Which Dead Ideas will be first to go?

I’m participating in a discussion of Matt Miller’s new book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, which I’ve gushed about here already, over at the TPMCafe Book Club this week. Here’s my first post:

When I was reading through the seven Dead Ideas in Matt’s book, I got most excited about “Your Company Should Take Care of You” and “Taxes Hurt the Economy (and They’re Always Too High).” That’s partly because they’re the chapters are full of wonderful historical detail–about the rise of the corporate welfare state in the U.S. and past debates over tax policy–that I wasn’t very familiar with. It’s also because the ideas are so flawed and the fixes so straightforward: Get employers out of pension and health care provision, and raise our taxes enough to pay for what we want government to accomplish.

But Robert Litan’s second thoughts about the inevitability of higher taxes got me second-thinking too. My reactions to a book like this aren’t very good proxies for what the likely political realities are. So I’m curious, Matt (and all you TPMCafe commenters): Which of your Dead Ideas do you think are likely to keel over first?

Stocks Rally Further in Run-up to EU Summit

MOSCOW — Global stocks enjoyed one of their best days in weeks on Tuesday ahead of a summit of European leaders that’s expected to be dominated by calls to boost economic growth.

Europe remains the focus of attention across all financial markets in the run-up to the June 17 Greek election that could go a long way to determining the country’s membership of the euro as well as the future of the single currency zone.

http://www.124monkeys.com Sean DeCoursey forgot his password

I’m pretty sure “employer provided health care” and “taxes will go up” can cancel each other out. Killing the insurance companies would free up so much $$ and resources its not even funny. Actually, it’s kind of sad in a depressing type of way.
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Seriously, fixing health care would reduce medicare/medicaid costs, increase corporate profits, and wage earnings. more profits+wages = more tax receipts without raising rates. and reductions in medicare costs reduce the need for future tax increases. kind of hits the problem on both ends.
tc125231

I would agree with Mr. DeCoursey’s post, for the most part. Those who read Krugman’s blog regularly are always struck by the number of hard statistics from a wide variety of sources he can bring to bear on the proposition that our health care system is broken.

The numbers consistently appear to show three things:

1.Overall outcome comparisons, like infant mortality and life expectancy, are much worse;
2. Statistics that can’t be attributed to demographics and lifestyle (a frequent McArdle ploy) such as deaths per treatable illnesses, are much better in places like France and Sweden;
3.The U.S. spends way more than countries with much better outcomes per capita.

However, really fixing this involves getting rid of quite a few dead ideas. How likely is that? I think the jury is still out.
Ffred

I think moving the health care and pension infrastructure from corporate to government level could greatly contribute to a new form of economy, one that emphasizes not so much growth (as in cancer or gas) but sustainability and agility. These ideas have been hashed over before (notably by Ralph Nader, not that I would ever have voted for him for president), but as tc points out, who knows if/when their time will really come?