Children in the Playground: They Don't Know How to Share

One friend, a Republican, tells me that corporations should not pay taxes because they just factor the cost of taxes into the cost of their product; hence we, the consumer, end up paying those taxes.

Another friend, a Democrat, tells me that corporations consume huge resources in the process of making big bucks—from roads to schools to air traffic controllers to police protection—and that their tax burden does not come close to how much they benefit from the public trough--to which many corporations pay no taxes.

Imagine you are an accountant working for “Midas Touch, Inc.” You look at the financial projections and see that at the end of the fiscal year there will be a billion dollars of profit on the books.

A choice startles you: you can pay taxes on that money or you can give it away to the corporations’ many executives as bonuses, evaporating all the profits and enriching your officers in process.

Which would you do?  GE pays no federal taxes. It took in more money than most nations have in their treasuries last year. Most American corporations pay no federal taxes.

Imagine ice cream. Imagine that all the ice cream factories in the country organized to provide ice cream only through ice cream insurance. You could no longer just pick a grocer and buy ice cream.

You now had to buy ice cream insurance and hope you’d be reimbursed for that cone you bought your daughter. The price of the cone would now reflect, not only the cost of the ice cream and the salary of the grocer, but also the executive salaries and overhead of the ice cream insurance companies.

It sounds absurd but that is exactly what has happened to health care. We don’t pay doctors. Health insurance companies do. And they regulate our medical care through their corporate policies—policies that guarantee a profit for their executives. The purpose of a health insurance corporation, like the purpose of all corporations, is to make as much profit as possible.

Why would we allow this to happen? Our health care does not need an insurance bureaucracy layer any more than our ice cream needs require an insurance layer. But if we all paid for health care the way we all pay for ice cream we’d all pay Haagen Dazs prices for our health care (because our health care is Haagen Dazs quality).

But we could pool our money and negotiate those prices—driving the costs down. That’s what a single payer system does. That is why Medicare is so successful.

When people get sick doctors make money. When people get sick hospitals make money. But why, because people get sick, should accountants and insurance companies also make money?  It makes no more sense than ice cream insurance.

We need a government that will change these absurdities. We need to find a fair way to tax corporations whose profits we know are astronomical. We need to find a way to make health care as safe as water and as available as air and as affordable as ice cream.

We can do this—but only through the collective role of good government. Don’t give up. Demand it. The recent brawl over the federal debt ceiling would make a cynic of any rational person.

Resist it. Hold onto your skepticism but reject the temptation to withdraw—turning the country over to King Midas, Inc. If we value our democracy we need to come together to demand that our government makes things make sense.