Friday, May 29, 2009

"Out of Money"

In California and the United States ?

The governor of the Golden State just announced a proposal to eliminate health insurance for 1 million poor kids.

This can be juxtaposed with the 103 Fortune 500 companies who are headquartered in California. And the 80 + billionaires who reside there. Clearly, there is money and many people in the state are not broke. It's just a matter of taxation.

But taxing wealth in today's world means the wealth will move elsewhere. It's not difficult to move capital, as well as many areas of production. So this is the bind California and most governments are in.

It's not quite accurate when Obama says that "Well, we are out of money now."

The United States is not out of money, just its public sector, which is basically held hostage by wealthy private interests.

1 comment:

Thomas said...

For US states, one possible solution would be to increase the federal income tax rate for everyone and to allocate a larger share of it to the states.