. Just have the Republicans introduce legislation called "Penny Elimination Act to Reduce the Size of Government."

The act as named is factually true. The mint can fire the penny punches,save on zinc,  and save on minting the things.
The Republicans should then be nagged into a tax cut which matches the savings from penny making.
Since Republicans always say that tax cuts bring in more revenue they cost should take that into consideration. They're Republicans, so they think that way. Anyhow, nudge them into a  tax credit based on being a US citizen. One penny tax credit per US citizen, every year, based on the projected savings that year and of course, adjusted to inflation. 

Democrats can just say in private that the Republicans bagged them small, but there kind of thing, national minimum income.

Someone needs to suggest a New Dollar, by moving the decimal point to the left one place.  The New Money will be worth exactly 10x the old, so pennies and nickels will still matter … sorta.

Didn't Germany do this in the early 1920s - except that it was several places that the decimal point was moved, not just one?

But the bottom line is that so long as the "traditionalists" - aka the "Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation" - are still alive in essentially any numbers whatsoever, European-style universal healthcare will not be implemented here, unless it is funded by spectacularly regressive taxes, such as not only abolishing the penny, but by legalizing, and taxing, marijuana sales, "remittances" sent outside the country by illegal aliens, and on items (stereo)typically bought by the criminal underclass, such as "burner" cell phones and their refill minutes.