It’s not a matter of profit. It’s a matter of costs.
From the graphic the insurers take in $371.6b and pay out $241.9b in medical services costs.
That’s $130b on a pointless activity that uses up physical resources that would be better deployed elsewhere in the economy.
Healthcare needs to be provided as a matter of course, and “competition” won’t improve it or control it because there is always a supply side shortage of provision.
That’s a difficult problem to solve, but solving it by forcing a huge bill on expectant mothers and cancer victims, etc in a futile attempt to control demand is not the way.
Which is why the rest of the world charts a different path.
"This million dollars can be lent out to another person as a mortgage"
It can't. It isn't. And it never has been.
What banks do is provide liquidity against your collateral. You sell them a charge over your house (for example), and they give you a credit for it. That credit can then be passed on to other people.
Banks are in the business of discounting. They don't take anything in and give it out to other people. [0]
Turn plain English into sharper, more professional LinkedIn wording. Rewrite post drafts, About sections, bios, and comments in a style that feels more polished and platform-ready.
Comparing a currency issuer like the US to currency users like Italy and Greece is a category error. You can compare Alaska to Greece or California to Italy. But you should compare the US to other currency issuers - like the Eurozone, Japan or the UK.
It’s rather more simple than that. In a floating exchange rate world, which is the one we live in a dollar is just a 0% bearer bond.
So when a government bond matures it is replaced automatically with a simple bank deposit. It’s nothing more than an asset swap.
“People with savings” are precisely why there is a “debt” in the first place. When they spend those savings they pass tax points which then creates the tax that retires the “debt”.
To put it in simple terms the “grandchildren” will “service the debt” using the counterparty “savings assets”inherited from their “grandparents”.
Don’t fall for the standard narrative. It’s not true.
That confuses two points. Employees sell labour hours. At the basic living wage those hours are interchangeable between all people offering them. Even to the extent of age or infirmity. That’s what “unskilled labour” means.
The conversion of those hours into labour services is why the private sector is allowed to profit. If they want “better quality hours” then they have to bid up the price of those hours.
That should be market determined, rather than being administratively set as the gap between unemployment benefit and the minimum wage. You’ll be surprised how well the private sector can use hours once they see people doing the basics of turning up on time and doing something.
When we sentence offenders to “community service” we give them a job as rehabilitation, along with all the support mechanisms to straighten out lives. If we can do that for offenders, we can do that for everybody.
Yet the state pension tells us that isn’t the case. The state pension is a UBI allocated by age rather than physical area. We have millions of data points showing that when people receive sufficient to live on they stop working.
The result is political pressure to remove the state pension or increase the age at which it is received.
If UBI worked as you suggest then the resulting increase in productivity would drive the state pension age down not up.
The evidence is against you. Giving people money reduces productivity and makes it more difficult for firms to get the labour they require, and at huge cost to the state that uses up the finite taxation space there is available.
Except that doesn’t work as there remains a systemic shortage of jobs on offer.
The societal deal with the private sector is that it employs everybody at a rate that allows an individual to live in return for the chance to make a profit. A job guarantee ensures that the private sector overall cannot shirk that responsibility.
If the private sector does its job, nobody will be employed on a job guarantee.
You have to work if you want to get paid. Otherwise you will get fired. The obligation of the state is to provide you with a guaranteed alternative job offer, not a guaranteed income.
It’s up to you if you take up the state’s offer or not.
The UBI removes the motivation to work and turns everything into volunteering. The result is a rise in the “reservation wage gap” - the amount the private sector has to pay to get people to work for them.
The reservation wage gap with a job guarantee is near zero - which is more economically efficient.
Additionally the job guarantee acts as a powerful spend side automatic stabiliser that is temporal and spatially efficient - which removes the need to manipulate the base interest rate allowing it to return to its natural rate of zero. This allows permanent cheaper mortgages and business loans.
We're not writing code in a computer language any more, we're writing specs in structured English of sufficient clarity that they can be generated from.
I suspect that is where we will be going next - automated verification. At least to the point where we can pass it over the wall for user acceptance testing.
Is it possible to write Cucumber specs (for example) of sufficient clarity that allows an LLM agent team to generate code in any number of code languages that delivers the same outcome, and do that repeatedly?
Then we're at the point where we know the specs work. And is getting to the point where we know the specs work less effort than just coding directly?
You'll get the same software in outcome terms. Which is what we want.
Tokens are cheaper than getting an individual to modify the code, and likely the tokens will get cheaper - in the same way compilation has (which used to be batched once a day overnight in the mainframe era).
Non-determinism is how the whole LLM system works. All we're doing with agents is adding another layer of reinforcement learning that gets it to converge on the correct output.
That's also how routing protocols like OSPF work. There's no guarantee when those multicast packets will turn up, yet the routes converge and networks stay stable.
I think this fear of non-determinism needs to pass, but it will only pass if evidence of success arises.
From the graphic the insurers take in $371.6b and pay out $241.9b in medical services costs.
That’s $130b on a pointless activity that uses up physical resources that would be better deployed elsewhere in the economy.
Healthcare needs to be provided as a matter of course, and “competition” won’t improve it or control it because there is always a supply side shortage of provision.
That’s a difficult problem to solve, but solving it by forcing a huge bill on expectant mothers and cancer victims, etc in a futile attempt to control demand is not the way.
Which is why the rest of the world charts a different path.