Super-rich to get soaked in Trump's tax reform, a la his 2000 presidential plan?

In another interesting twist, complementing his preference for single-payer healthcare, Trump proposed to pay off the national debt through a one-time tax on the super-rich, back when he was considering a Reform Party campaign for President in 2000.

I was watching some old videos of that exploratory committee, and they referred to his "Robin Hood tax" idea: tax the whole wealth (not just annual income) of individuals and trusts that were valued at over $10 million, at 14.25%, one-time only, and that would deliver roughly $6 trillion in revenues, which was the size of the debt at the time.

He offered to end the estate tax to put a little something in it for the rich. But mostly the goal was tax cuts for the middle and working classes, saving Social Security, and paying off the debt.

That overall picture doesn't sound too different from the way he pitched his tax plan during the campaign, and he went to great lengths to emphasize that it was only an initial position during a negotiation with Democrats, Republicans, House, Senate, etc. If the rates for the very rich went up from his initial proposal, meh, whaddaya gonna do?

But that was only tax rates on a person's annual income. The Robin Hood plan was a one-time tax on their entire net worth. There's a lot more money sitting around out there than there is being earned in a given year.

Does Trump still believe in a one-time clawing back of 15% of the largely ill-gotten wealth made over the past 30-40 years? He said he no longer believed in it when asked in 2011 by George Stephanopoulos, but he also said that about single-payer during the 2015 Fox debate, and we know how much he's been pushing for negotiating drug prices and praising universal healthcare right up through 2015. Maybe he's quibbling over the exact rate -- now he only supports a 10% tax on the wealth of the super-rich, and maybe that threshold has been raised to $20 million.

He did go public with a plan to levy a one-time tax of 10% on corporate profits sitting overseas, to bring the remaining 90% of that wealth back into the country and hopefully put it to good use. So the basic idea has still been bouncing around his head. He didn't say he wasn't also thinking of levying a similar 10% tax on wealth already sitting here in America...

One thing seems unlikely to have changed -- his underlying worldview or tone. Here he is in a '90s internet article from CNN:

"By my calculations, 1 percent of Americans, who control 90 percent of the wealth in this country, would be affected by my plan," Trump said.

"The other 99 percent of the people would get deep reductions in their federal income taxes," he said.

It's hard to ignore his playing off of one class against another, aiming to draw support from "the other 99 percent" even if it cost him votes, reputation, or whatever, from the "1 percent of Americans who control 90 percent of the wealth". Whatever specifics may have changed in his mind, something as fundamental as a worldview has not.

From another ancient internet article:

[Advisor Roger] Stone said Trump's polling shows that 65 percent of the public supports the "Robin Hood" tax concept.

"The tax issue solves a lot of other things -- the Social Security trust fund shortfall, plus it gets rid of the inheritance tax, and everything starts to fall into place," Trump said

Stone said Trump will soon release a plan for universal health care akin to the Canadian system.

"We'll put out a health care plan that will make Ted Kennedy blush," Stone said.

Nobody seems to have noticed just how forcefully Trump was willing to push the idea the first time he considered running for office. The counter-campaign was just throwing everything at the wall and seeing if it would stick. Reporters have minimal research skills (they cannot be bothered to google, let alone search Lexis-Nexis), and would not have pursued the story anyway because they're lazy. Plus Trump was hitting his enemies from so many angles, constantly changing them up, that they couldn't drill too hard even if he did have a weak spot within the GOP primary.

The only one to look in depth was the Politifact article linked at the top of this post, and it must have gotten buried under the avalanche of the 99% of their stuff that is BS propaganda hit pieces. Crying "wolf!"

In their research, Politifact turned up some quotes about how ridiculous some thought Trump's soak-the-super-rich plan was, including Stephen Moore -- a Reaganite supply-sider who would go on to become an economic advisor to Trump and a campaign surrogate (the really spastic one). I think Trump hired people like that in 2016 to fly under the radar while running as a Republican, in order to not disorient GOP loyalist voters too much too quickly.

I sense folks in the Trump movement opening up to the idea of "who cares about tax cuts for the rich?" ahead of the tax reform legislation that is sure to be a bigger shit-show than the healthcare circus. Ann Coulter was on Hannity the other night pointing out that W. Bush gave the very rich a yuge tax cut, and what did they turn around and do with the money other than bring in guest workers? (Or off-shore their business, or put it into the casino of the stock market hoping for their money to make more money without having to hire anyone.)

The idea that the super-rich are aching to hire Americans at decent wages is a total farce by this point, and even Hannity (caught off-guard) couldn't argue with those facts.

Trump himself blasted the carrot rather than stick approach during multiple rallies, such as in Erie and Wilkes-Barre PA. Politicians have been offering zero-interest loans to companies if they stay here, then they take the money and run overseas anyway, where they sell their product back into the US with no tariff. "There's going to be consequences" tax-wise, has been his mantra, not "tax cuts to the top will boost hiring and incomes".

Bernie whipped up so much of the Democrat and independent voters about his own "Robin Hood tax," which would have gone to pay for free college for all (Craaazy Bernie, kids need real jobs and real training). Trump would use the revenues to pay down the debt instead. Still, there may be enough support among the public that Trump and/or Crazy Bernie can turn up the heat on Congress to get something like this into the tax reform code.

r/K theory: Conservatives = r, liberals = K (reminder to the ignorant)

A recent comment blithely asserts that liberals show the hallmarks of a group adapted to an environment that is abundant in resources relative to the number of individuals competing for them, where life is cheap and time horizons are short, and where thoughtless rapaciousness is the norm. That contrasts with conservatives, who are alleged to show the hallmarks of the opposite end, where resources are stretched thin, where time horizons are long, and where stewardship is deliberate.

This way of thinking goes under the name r/K selection theory in evolutionary ecology. It is sometimes applied usefully to human beings, but usually not. Not because human beings transcend ecology, but because the people doing the thinking aren't very good thinkers.

I left a bunch of comments in response, but the topic deserves a post of its own because I can't stand when people bastardize SCIENCE! to prop up their half-baked ideas. Those comments are below, which also cover the moral dimension to this half-baked evolutionary thinking (shades of latter-day Social Darwinism in our neo-Gilded Age).

I'll add a few more things about sex, violence, and impulsivity:

Frontier Mormons began as a polygamous cult and only gave up polygamy, reluctantly, in order for Utah to join the Union of states. Saloons, brothels, and red light districts were more common per capita out in the libertarian / individualist / conservative utopia of the Frontier, than in a sleepy town back East. Conservatives get married earlier, have kids earlier, including higher rates of teenage pregnancy.

Whites are locked up at far higher rates in Arizona than in Alabama, showing higher violence and impulsivity in Conservative (TM) bastions.

Time horizons are so short in conservative strongholds like Texas that the state has given its name to a form of card gambling, not to mention Las Vegas being in Frontier land. And the tendency toward making a living by shiftless get-rich-quick schemes (cattle, gold, oil, etc.), shows how short-term-oriented the Frontier people were compared to the settled, more liberal folk back East.

So if anything, conservatism as a political movement is a reaction to the kinds of behaviors that pop up in a r-selecting environment.

* * * * *

Who has larger families, lives in low-density areas, where land has not been over-developed, with abundant resources, lower threats to their security, etc.? Not liberals.

Only a retarded and ignorant idea, i.e. that conservatives are K-selected, can lead to the prediction that conservatives would be pushing a "one child policy" rather than being the most fervently natalist.

Getting back to healthcare, or any welfare policy, and r/K:

Dull minds look at the black clamor for welfare goodies as a sign that the welfare state is an r-selected outcome, as blacks are more r-selected than whites. They conclude that conservatives must be K-selected, and therefore eliminating welfare would be the K-selected outcome.

It's totally backwards.

Urban blacks shoving their open hands in the white man's face is as r-selected as it gets -- abundant resources (white people's money), squeaky wheel gets the grease, intense competition amongst each other and against other non-white groups to get the biggest piece of the white money pie.

They have no fear of over-grazing the white cash commons, or killing the honky goose that laid the golden egg. See post-colonial southern Africa.

But that's just the demand for welfare from blacks.

The actual provision of welfare comes from whites, and it's K-selected -- part of a stewardship strategy to take care of one another, now that in an industrial urbanized ecology, resources are no longer so abundant that anyone can sustain themselves and their family.

For that matter, "liberal" regulations against unlimited resource extraction (say by oil companies) are also K-selected stewardship strategies. It's the r-selected conservatives of the less-developed Great Plains or Alaska whose answer is always "drill baby drill".

The demand for welfare by whites is of course not r-selected -- they don't shove their hands in the man's face, trying to suck up as much as possible, more and more over time, with no mind toward whether there will be enough money for everybody.

Whites are ashamed to receive welfare, are loathe to use it because "it's there for those who desperately need it," and do not want to over-burden the system into collapse.

Those are all signs of K-selection.

BTW, which non-white societies have a functioning welfare system -- K-selected Chinese or r-selected Nigerians?

Only whites in r-selected areas view welfare as unnecessary and in need of elimination. Land is abundant and cheap, resources are plentiful, crime and war are mild or even gentle -- who needs welfare?

You can split hairs and refer to "individualist" conservatives (r-selected) vs. "collectivist / communitarian" conservatives (K-selected), but that's on top of the liberal vs. conservative distinction. Too many spectrums.

The Trump "conservatives" (especially in the new ground zero of the GOP, Appalachia -- not the Plains and Mountains) are K-selected and see welfare state policies as necessary so that our industrial urbanized ecology doesn't allow people to slip through the cracks.

The heyday of individualist Frontier conservatism was the Reagan years. Anyone pretending that it's still a pre-NAFTA, pre-HMO environment is going to be wildly out of touch, and acting on the wrong side of history.

To summarize, the anti-welfare fanatics on the Right are guilty of anti-white demonization, whereby they portray poor whites as having the same characteristics of poor blacks.

Namely, demand for welfare is r-selected greed that will over-burden the system until the whole thing collapses, and the individuals extracting the resources don't give a damn about causing such a collapse.

That is the black behavior regarding the welfare system, not the white behavior.

Casting white recipients of welfare as a bunch of parasites hell-bent on sucking the most sustenance out of their captive host, is why community-minded white people don't just write off the wacko part of the Right, but are disgusted by it.

How dare someone portray the less fortunate among our in-group as though they were a parasitic out-group like the Gypsies?

The cracking of corporate solidarity in the nationalist era

The elites try to demoralize their enemy, the people, about the futility of banding together and using collective strength to get their way. On their side of the battle lines, though, they circle the wagons for each other. This corporate class solidarity is manifested in the Chamber of Commerce, the largest shadow legislature group ("lobbying"), which pursues all manner of big business interests against the general public.

But it would be wrong to think of the Chamber as a monolithic group: it is a coalition of member groups, such as pharmaceuticals, insurance, banking and finance, oil, and so on. Each of them has their own specific goals that they rely on the Chamber to bring about, and they do not always harmonize perfectly with the goals of the other groups. Some other group's agenda may impose costs on your own industry.

A manufacturer would prefer not to have his workers addicted to tobacco, lowering their productivity (sicker, taking frequent breaks) and adding to the employer's health care coverage of them. So the tobacco industry getting its way will impose those costs on the manufacturing industry.

It's just a relatively small cost to pay in order to get your own main goal, and that can only be achieved by having all the major industries band together and push for corporate control over all aspects of society. Otherwise each industry could be fought against one by one, making their victory far more doubtful.

Although these costs that each industry imposes on the others are usually rumblings under the surface, they can erupt into quakes that split the industries apart from each other. Simply put: if one industry no longer has anything to gain from being part of the coalition, they will cut their losses and defect.

This could be because their goal has become guaranteed to succeed, or guaranteed to fail. In either case, the outcome is certain, and there's no point in wasting millions of dollars lobbying against the inevitable. Only when the outcome is in doubt, and their dominance is not totally secured, does it make sense to spend all those resources recruiting others to help your side out.

When that defecting group gets out of the coalition, it may even be shunned and targeted by the remaining member groups -- both to punish the defection as well as to distance themselves in the public eye from a former member that has gotten so much of a stigma that they could never achieve their goals through the coalition.

The only major case like this recently as been big tobacco, who went from being a dominant member of the Chamber, and one of the most successful lobbying groups, to an utter pariah among the general public, the government, and even the other big business groups.

Generational trends away from smoking made it possible for the anti-smoking groups to convince larger and larger swaths of the population that the tobacco companies are evil and need to be stopped. With their doom becoming more and more certain, there was no longer any point in the tobacco companies trying to lobby for deregulation, and therefore no point either in staying in the Chamber of Commerce coalition.

In fact, with the tobacco industry out, the remaining Chamber industries could now openly attack and distance themselves from an industry that would only impose costs on them and provide no greater benefit. One corporate group against another.

The tobacco case was an isolated example due to a generational trend in one domain of life. But now that there are populist rebellions firing off across the political spectrum, from Trump supporters to Sanders supporters, it will be easier to hammer away at the underlying cracks in the corporate coalition, dividing them and then conquering them.

Two of the biggest players in the Chamber are the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, who impose massive costs on all other industries by adding the skyrocketing costs of healthcare onto corporate balance sheets.

America is the only rich country without a national health plan of some kind (typically it is single-payer), which drives up costs as the healthcare providers can easily swat down small enemies like individual workers or their employers. It's impossible to swat down the entire nation, which is why the single-payer countries pay far lower prices for their healthcare (per capita, as a share of GDP, for a given drug, etc.). The national purchaser buys in the largest wholesale quantities, so they can easily negotiate the prices far below the retail level.

Even worse for employers, healthcare costs are highly variable from one year to the next, and in ways that are not merely canceled out across the risk pool of employees. If there's a nasty epidemic one year, one employee's higher healthcare costs will be correlated with other employees' higher costs. It's not like random accidents like falling and breaking a wrist, which are not correlated. Higher variance means more risk, and employers don't like that. It makes it harder to work healthcare costs neatly into their overall compensation packages.

And unlike simply giving their employees more cash instead of healthcare benefits, the healthcare package adds all sorts of administrative costs from being tied to the adversarial and stingy for-profit healthcare providers.

All in all, it's a great big headache that employers in all industries would be happy to just cut loose and let the taxpayers worry about it instead. That's how it's done in the single-payer systems. For example, Australians pay a 2% income tax (a further 1% if you're rich), and those tax revenues go into a national fund that pays out to private or public hospitals when citizens use their services. Obviously that's a gain for citizens, too, since 2% of your income is a lot less than all the premiums you pay over the course of a year (unless you're rich).

However, the insurance and drug companies want those prices to stay sky-high, and that's their non-negotiable agenda in the Chamber of Commerce coalition. The other industries accept the headache of having to pay for their workers' healthcare, as long as the circle-the-wagons behavior gives them something of their own in return.

But what if those other industries' goals are now appearing doomed to failure?

The single greatest focus of the Chamber in recent years has been passing the TPP corporate globalist trade deal, which like NAFTA would benefit the industries that off-shore their labor into the cheap third-world countries and pocket the savings in massive profits. That includes manufacturers but also tech industries that move call-in centers, customer support, etc., into the third world.

Within the first week of Trump's presidency, he killed the TPP and made it clear that no such similar trade deal will ever be signed again. He's even going to go back to NAFTA and tear that one up too. Suddenly the political climate is so bitterly opposed to these corporate trade deals that there's no point in trying to write them and have them passed through Congress anymore. They're dead, and they're not coming back to life within our lifetimes.

Any industry for whom corporate trade deals were the raison d'etre for belonging to the Chamber of Commerce are going to ruthlessly reconsider just what they're going to be getting out of their membership, and how much they're spending to be part of the club.

Likewise, one of their most fought-after goals has been amnesty for illegals and open borders to all immigrants. This drives down labor costs by expanding the supply of labor to effectively include the billions around the entire world. You want more than ten bucks an hour? It's a shame that there's some foreigner willing to do it for five.

And yet just like the globalist trade deals, the globalist immigration plan has gone up in a puff of smoke with the election of Trump. Any industry that was pouring money into the Chamber in pursuit of open borders has suddenly lost their motivation to renew their membership.

The main industry that has seen its dreams vanish into thin air is manufacturing. They relied on globalist trade deals to off-shore labor to cheap countries, and to bring in hordes of immigrants to undercut wages at home. If you haven't noticed, they've also been the most compliant with the Trump agenda -- re-investing jobs and plants back here in America. They are not happy or eager to lose those labor savings from third-world workers, but they know that they are now in the same position as big tobacco trying to push for deregulation to a generation that has never smoked.

And now that manufacturers are drawing minimal benefits from the Chamber coalition, the massive healthcare costs imposed on them by the drug and insurance industries are going to really sting. They are no longer off-set by larger gains from mutual aid among big industries. Sky-high healthcare costs also make manufacturers less competitive than their rival companies from countries where healthcare is paid by taxpayers, not employers.

I would not be surprised if the manufacturing sector became a lot more supportive of single-payer or similar healthcare reforms.

The retail sector is another big player who has seen its big dreams evaporate due to "hire American" and "buy American" becoming national policy. Cheap Chinese crap allows a higher profit margin than well-made and more costly American products. Illegals can no longer be used as cheap labor for brick-and-mortar stores. Home Depot and Walmart are in desperate need of a boost to their reputations, and supporting universal healthcare is big enough to do it.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are industries who appear to be getting their way so easily with the Trump administration that they don't even need to bother lobbying Congress. The oil and energy industry is the big winner here, with Trump approving the pipelines that had been held up forever, promising to put coal back into play, slashing all sorts of regulations, and dismissing climate change as a reason to put the brakes on the energy industry.

At the same time, it's not as though deregulated energy was a central plank in the Trump platform, and it could go away under a different populist Republican, let alone a populist Democrat like Bernie.

At least for the time being, the big oil companies do not need to waste tons of dollars, political capital, and public reputation, defending the corporate rape of the healthcare sector by the drug and insurance industries. They'd be happy to be rid of healthcare costs on their balance sheets. That doesn't mean they have as much motivation as manufacturers to support single-payer, but it may mean they just stay out of the fight.

There aren't too many other big players in the Chamber to come to the aid of the drug and insurance companies -- banking / finance, really. And Trump saw to it that reinstatement of Glass-Steagall was put into the Republican platform last year, so their days of laissez-faire pillage may be coming to an end, too, and therefore have less of a reason to be top-tier members of the Chamber.

Even with the two healthcare industries, Trump could split them apart by pushing first for the negotiation of prescription drug prices. When Medicare Part D was signed into law by Republicans in Congress and W. Bush, there was an explicit carve-out that the prices would not be negotiable -- corporate rape would be the rule. When the Democrats in Congress (insincerely) tried to pass this as a separate piece of legislation in 2007, Republicans stopped it and re-iterated their pledge to corporate rape in healthcare.

Trump, however, has been pushing for this policy single-mindedly on the campaign trail and in office. It's the only specific issue he ever addresses regarding healthcare. If the populist movement manages to kill off that big goal of the drug companies, they will have lost a major stake in their Chamber of Commerce membership, if not all of it.

Then they could be played off against the insurance companies. The high premiums that insurance companies charge make it harder for the insured to consider drugs a worthwhile investment -- and that's lost business for the drug companies. But if the drug companies were muscled into lowering their prices, they could argue for the insurance companies to lower their premiums and include the now-cheaper drugs, expanding their market. The drug companies would be compensating, somewhat, for lower prices by selling in larger volume (i.e. by being included on more insurance plans).

It's not inaccurate to talk about "big business" or "corporate interests" as a monolithic thing, since they all do want the same abstract thing -- elite control over society. But they are distinct industries with specific concerns and agendas. The Chamber of Commerce is a coalition of disparate factions, sometimes cohesive and sometimes fragile.

As they became stronger, they got overly ambitious and self-assured of their invincibility, leading them to champion the most offensive policies -- banning the negotiation of prices for healthcare bought in wholesale quantities, the right to make teenagers addicted to poison, national citizens being replaced by fungible global labor-units, and so on and so forth. This sparked a populist and nationalist revolt, which will pick apart the factions one at a time, playing each conquered group off against the surviving groups until all are brought under control.

The Trump movement has proven that you can "fight City Hall," and it will prove you can bend corporations to the popular will. Chamber schmaymber!

Tax foreigners to pay for American welfare

Now that "tax reform" is next on the legislative agenda, the first major overhaul since Reagan, it is necessary to remember that Trump did not campaign on being another "tax cuts for the rich" Republican. So while there may or may not be a tax cut for the rich, which would be nothing new, there will be some kind of tax on foreigners and foreign stuff.

The foreign tax could be on the goods and services in off-shored industries (a tariff), beefed up fees for applying for visas, taxing remittance payments made from within the US, a rise in income tax rates on legal immigrants, setting up an explicit tax to levy on foreign nations whose military defense we provide, and so on and so forth.

We hold the cards here because we are not an export economy, meaning retaliatory tariffs have few targets of ours to hit. Americans are less inclined to live and work in foreign countries, compared to vice versa. No Americans send remittances back here. Hardly any of us work abroad where our incomes could be taxed even higher than now. And nobody but Uncle Sam provides our military defense.

If the rest of the world is so much more dependent on us than the other way around, we can easily tax the hell out of them and they'll still profit by interacting with us.

Trump has mentioned this logic here and there, but never really spelled it out. In short, we do not need to raise taxes on ourselves in order to pay down the debt or spend on ourselves, such as welfare and other entitlement programs. It would be far more palatable to the American people if we paid for government goodies by levying charges of all kinds on non-Americans who need us far more than we need them.

This is how Trump plans to cut the Gordian knot of not-taxing and spending. We'll cut taxes on ourselves, and spend more on ourselves / pay down the debt, by charging foreigners out the ass to be a part of the American network.

An earlier post warned not to expect too much populism unless it also intersected with nationalism. It's still true that those are the most promising areas for change. The new system of "tax foreigners to pay for American welfare" is not a conceptual intersection between nationalism and populism, but at least a procedural one.

"But how are we going to afford President Trump's lifelong dream of a single-payer healthcare system?" Easy -- tax foreigners some more! Foreigners are not the root cause of our disastrous healthcare system, so it is not naturally an Us vs. Them issue. However if we can fix our healthcare mess by making Them pay up big-league for interacting with us, then that's enough of an intersection between nationalism and populism.

Seriously: expect that to be the answer to any furrowed-brow reporter asking Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, or the God Emperor himself, "But how are we going to PAY for that?" Higher taxes on foreigners!

Trump, 1999: "I'm quite liberal, and getting much more liberal, on healthcare"

For the past week here we've seen that Trump's big-picture vision for healthcare has always been single-payer. To appreciate just how deeply committed he is to this form of healthcare, watch this interview with Larry King from 1999, when he was forming an exploratory committee about running for President under the Reform Party that Ross Perot founded earlier in the decade.

The entire interview shows how little he has changed, so we can be sure what he's expressing right before potentially running for President is what he has totally committed himself to. Although most of it will sound uncannily familiar, listen to this exchange on healthcare:

Larry King: Patient's Bill of Rights. You mention healthcare as one of the social issues. You for it?

Donald Trump: I think you have to have -- and again, I said I'm conservative, generally speaking I'm conservative, and even very conservative. But I'm quite liberal and getting much more liberal on healthcare and other things. I really say, What's the purpose of a country if you're not going to have defense and healthcare? If you can't take care of your sick in the country, forget it, it's all over, I mean it's no good. So I'm very liberal when it comes to healthcare. I believe in universal healthcare. I believe in whatever it takes to make people well and better.

LK: So you believe, then, it's an entitlement of birth.

DT: I think it is. It's an entitlement to this country, and too bad the world can't be, y'know, in this country. But the fact is it's an entitlement to this country if we're going to have a great country.

LT: So you are for this measure?

DT: I am for whatever it takes. We have the money, the fact is that the world is ripping off this country. Germany is ripping us off big-league, Saudi Arabia is ripping us off big-league, France -- I mean, they're the worst team player I've ever seen in my life. You look at what's happened -- Japan for years, I mean we're like a whipping post for Japan.

He goes on to say that if we negotiate fair trade deals, we'll have more than enough money pouring into our economy that we can lower taxes and still provide goodies like universal healthcare.

If everything else he says has stayed the same, we have to conclude that he still feels this way on healthcare. Trump the impulsive flip-flopper is just a media fabrication (a projection of their own temperament). From these ancient interviews, we know he is strategic, cautious (won't run unless he could win), and committed to where he stands on what he thinks are the most important issues facing the nation.

Populists will breathe a sigh of relief that Trump has always had his sights set on single-payer, while conservatives will have to "trust Trump" as he pitches the system that every other rich country enjoys, with far better health outcomes at far lower prices.

Corporate propaganda has so thoroughly brainwashed conservatives about healthcare, where single-payer is the apocalypse, so admittedly the Trump team has their work cut out for them. On the other hand, he will easily draw in moderates and liberals who have been crying for single-payer for decades.

With the Congressional Republicans forever torn between moderate vs. high levels of sociopathy on entitlements, this provides Trump with the first real opportunity to "pivot" toward the center.

Hopefully Pelosi and Schumer vote against single-payer, putting them on the record as phony sell-outs, and allowing Trump to rake in even more former Obama voters during his re-election. Although perhaps they will vote for, and try to spin it as having won over even a Republican President on healthcare, and from a minority party position.

Trump never forgets: R's blocked negotiating drug prices under W. Bush

The only position on healthcare that Trump has consistently taken is an overall lean toward single-payer.

However there is one specific thing that he keeps hammering home, and that is the absence of negotiation on the prices of prescription drugs, despite the US government being the largest single buyer (Medicare Part D).

"Who da hell would buy wholesale and pay retail?"

He knows it's because the drug companies and insurance companies have bought off the politicians, and has said so often on the campaign trail. Some politicians are "incompetent," but probably they're "taken care of" by the lobbyists.

If the federal government threatened to walk away from a certain supplier for charging too much, that company would lose access to nearly half of all dollars spent on healthcare in the US (i.e., what the government covers) -- a sector that accounts for nearly 20% of our GDP. We have their balls in a vice, and all we have to do is squeeze.

Trump knows that when Medicare Part D was signed into law by W. Bush in 2003, there was an explicit provision in it that there would be no negotiation of prices on prescription drugs. This was back when the Republicans still thought that championing corporate rape was a long-term winning strategy.

That law went into effect in 2006, and by 2007 the Democrats who barely controlled the House decided to push back in a follow-up bill that would have required the Secretary of HHS to negotiate drug prices.

It passed the House without a single Democrat defection, along with a couple dozen moderate Republicans. But most House Republicans decided that corporate rape was still the winning strategy, and voted against. When it reached the Senate, the only Dem defector was Harry Reid -- a harbinger of how disastrous Obamacare would turn out. And although 6 Republicans voted in favor, 41 of them did not, and it was killed by filibuster 55-42.

Of course, even if it did barely pass, Bush would have vetoed it and withstood an override challenge. So the Democrats were just posturing, trying to score populist points with voters, while assuring donors and lobbyists that there was ultimately nothing to worry about. That's how Obamacare played out, when they actually had the chance to make their wishes come true with a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate and one of their own in the White House.

Still, why did Congressional Republicans allow themselves to be branded as the party of corporate rape in healthcare? Out of sheer partisan polarization? Well congratulations, geniuses: if the other party knows that you're going to reflexively naysay any of their policies whatsoever, all they have to do is make an insincere gesture of populism, and without thinking you'll make yourselves the proud sworn enemies of the American people. Gee, how do we explain your abject pathetic failure in the next year's elections?

(Thankfully that shoe is now on the other foot. "Wouldn't it be great if we got along with Russia to fight Islamic terrorism?" IMPEACH THE KREMLIN-PUPPET TRAITOR!)

The utter failure -- indeed the fanatic insistence on not negotiating prices for something that you are by far the largest purchaser of, is so offensive to the common sense of a businessman like Trump, that he must have been howling for all of them to have been fired. The vote was reported by the media, so it's possible he heard about it ("I never forget").

Rather than be rewarded for populist gestures, the moderate Republicans have been slowly voted out, and only one of the Republican Senators who voted to negotiate drug prices is still there -- Susan Collins of Maine -- while many of the naysayers have easily held onto their seats. Same story in the House.

Fun fact: hardcore libertarian Ron Paul was one of the few Republicans in favor of negotiating prices. There may be a fault-line there to hammer on, where libertarian-leaning Republicans will have to prove their basic business sense.

Unfortunately, the list of "Republicans for corporate rape in healthcare" included those who would become major figures of the Trump era, other than the man himself -- Leader McConnell and AG Sessions from the Senate, and from the House, VP Pence, Speaker Ryan, Leader McCarthy, and worst of all HHS Secretary Price.

Since Trump has single-mindedly focused on negotiating prescription drug prices for Medicare, he has to know his point-man in the Cabinet has the wrong voting record on the issue. It's one of the first things he would've looked into.

It makes me think Trump is planning on digging up this corpse of a voting record and shaming the Congressional Republicans if they don't fall in line behind negotiating drug prices, if not yet full-on single-payer.

"What da hell kind of business sense do they teach you guys when you show up first day on Capitol Hill? ... Or maybe you were being taken care of by the drug companies' lobbyists? I dunno, folks, you think maybe that happened? Oh nooo, nooo, that never happens, especially not with the principled people in this room..."

If the majority of Congressional Republicans from 10 years ago were merely going against the idea out of partisan polarization, they can now safely go along with it since Trump is pushing it.

And since Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, et al. already voted for it then, they'll have to either go along with it again, or face a bloody revolution from their constituents, who want nothing more than universal healthcare. They would have to worry about far more than a tweetstorm from Trump -- he would camp out on their home turf, inflaming the rage of local liberals about how he's promising cheap drug prices and Pelosi and Schumer are getting in the way and going back on their voted promises from just 10 years ago.

He's got enough leverage over both sides to make it happen, although it would be easier to pass with a bare majority in the Senate. Ideally some other topic would force the nuclear option first -- no way McConnell would use it first for a populist cause.

Once he gets citizens used to the idea that we're going to use our collective bargaining potential to get killer deals and enjoy a higher standard of living, it'll soften them up to a gradual move toward single-payer. That could be his major issue for re-election -- "better than ever before" because we've never had a first-rate healthcare system like the other rich countries have for decades now.

Price transparency for healthcare is not a problem in single-payer

A major concern that people on the Right have raised about fixing the healthcare system is the lack of transparency in pricing.

The drug companies and hospitals don't have a menu posted like they do when you walk into a McDonald's, and if you try to press anyone there for the information, they either do not have it or will refuse to give it to you. Perhaps you'll only find out how much something cost after the fact and they've stuck you with the bill for a $20 cup of orange juice. Then you either pay it, or pay the various costs of fighting off a collection agency, or pay the costs of filing for bankruptcy.

The exact same drug by the same manufacturer in the same quantity may cost orders of magnitude more in America than in another first-world country. We don't know how much it costs here before we get the bill, and we certainly don't know how cheap it is to buy in other countries.

This opacity allows the healthcare providers to drive up prices, just as we've seen over the past several decades.

But is the lack of transparency in pricing a cause or effect of our terrible healthcare system?

The argument on the Right assumes that if we could make prices more transparent to the customer, it would go a long way toward bringing down expenditures. They would now have the information needed to shop around, play competitors off against each other, and so on.

The trouble is that people do not want to even think about prices when it comes to healthcare. Five years or so ago, the libertarian autists at George Mason economics were discussing this aspect of rising healthcare costs. Some of them (Hanson, I think) pointed out that people are in a different mindset when it comes to things like life and death, so they don't apply the same behaviors to navigate their way through healthcare decisions.

If our health is sacred and taboo, especially on the insides of our bodies where we can't really see what's going on, we just aren't going to "go there" and view it like a mundane mechanism. To the human mind, the body is not like a car with its parts and systems, so we aren't going to ask multiple health providers for quotes, ask which provider has the best reputation, haggle about the price, and so on.

It's part of the sacred realm where mechanisms and price haggling are not allowed. So we just accept whatever it costs to get better, and hope it won't cost too much.

Parishioners, sitting in the pews on Sunday morning, are not wondering if the Church scored a killer deal with whatever furniture makers made their pews. They aren't thinking, Is all that money in the collection plate going to waste because the leaders didn't negotiate a good deal on the pews? It's part of the sacred architecture, and is beyond questions of pricing when you're in the worshiping mindset.

So, even when you experimentally give people the kind of information about healthcare that they'd need to shop around, they tend not to make use of it. Those facts, figures, and spreadsheet calculations put them into the profane mindset when they're facing decisions about something sacred like their health.

This will remain a problem as long as the recipient of price information is the end consumer of healthcare. If it's a close friend or relative, it reduces to the same problem. They're too emotionally invested in their loved one's sacred health to even think of getting into the profane haggling mindset.

Single-payer systems solve this problem by making the national health boards the recipient of price information. First as an opening offer, then lowering it through aggressive negotiations by the national board. The board could also demand to see the recent or long-term history of prices for various things -- are prices going up disturbingly quickly?

These board members are in total bean counter and negotiator mode, as they are not the end consumers of healthcare goods and services being considered. Occasionally they'll be using the public system, but not at that moment for those services being examined. This allows them to keep a much cooler and rational mindset while considering prices, and trying to get a better deal from the providers.

It's no different from how those pews got purchased for the Church -- somebody somewhere in the organization looked at how much there was in the budget for pews after the collection plate had been sent around, then they sent out a request for bids to manufacturers, inspected their track record for quality, played them off each other, and negotiated a decent deal. Nobody in the sacred services had to know anything about it -- and would not want to know.

So, relying primarily on a single-payer system not only allows all the isolated little taxpayers to pool their resources and throw their collective weight around at the negotiating table. It also allows them to not make serious financial decisions when they're in sacred mode, where price is no matter, sending it off instead to someone who will be in profane mode.

You could always try to get someone else to haggle on your behalf, while not pooling resources with anyone else to do so. But then you'd have as many hagglers as patients -- why waste all those resources, when it can be consolidated into a specialist team that haggles on behalf of the entire population? Especially when a national haggler can make a more serious threat by walking away, compared to an individual haggler.

Nobody in the first world knows what most of the prices are for their healthcare services -- whether they live in America where they get raped, or in the other rich countries where they do not. Somebody other than the end consumer is thinking about prices, if anyone is at all. So price transparency is not a necessary factor in explaining why our system sucks, and fixing that problem would not be sufficient to deliver good healthcare outcomes at low prices.

The more you look into it, the more reasonable the single-payer system is, whether Canada, Australia, England, France, or wherever.

Trump for single-payer healthcare, by letting both parties prove their plans are catastrophes?

First, let's note that Trump would have to be suicidal to want his name or political brand to be tethered to the fate of the Republican reform of Obamacare.

Without 60 votes in the Senate, there can be no true, substantial repeal of Obamacare nor replacement with entirely new things like selling insurance across state lines. Even if the Senate lowered the bar to a simple majority to pass substantial legislation, there would be enough defecting Republicans (3 would be sufficient) to prevent the bill from landing on the President's desk.

So the only possible outcome is a superficial reform of Obamacare, and since the structural weaknesses of Obamacare are deep, the reformed version would also implode in short order.

Because the Republicans in Congress would have been the last to have touched the healthcare system, they would be easily blamed for its implosion. "It may not have been a perfect system, but at least Obamacare didn't fall to pieces -- you can thank the Republicans for fumbling the pass, causing the healthcare system to shatter into a million broken pieces."

That's why the Democrats and the media are not pushing that hard against Obamacare 2.0 -- just trash-talking the lack of cohesion on the other team, and trying to brag about how great their own plan has been. But not pulling out all stops as they do when Trump threatens something they truly love, like proposing the Muslim ban.

The enemy wants us to be the last party to be seen on camera handling the healthcare system right before it imploded, so that they can own all of the upside of Obamacare (covering the uninsured) and none of the downside (destined to implode). The Party of Stupid will face the opposite fate -- owning none of the upside (they showed heartless obstruction toward covering the uninsured) and all of the downside (their fault it broke if they touched it last).

Fortunately our President is not that stupid, and actually campaigned on not being the typical stupid Republican with typically stupid Republican solutions. He knows damn well how deadly it would be to own a reformed healthcare system that was still destined to implode because not enough votes in the Senate could be garnered in order to pass true, substantial "repeal and replace".

Nor is Trump, like Congressional Republicans, addicted to losing. And taking the blame for Obamacare's inevitable demise would be the ultimate own-goal.

I'm not the blackpill type, and yet I couldn't see what Trump's longer-term goal could have been, given his apparent support for the GOP's healthcare legislation. I didn't want to rush to publish a downer post about how Trump is being led into the abyss by Paul Ryan et al. Then I ran across this from Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review:

If this bill does not bring immediate relief, and in fact exacerbates the death spiral, the private market, along with GOP political capital, will be dead by 2020. The new regime will never be in place, especially not during the reelection of President Trump. We will either have a massive bail out or a single-payer system by that point.

Of course he says that like single-payer is a bad thing, and why Trump must reverse course. But then Trump is not an ideologue about single-payer, which the True Conservative (TM) crowd never tired of reminding us during the GOP primary. Take this example from February 2016 at Independent Journal Review (going after the closeted gay young Republican audience): "5 times Donald Trump praised socialized healthcare", with examples going from the late '90s through 2015.

Like Horowitz, he wrote that post like it's axiomatic that single-payer is a bad thing, and that's why no true Republican can vote Trump over Bush, Rubio, Cruz, et al.

Trump has never railed against single-payer, only saying it could have worked in an earlier time but not now, when the country is not that different from 2000 when he was praising it in detail. He used to note how much healthier Canadians are, while paying less, even when you control for demographics. He has recently said he "doesn't want" single-payer, but he's not a puritanical ideologue, so perhaps that only means he'll accept that outcome while not being the biggest fan of it.

And it's also possible that, yet again, Trump is playing dumb and letting his enemies destroy themselves, so that he can get his way easily in the aftermath.

The Democrats are bought off by the drug companies, insurance companies, and healthcare providers, so like hell they would ever advance single-payer on their own. Also, they're such kneejerk partisans that, as Trump keeps saying, they'd vote against their own utopia if Trump were the one who gave it to them.

They are easy to dispatch, by pointing out what a disaster Obamacare had always been and would have continued to be. Skyrocketing premiums and deductibles, shrinking choices, etc. -- those began long before the Republican Congress' attempts at reform.

It's the Republican opposition to single-payer that would prove more difficult. He did not defend the idea against True Con types like Ted Cruz during the primaries because he feels like abstract hypothetical debates would not drive the point home to the voters. Trump can point to the better health and lower costs for Canadians and Australians, but then Lyin' Ted can respond that America is different, we can't go for totalitarian government-mandated socialism in healthcare, and so on and so forth.

Trump would get bogged down in pointless debating, and have little to show for it. He might pick up some sympathetic Democrats in the Senate, but he would alienate many more Republicans, not to mention turn off Republican voters for whom single-payer is an abstract taboo topic.

By letting the Republican Establishment -- both the corporate wing and the libertarian wing -- have their way with the reform of Obamacare, Trump can make the case that he's been not only open to their True Con ideas, but has actively encouraged them. He looks like a negotiator in good faith, not an infiltrator and usurper of the Republican orthodoxy. More importantly, he doesn't turn off legions of Republican voters.

But since any version of Obamacare is destined to fail, Trump can let the Republican Establishment prove directly that their plans are just as disastrous as the Democrats'. It will no longer be a hypothetical debate -- I gave you guys in Congress the chance to come up with something great to replace Obamacare, and this is what happens? Folks, it looks like we can't trust the Establishment's plans for healthcare, no matter which side of the aisle it's coming from.

Then with Obamacare / Ryancare having imploded, Trump can use the emergency atmosphere to propose a bold new direction to lead us away from the failed policies of the past from both parties. "We're going to look into" a system like Australia's -- it's not going to be exactly like that of any other country, but they seem to be doing a lot better than we are, so we're going to look into what they're doing that we are not.*

Trump loathes the endless wheel-spinning of adversarial debate (he's not a lawyer), and prefers to Socratically prove that your so-called genius plan is a total horrorshow -- by letting you go right on ahead with it. Then when it blows up in your face, we'll do something different or even the opposite, and get a much better result. It's an experiential take on arguing from a reductio ad absurdum. You're so against single-payer? OK, you're such geniuses, hit us with your best shot in the opposite direction. Gee, that was an utter disaster -- looks like single-payer it is.

If Trump can lead the charge to push for a bold new system after Obamacare / Ryancare implodes, he might just be able to pick up enough liberal Democrats in the Senate to pass 60-vote legislation, or failing that, rope the Republicans into an Australian system in order to preserve what little credibility they will have after passing failing legislation. At that point, they could lower the bar to 50 + Pence, and afford a few defections. Even if an Australian-style system cost him 5 Republicans who think single-payer is tyranny, he would only need to pick up 3 sympathetic Dems like Bernie to hit 50.

Trump has been saying all along that the best thing politically is to do nothing, let Obamacare implode, and then its creators will come begging to the negotiating table.

But then Trump must be thinking the same about the worthless do-nothing Republicans as well -- let them finally get Presidential approval for their discredited corporate / libertarian plans, and then when it blows up and they face losing the Congress in mid-terms or in 2020, they will come begging for Trump to give them a winning replacement -- like the Australian system he has already had in mind for several decades. They will have no choice but to go along with it, and will be rewarded when voters see better quality at lower prices in their healthcare.

Finally, for the Americans who may have ever had a kneejerk reaction against single-payer: ask yourself why your counterparts outside of America are not agitating to destroy their own single-payer system, and why they either make fun of us or take pity on us for not enjoying such a system? They are otherwise 100% on board with the populist / nationalist movement led by Trump and others. So why aren't they harping on "socialized healthcare"?

Probably because it isn't that bad, and at any rate is better than what we have here -- admittedly not a very high bar to clear. As much as they gripe about their own system, they'd never want our own system, unless they're very rich. For everyone else, "how they do it outside America" sure looks like it gets better results at lower prices.

The working-class voters who put Trump over the top, in particular will not have a kneejerk reaction against single-payer. Not that they're kneejerk in favor of it either, like well-to-do progressives. They're simply willing to give it a try, after so many failures of conventional thinking.

Let this be a corrective to the previous post about not expecting much populism in domains where there is not a natural angle about globalism vs. nationalism. If Trump can let both Establishment sides prove their policies are garbage, he's got carte blanche for a bold new populist solution.

* I think Australia would be the best example to point to, since the Republican voters and politicians do not have a kneejerk association of Australia and the Australians with wimpiness, socialism, tyranny, etc. It would be poison to use France or Sweden as the example, for branding reasons only. It would be easier for them to accept a system that is 90% single-payer and 10% private healthcare, since they have no preconceived notions about Australia's healthcare system, but have dystopian views of "European" healthcare due to lobbyist propaganda here in America.

And certainly he would brand it with something other than "single-payer," which is too toxic among Republican voters. He's an expert brander, though, so whatever the phrase is, it'll sell.

Don't expect populism (healthcare) unless it is part of nationalism vs. globalism

Early on in the Trump campaign, I discussed how the nationalist focus would take precedence over the populist focus. That's how it unfolded during the previous incarnation of where we are now, the shift away from the Gilded Age and into the Progressive Era -- from laissez-faire and open borders to closed borders and economic nationalism.

See earlier posts here and here about income tax and the minimum wage, both of which only took off during the New Deal, after the nationalist goals had been largely achieved during the Progressive Era.

The basic logic is that the government will only be able to deliver populist outcomes when there is a high level of civic cohesion, which requires a nationalist rather than globalist focus. When millions of foreigners were pouring into the country during the Gilded Age, the founding stock Americans did not want to blow taxpayer money on subsidizing their job competitors and cultural replacements. Only when the Ellis Island people were assimilated (to the degree they were) did the founding stock feel OK with using the government to provide nice things to "all Americans".

History cannot be reversed, for example going from the neo-Gilded Age back to the New Deal. It can only run through phases of a cycle. If it goes A-B-C-D, you cannot go from D "back to" C. You have to run through A and B all over again before you find yourself in C again. This is what we ought to expect regarding the rebirth of populism and nationalism. The pure populist phase comes after the nationalist phase.

Concretely, that means we should not expect much to improve in healthcare, which is more of a pure populist battle of the general public against the greedy mega-corporations that control pharmaceuticals, insurance, and hospitals.

Trump is making major gains on economic nationalism, for instance stopping the TPP dead in its tracks and threatening big companies to bring back their manufacturing jobs and plants rather than exploit cheap labor abroad. If they refuse, they side with the anti-American side of the anti vs. pro American fault-line -- putting them in league with those who want open borders even for violent gangs and terrorists.

Already without a stiff tariff being levied, many big players are moving production back to America so that they do not run afoul of the nationalist movement. They would rather have a decent profit than no profit, if sky-high profits are no longer possible because of public hatred of off-shoring and the government now willing to act strongly on behalf of such nationalist fervor.

And it's not only the senior management at big companies who are bending to the nationalist will -- Trump can threaten any Republican in Congress with their job if they side with greedy globalist corporations over the American worker and middle class. All he has to do is launch a broadside on Twitter and roll into their home district or state -- and poof, there goes their career. No Republican can take the anti-American side, when Republican voters have chosen nationalism as their primary focus, so they will gradually come around to tariffs and other measure to re-patriate manufacturing jobs.

But what is the pro vs. anti American angle to healthcare? It's not as though white Americans have pathetic healthcare for their money compared to other white Westerners because we're being taken advantage of by foreigners or foreign governments. It's an entirely domestic battle between sociopathic big corporations and isolated citizens who have no weight to throw around at the bargaining table.

The Trump administration and the Trump movement will have little success in trying to spin the healthcare battle as one between America-first vs. globalist camps. Likewise, Trump will not be able to bully Congressional Republicans very much by painting them as anti-American, in the sense of globalists callous to the needs of their countrymen, for siding with the greedy corporations rather than the people. And given that it's the corporate lobbyists who pay Congress' salaries, they have every motive to obstruct pure populism in legislation.

There are some Democrats and Independents in Congress, such as Bernie Sanders, who would align more with Trump than the Congressional Republicans would on pure populism. However the numbers are not that great, and could be off-set by defecting corporate elitist Republicans. In general, though, there is such a high degree of partisan polarization that Trump has to choose either the Democrats or the Republicans to work with, being unable to build a big coalition between the parties. And since the Democrats are sworn enemies of Trump, they will not be the side in Congress that he works with.

Trump could only get pure populist outcomes from executive orders and the federal agencies (e.g., antitrust division of Justice Dept). If it involves actual legislation in Congress, including substantial repeal and alteration of existing laws, populism will have to wait until we achieve the nationalist goals and build a greater civic cohesion. It's conceivable that on some economic matters -- tax cuts on the ill-gotten wealth of our parasitic elites -- we will get worse outcomes in the short term.

My advice is to temper expectations about matters of pure populism, and focus more on the "intersectionality" between nationalism and populism. Issues that lie along the fault-line of America-first vs. globalism is where we currently hold the leverage against the enemy.