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[OM] Re: OT colonoscopy

Subject: [OM] Re: OT colonoscopy
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 21:13:07 -0800
Steve Dropkin wrote:
> <snip>
> It also strikes me as ironic that American business can complain so 
> loudly about the cost of providing health insurance for employees 
> and yet treat a more equitable solution as some sort of failed 
> socialist plot. General Motors estimates that approximately US$1,500 
> of the cost of each vehicle they make in the U.S. pays for 
> employee/retiree health coverage -- a cost that Toyota, Honda, 
> Volkswagen, and Volvo don't pay (directly) in their home countries.
>
> GM may be an extreme example. But businesses of all sizes across the 
> U.S. are saddled with a considerable (and increasing) cost of 
> business that their foreign competition is not. So how well _is_ 
> this system working for everyone?
>   
I neither agree nor disagree here with you overall points. As a long ago 
trained economist, I don't remember much about now outdated (and then, 
as now, incomplete and inaccurate) theory.

What I do remember is the enormous differences in structural and tax 
aspects of economies between countries. So I have a simple comment. 
Unless one knows what portion of the overall tax income that pays for 
the health care in those other countries comes from corporate taxes and 
how the overall, effective corporate tax rate, adjusted for accounting 
differences, differs from that in the US, it is impossible to come to 
any meaningful conclusion from the above.

IF, for example, BMW were to pay roughly $1,500 more in corporate taxes 
per vehicle than GM, and if those taxes from all corporations were to 
roughly equal the amount the German govenment expends on health care, 
GM's argument would be specious and simply a misleading political 
maneuver to get lower taxes or get the government to take over one of 
their costs of being in business. For busineses to try to recover from 
mismanagement and/or honest mistakes by getting relief from thier 
governments is not unheard of. :-)

I am not proposing that any of this is or is not the case, the reverse 
may be the case, for all I know - only that we do not know enough about 
it from the information presented to form any informed opinions about it.

<snip>

Moose

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