COBRA is not something feasible for an average American. If you are paying $100 a month for insurance, and then have to pay $400 under Cobra while NOT HAVING INCOME, is not likely to help.

A world where dinosaurs roam the earth (at the same time as cavemen, obviously).

Jurassic Park was just a book, not a proof of concept. Dinosaurs aren't coming back. =(

And working people who qualify for federal subsidies. It's also not clear anybody was actually "hurt" financially except the people who directly pay the new tax, which is whatever. Healthcare costs rose massively the decade before Obamacare, so there isn't much reason to blame Obamacare for the increases over the lasr decade.

But would you really be surprised if we end up seeing the fentanyl version superTRex?

The government doesn't 'run everything' in a national health service. In the UK in the 1940s, Conservative opposition forced the Labour government to accept general practitioners as independent contractors and not salaried state employees, and individual hospital trusts are separate contractors as well. An independent body called NICE decides what drugs are to be accepted and, with its enormous bargaining power, the National Health Service can obtain a far better price than Americans are gulled into accepting.

In the US, you can literally die on the operating table because your insurers' accountants take too long to authorise the operation you need. Americans think this is normal. It isn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JtZ1e78ITE

Why does Joe Biden use this exact sequence of 3 numbers? Does he not realize it will cause Fundamentalist Christians and schizods like me to be very suspicious of his government? Can he really be this unaware or is it deliberate? And if it is deliberate, why would he want Americans speculating about this allusion to Satansim? Is he trolling Q-tards? I don't know what's going on anymore, I'm scared bros.

For those who know nothing about the Bible or the occult the number 666 is a meme to Satanists. They use this number to sign their works. The reason why 666 is the number of a man and the Beast is that men and beasts are carbon based life forms. The carbon atom has six neutrons, six protons, and six electrons. Anyway, my mom's calling for me, time to take my meds now.

These posts made laugh hard lol

.... or maybe not. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter because the rapidly impending question for all OECDs is what percentage of our economy and consequently our working lives are we willing to devote to healthcare and away from other things that make life enjoyable?

Decision makers are old and are put in power by people who are old. Cutting healthcare is a political third rail in every other first-world country other than the US: you'd be more likely to see cuts in the military than the healthcare system.

Well I'm not expecting the US will cut healthcare as a % of GDP either. What I'm expecting is for the US to focus on increasing efficiency and our peer nations to increase the % of GDP they're currently spending on healthcare up to our level. That's inevitable with needs-based approaches where the need in question is essentially insatiable. Healthcare is different in that respect than say water or even food - where we can set some basic level that remains relatively static - since there will always be a demand for medical advances no matter how marginal all taking place in an industry that is heavily reliant on people. All I'm saying is that we're quickly reaching a point where we'll have to say no to providing potentially available and technically needed healthcare because we don't want to give up what amounts to luxury items we'd rather enjoy.

Very, very, very, very, very, very deliberate.

Repeat 5 more times and do it on 6 sequential days in total.

All the beast.

What I do not get about the democrats is you got a 2 billion $ relief package through , you can get a 1.2 trillion $ Infrastructure deal through and you could get another 1.5 trillion through . You elected a moderate president not Bernie. Why would you not take this and celebrate?

I saw that the child tax credit goes to anyone earning up to $400,000 WTF?

Big Borther Joe hard at work:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bi...rk-11634675119

Well I hope everyone agrees that reinvestment in the IRS is needed. It has been gutted and ignored for one reason over the decades and that is so they won't have the resources to go after the wealthier people who will hire lawyers and fight back and that leaves them mostly only focusing on the little guy.

Investments in the IRS are one thing that always pays back many times over.

Because of the $600 initial figure, I was under the impression that this covered people who had net increases in their bank account over the threshold amount. Definitely a rule written by someone who has never handled finances, but at least consistent with other IRS regulations.

The article cites a lawmaker who says “The average American runs $61,000 through their account. The average American will be picked up by this plan.”

It's possible this is just intentional misrepresentation, or he doesn't understand it, or I don't understand it.

If it's the sum of all inflow/outflow, even $10,000 is laughably low and pretty much everyone with a bank account will be on the list. If it's net deposits, then it'll be trivial for cheats to skirt the rules, but you might catch a lot of unsophisticated small businesses who don't file their taxes properly. You definitely won't be catching anyone in the 1% because of this, but it certainly opens the door for more aggressive monitoring.

I thought these are the same people who think the Patriot Act was the worst thing ever conceived.

I don't envy the banks at all in this.

Banks have been reporting interest and dividends to the IRS since well before the patriot act.

Anyone with a bank account should know this.

Of course many people keep things off the books and might be annoyed that they'll have to pony up now. Which I get but...every dollar I make is taxed do I'm not really going to lose sleep over it.

Inso0 is almost never right about anything, but he is right that this is not an effective way to crack down on tax cheats in the 1%. It's disingenuous to try and sell the proposal on that basis.

As best I can tell, the main people who will be affected by this sort of thing are people in the building trades, restaurant employees, self-employed consultants, etc. Many people in these categories cheat on their taxes, and if that's who we are targeting, then we should just say that.

But we are not going to crack down on tax avoidance by the Steve Cohens of the world by increasing the monitoring of cash transactions in their Chase checking accounts.

I'm not going to lose sleep over this either because it won't affect me personally, but it certainly feels like grasping for an inconsequential political victory.

I agree. This is pretty obviously an effort to crack down in labor not reporting all their highly taxed income. More of the economy is service oriented and Uncle Sam needs his fix.

But whining about the patriot act and implying leftist hypocrisy is just putting a sign on your back that says 'kick me'.

Not only that, but the ones who will get caught doing wrong and face punishments are probably the same people that make up the group most cited by internet warriors as needing protection from the consequences of their actions.

Sure there will be some Cousin Vinny types that intentionally break the rules, but a lot of the people running tiny businesses or working in cash industries are already teetering on the edge of personal disaster at all times. I don't know many restaurant workers, but I deal with many tradespeople and I'd bet my bottom dollar that the crowd who asks to come pick their checks up on Fridays instead of waiting the extra 2 days for the mail aren't going to be happy if a taxman comes knocking.

But then again, they are more likely to be red voters, so perhaps there will be no love lost here.

I agree that the people in question are not living lives of luxury. For the most part, tradespeople, restaurant workers, small business owners are part of the shrinking middle class that every politician on either side of the aisle claims to be interested in protecting.

One of the implicit solutions for protecting these groups has been to look the other way on tax avoidance. That's a strange solution, because the office manager at the dentist's office is getting squeezed financially every bit as much as the guy who fixes your toilet, but he doesn't have the opportunity to take advantage of the government looking the other way because he is a W-2 employee.

To be fair, I think it's less about looking the other way and more about resources spent vs recovered.

The banks giving the government a spreadsheet that can be sorted by descending value and cross-referenced with tax returns makes the targeting part easier. They'll be less likely to end up with a negative ROI.

There's almost no chance they catch a whale though. Gonna be a lot of dentists and carpenters who chose to buy a new BMW or F150 instead of paying Uncle Sam what they owed.

We had a bed liner sprayed on one of the new fleet vehicles yesterday by a small business that charged 4% extra for using a credit card and 2% extra if we paid by check. In 20 years of small business accounting it was the first time I'd ever come across a vendor that added a surcharge for paying by check. Perhaps a sign of things to come if this plan goes through, however.

That strategy doesn't have much staying power. The days of avoiding taxes by insisting on payment in physical currency won't last much longer. Physical currency soon will be too difficult to spend for that to be a viable strategy.

Not if more businesses choose to encourage it.

There's a gas station near my house that gives a 10 cent discount for cash purchases as well.