Newsroom – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

The tax burden is measured by the ‘tax wedge as a percentage of total labour costs’ – or the total taxes paid by employees and employers, minus family benefits received, divided by the total labour costs of the employer. Taxing Wages also breaks down the tax burden between personal income taxes (PIT), including tax credits, and employee and employer Social Security Contributions (SSC)

Key Taxing Wages results in 2011 included:

The highest tax wedges for single workers without children who are earning the average wage in their country were observed in Belgium (55.5%), Germany (49.8%) and Hungary and France (49.4%). The lowest tax wedges on the same basis were in Chile (7%), Mexico (16.2%) and New Zealand (15.9%) The average for OECD countries was 35.3%. (See Table 1)
The average overall tax wedge, for those earning the average wage, increased by 0.3 percentage points between 2010 and 2011. This was largely due to PIT. Of the 26 countries where the tax wedge rose, in 18 the PIT wedge also rose, most notably in Ireland (+3.8 percentage points), Hungary (+2.4 percentage points) and Portugal (+1.4 percentage points). Falls in the overall tax burden were also primarily due to PIT changes – the largest decrease was in New Zealand where the tax wedge fell by 1.1 percentage points due to changes in the income tax rates in 2011.
The United States was the main exception to the rule. The overall tax wedge fell by 0.9 percentage points in 2011, due to a decrease in employee social security contributions which outweighed an increase in income taxes resulting from the expiry of the temporary “Making Work Pay” non-wastable tax credit.
The highest tax wedges for one-earner families with two children at the average wage were 42.3% for France, 40.3% for Belgium and 38.6% for Italy. New Zealand had the smallest tax wedge for these families (-1.2%), followed by Chile (7%), Ireland (7.1%) and Switzerland (8.4%). The average for OECD countries was 25.4%. (See Table 2).
Single people in Hungary faced the biggest increase in the tax burden, but families with children enjoyed the biggest reduction due to a reform of the child tax relief scheme that changed from a tax credit to a more advantageous tax allowance in 2011.

In all OECD countries except Mexico and Chile, the tax wedge for families with children is lower than that for single individuals without children. The differences are particularly large in the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand and Slovenia.

Government investment needed in new economies – latimes.com

For more than three decades American venture capitalists have concentrated their activities and earned their returns in a very small number of industrial domains. In booms and in slumps, in bull markets and in bear markets, the information and communications technology and biomedical sectors together have consistently accounted for 80% of venture capital investment.

Why has it been in the world of information technology and, secondarily, biomedicine that venture capitalists have been successful? In brief: Only in these sectors did the state invest at sufficient scale in scientific research and in its translation to working technology. In over 40 years as a working venture capitalist, I learned that my colleagues and I and the entrepreneurs whom we backed were all dancing on a platform constructed by the federal government.

Let’s focus on information and communications technology. National funding of the basic research that enabled the IT revolution was overwhelmingly provided by the Defense Department. The Soviet threat, crystallized in the years after 1945 and amplified by the Korean War in 1950 and the launch of Sputnik in 1957, was the context for the U.S. military‘s massive commitment to renewing its wartime role as the principal financier of technical research and the principal customer for the products that generated.

The scale of research and development funding was substantial. For 25 years through 1978, federal sources accounted for more than 50% of national R&D expenditures and exceeded the R&D expenditures of the other governments in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development combined. From microelectronics and semiconductor devices through computer hardware and software and on to the Internet, development of all of the components of digital information and communications technology reflected state policies for R&D and procurement.

There is a larger lesson here. Over some 250 years, economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error and error and error: upstream exercises in research and invention, and downstream experiments in exploiting the new economic space opened by innovation. Each of these activities necessarily generates much waste along the way, such as dead-end research programs, useless inventions and failed commercial ventures. In between, the innovations that have repeatedly transformed the architecture of the market economy, from canals to the Internet, have required massive investments to construct networks whose value in use could not be imagined at the outset of deployment.

At every stage, the innovation economy depends on sources of funding decoupled from concern for economic return. As economists have long recognized, such funding will not be delivered by competitive markets. Only an active state in pursuit of politically legitimate missions — national development, national security, conquering disease — can play the required role.

Thus, from the Erie Canal to the Internet by way of the transcontinental railroads and the Interstate Highway System, the American state has played a strategic role in the deployment of the transformational technologies that have created a succession of “new economies.” In disregard of this history, forces have been at work for a generation to delegitimize the state as an economic actor — even as the next new economy can already be defined in broad strokes.

CARPE DIEM: AMA: The Strongest Trade Union in the U.S.A.

From Mark Perry’s Carpe Diem blog:

As a follow-up to the post below on Milton Friedman’s Mayo Clinic talk on the “economics of medical care,” I present the two charts above.

The top chart shows the number of annual graduates from U.S. medical schools (AMA data here) per 100,000 U.S. population, from 1962 to 2011. Between about 1970 and 1984, there was a significant increase in medical school graduates that pushed the number of new physicians from 4 per 100,000 Americans in 1970 to almost 7 per 100,000 by 1984. Since 1984, the number of medical school graduates has been relatively flat (see red line in bottom chart), while the population has continued to grow, causing the number of new physicians per 100,000 population to decline to only 5.3 per 100,000 by 2008, the same ratio as back in 1974. Over the last few years the number of medical school graduates has increased slightly, and the ratio of graduates per 100,000 increased to 5.56 last year, the highest in a decade.

The bottom chart compares the actual number of medical school graduates (red line) to the projected number of graduates if the number of new physicians had keep pace with U.S. population increases, i.e. the ratio of graduates per 100,000 Americans had stayed at the 1984 level of 6.91. In that case, we would now be graduating close to 22,000 new doctors annually, and the cumulative increase in medical school graduates from a rate of 6.91 per 100,000 population over the last 27 years would mean that we would have 84,000 additional physicians today.

Medicare SGR sticker shock adds urgency to pay reform campaign – amednews.com

Medicare SGR sticker shock adds urgency to pay reform campaign

The price tag of a one-year Medicare payment patch rises to $25 billion as calls continue for a permanent measure to overhaul the program’s pay system.

End-of-Life Health Care – NYTimes.com

Fortunately, advance planning for end-of-life decisions has been going on for years and is continuing to spread despite the demagogy on the issue in 2009. There is good evidence that, done properly, it can greatly increase the likelihood that patients will get the care they really want. And, as a secondary benefit, their choices may help reduce the cost of health care as well.

Many people sign living wills that specify the care they want as death nears and powers of attorney that authorize relatives or trusted surrogates to make decisions if they become incapacitated. Those standard devices have been greatly improved in recent years by adding medical orders signed by a doctor — known as Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment, or POLST — to ensure that a patient’s wishes are followed, and not misplaced or too vague for family members to be sure what a comatose patient would want.

Fifteen states, including New York, have already enacted laws or regulations to authorize use of these forms. Similar efforts are under development in another 28 states. The laws generally allow medical institutions to decide whether to offer the forms and always allow patients and families to decide voluntarily whether to use them.

With these physician orders, the doctor, or in some states a nurse practitioner or physician assistant, leads conversations with patients, family members and surrogates to determine whether a patient with advanced illness wants aggressive life-sustaining treatment, a limited intervention or simply palliative or hospice care.

The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism | Rick Perlstein | The Baffler

Ever wonder why right wing talk sponsors are so loyal?

In 2007, I signed on to the email lists of several influential magazines on the right, among them Townhall, which operates under the auspices of evangelical Stuart Epperson’s Salem Communications; Newsmax, the organ more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and Human Events, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite publications. The exercise turned out to be far more revealing than I expected. Via the battery of promotional appeals that overran my email inbox, I mainlined a right-wing id that was invisible to readers who encounter conservative opinion at face value.

Subscriber lists to ideological organs are pure gold to the third-party interests who rent them as catchments for potential customers. Who better suits a marketing strategy than a group that voluntarily organizes itself according to their most passionately shared beliefs? That’s why, for instance, the other day I (and probably you) got an advertisement by way of liberal magazine The American Prospect seeking donations to Mercy Corps, a charity that helps starving children in the Third World. But back when I was getting emails every day from Newsmax and Townhall, the come-ons were a little bit different.

Dear Reader, I’m going to tell you something, but you must promise to keep it quiet. You have to understand that the “elite”would not be at all happy with me if they knew what I was about to tell you. That’s why we have to tread carefully. You see, while most people are paying attention to the stock market, the banks, brokerages and big institutions have their money somewhere else . . . [in] what I call the hidden money mountain . . . All you have to know is the insider’s code (which I’ll tell you) and you could make an extra $6,000 every single month.

Soon after reading that, I learned of the“23-Cent Heart Miracle,” the one “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about.” (Why would they? They’d just be leaving money on the table: “I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product,” read one of the testimonials. “I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven’t had open-heart surgery.”) Then came news of the oilfield in the placenta.

“Dear NewsMax Reader,” this appeal began, leaving no doubt that whatever trust that publication had built with its followers was being rented out wholesale. “Please find below a special message from our sponsor, James Davidson, Editor of Outside the Box. He has some important information to share with you.”

Here’s the information in question: “If you have shied away from profiting from the immense promise of stem cells to treat disease because of moral concern over extracting stem cells from fetal tissue, pay close attention. You can now invest with a clear conscience. An Israeli entrepreneur, Zami Aberman, has discovered‘an oilfield in the placenta.’ His little company, Pluristem Life Systems (OTCBB: PLRS) has made a discovery which is potentially more valuable than Prudhoe Bay.”

Davidson concluded by proposing the lucky investor purchase a position of 83,000 shares of PLRS for the low, low price of twelve cents each. If you act now, Davidson explained, your $10,000 outlay “could bring you a profit of more than a quarter of a million dollars.”

Not long after I let the magic of the placenta-based oilfield sink in, I got another pitch, this one courtesy of the webmasters handling the Human Events mailing list and headed “The Trouble with Get-Rich-Quick Schemes.” Perhaps I’m a little gullible myself; for a couple of seconds, I believed the esteemed Reagan-era policy handbook might be sending out a useful consumer advisory to its readers, an investigative guide to the phony get-rich-quick schemes caroming around the right-leaning opinion-sphere. But that hasty assumption proved sadly mistaken, presuming as it did that the proprietors of outfits likeHuman Events respect their readers. Instead, this was a come-on for something called“INSTANT INTERNET INCOME”—the chance at last to “put an end to your financial worries . . . permanently erase your debts . . . pay cash for the things you want . . . create a secure, enjoyable retirement for yourself . . . give your family the abundant lifestyle they so richly deserve.”

Hurricane Sandy: beware of America’s disaster capitalists | Naomi Klein | Comment is free | The Guardian

The prize for shameless disaster capitalism, however, surely goes to rightwing economist Russell S Sobel, writing in a New York Times online forum. Sobel suggested that, in hard-hit areas, Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) should create “free-trade zones – in which all normal regulations, licensing and taxes [are] suspended”. This corporate free-for-all would, apparently, “better provide the goods and services victims need”.

Yes, that’s right: this catastrophe, very likely created by climate change – a crisis born of the colossal regulatory failure to prevent corporations from treating the atmosphere as their open sewer – is just one more opportunity for further deregulation. And the fact that this storm has demonstrated that poor and working-class people are far more vulnerable to the climate crisis shows that this is clearly the right moment to strip those people of what few labour protections they have left, as well as to privatise the meagre public services available to them. Most of all, when faced with an extraordinarily costly crisis born of corporate greed, hand out tax holidays to corporations.

The flurry of attempts to use Sandy’s destructive power as a cash grab is just the latest chapter in the very long story I have called the The Shock Doctrine. And it is but the tiniest glimpse into the ways large corporations are seeking to reap enormous profits from climate chaos.

One example: between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed or issued relating to “climate-ready” crops – seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme conditions such as droughts and floods; of these patents close to 80% were controlled by just six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta. With history as our teacher, we know that small farmers will go into debt trying to buy these new miracle seeds, and that many will lose their land.

What do top hospitals have in common? Not as much as you think.

Researchers at the Atlas looked at how the top 23 academic medical centers, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, provide care to their patients. Their results show huge variations in how the very best hospitals care for their sickest patients.

A patient at New York Presbyterian Hospital can expect to spend 20 days in the hospital during the last six months of life. The average Mayo Clinic patient would have 10 days in the hospital over the same time span.

At the University of Utah, the average patient sees 20 doctors during the last six months of life. At the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in California, that number is 73 physicians.

A patient at UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Hospital is three times as likely to have a fall or injury while in the hospital than one at Cedars Sinai, also in Los Angeles.

“We know these differences cannot be explained by the prevalence of diseases,” Goodman says. “Yes, populations differ. Those are small differences we see compared to the dramatic differences in care.”

PLOS ONE: Healthcare Reform and the Next Generation: United States Medical Student Attitudes toward the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

Of medical students surveyed, 94.8% agreed that the existing United States healthcare system needs to be reformed, 31.4% believed the PPACA will improve healthcare quality, while 20.9% disagreed and almost half (47.7%) were unsure if quality will be improved. Two thirds (67.6%) believed that the PPACA will increase access, 6.5% disagreed and the remaining 25.9% were unsure. With regard to containing healthcare costs, 45.4% of participants indicated that they are unsure if the provisions of the PPACA will do so. Overall, 80.1% of respondents indicated that they support the PPACA, and 78.3% also indicated that they did not feel that reform efforts had gone far enough. A majority of respondents (58.8%) opposed repeal of the PPACA, while 15.0% supported repeal, and 26.1% were undecided.

Conclusion

The overwhelming majority of medical students recognized healthcare reform is needed and expressed support for the PPACA but echoed concerns about whether it will address issues of quality or cost containment.