Perspectiva económica: Martínez-Solanas

This is in a nutshell my own condensed analysis of the French universal health care system, combining universal coverage with a public-private mix of hospital and ambulatory care and a higher volume of service provisions than in the United States. It must be understood when studying the French system that universal coverage can thus be achieved without excluding private insurers from the supplementary insurance market.

The French health care system was rated the best in the world by the World Health Organization in 2001 while the US health care system ranked 37th. In 2004, France spent 10.5% of its gross domestic product (GDP) and it increased to 11.5% of GDP on health care in 2017. By contrast, the US spent 18% of its GDP on health care in the same year. Payroll taxes in France provide 53% of funding, with employers paying 80% of the tax and employees paying the rest. In addition, a national earmarked income tax contributes 34% of funding, and State subsidies account for 1% of funding.

Universal coverage was achieved over seven decades by extending statutory health insurance (SHI) to all employees (in 1945), retirees (in 1945), the self-employed (in 1966), and the unemployed (in 2000). In 2000, the Couverture maladie universelle (Universal Health Coverage), or CMU, was created for residents not eligible for SHI, although the program required yearly renewals and entitlement changes whenever a beneficiary’s professional or family situation changed. After the implementation of CMU, fewer than 1% of residents were left without baseline coverage.

La tendencia de un poderoso sector del Partido Demócrata que se identifica como "Progresista" (un eufemismo para encubrir su filiación socialista/marxista), la cual suele imponerse al más amplio pero más débil sector "moderado", se ha caracterizado por enormes gastos en proyectos federales, en considerables aumentos en el presupuesto nacional y en la deuda pública y, en consecuencia, por altas y crecientes tasas impositivas. Esta tendencia puede perjudicar gravemente a los propietarios de bienes raíces, sobre todo a los que son propietarios de la casa o el condominio donde viven.

El plan fiscal propuesto por Biden/Yellen en el proyecto de ley de presupuesto, desencadena una situación que puede ser insostenible para la clase media: Si posee algo que ha adquirido más valor con el tiempo, incluida la casa donde vive, Jenny Yellen cree que debería pagar impuestos por el aumento del valor de su propiedad. Lo afirmó nuevamente esta semana en Capitol Hill, cuando propuso gravar las ganancias no realizadas (Unrealized capital gains) de los activos heredados y también de los bienes raíces. Para quienes no son expertos en temas económicos, las "ganancias no realizadas" son las que figuran solamente en el papel y no representan un ingreso adicional para el propietario de algo que NO ha vendido. Igualmente para el que ha heredado activos que habían aumentado de valor durante los últimos años. Por tanto, ¿qué significa eso? Sencillamente que millones de estadounidenses recibirían una cuenta adicional de impuestos, la cual sería impagable para los propietarios de menores ingresos y muy onerosa para el resto de la clase media. En otras palabras, enfrentarían una deuda que estarían obligados a pagar con un dinero que no tienen o perder sus propiedades.

When there is a stock market crash signaling a recession, stagflation, or severe depression, what we are experiencing is a sudden and very large drop in the value of stocks in the markets, causing a hasty sale of stocks and other securities by investors and some institutions. When the underlying value of the companies that issue the shares suddenly collapses, their price also falls proportionally and the resulting situation is the loss of much of the money that people invested and, in extreme cases, as in the Great Depression of last century, the loss of all your invested capital.

The hackneyed argument of the stock market as a capitalist den of speculators and millionaires is false. The indisputable reality is that there are countless small investors who have accumulated their life savings and invested them in stocks and that almost all citizens who have worked in the country have their pension funds invested in mutual funds and securities that pay substantial interest or dividends or in investment programs known as 401(k) that exempt them from taxes.

The serious problem for those who depend on these investments to have an additional income or a decent pension is when a market collapse occurs precisely when they have to sell some of these securities to cover unforeseen expenses or when their pension income is barely enough to cover essential expenses of their monthly budget.

What Causes a Stock Market Crash?

A stock market crash is caused by two circumstances: a dramatic drop in stock prices and the resulting panic. Here's how it works: Each of the shares owned represents a small stake in a company, and the investors who buy them make a profit when the value of their shares increases or when they receive interest or dividends approved by the company's board of directors. The price of these shares depends on the opinion of the majority of investors at that time about the value and future prospects of that company. So if they think the company they're investing in is headed for tough times, they sell those stocks in an attempt to exit before their value falls.

The reality is that panic plays as much (or more) a role in a stock market crash than the actual economic problems that cause it. There is an obsessive reaction that irrationally drives scores of investors to dump their shares at whatever price they can get, and the market plunges into a full-blown crash.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, man has created over 100,000 unnatural chemical compounds, spewing or spilling them into the air we breathe, the soil our plants are grown in, and the water we drink. These chemicals enter the plants and the system of animals who ingested them and when we eat meat or fish, and even some vegetables, it goes into our system.

In addition, man has contributed and is contributing to the disaster with the increased radiation to our environment from all nuclear bomb tests and nuclear plant disasters, with microwave radiation, with thousands of medications which the body recognizes as toxins, with fuel emissions, with pesticides, insecticides and a world of household chemicals and with processed foods containing harmful additives, among other things, plus the humongous use of plastic products.

The October issue of Consumer Reports (CR) reveals the horrendous "plastic legacy" we are leaving to future generations; an inheritance that they will not be able to get rid of due to its insidious characteristics. In addition to the world-wide contamination that is causing, the major problem is that plastic products take vast amounts of time to breakdown. It takes plastics an average of over 500 years to degrade and a huge portion turns into "microplastic" in the process of degradation; that is, it turns into myriads of tons of microscopic particles contaminating our food, the air and water. We eat them, we drink them and we breathe them.

The microplastic polluting the seas and oceans are consumed by plankton which travels up the food chain and eventually is consumed by us. This is extremely harmful to us, as microplastics contain chemicals such as BPA that interfere with our hormonal regulation and DEHP which is carcinogenic. And the body has no way of getting rid of them. In addition, marine life mistakenly consumes plastics for food, which causes these products to stay in their stomach invariably long periods of time as they are not biodegradable or digestible. Consequently, these marine animals starve to death with them being unable to consume enough food with their stomachs full of plastics, reducing fish and other marine food stocks.

According to the CR magazine, we are talking of about 5,000,000,000,000 plastic bags per year (over 5 trillion), over 30 billion plastic bottles that find their way to the ocean per year, some 160 million disposable razors used just in the United States (the overall number for the whole world is not known), etc., etc.