He said if you go back to about 1960, corporate taxes were about 4 percent of GDP and now they're about 2 percent of GDP. At that time, healthcare was 5 percent of GDP and now it's 17 percent of GDP. "So when American business talks about taxes strangling our competitiveness," he said, "they're talking about something that as a percentage of GDP has gone down from 4 to 2." Meanwhile, medical costs have exploded. "So medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness," he said.
In some other reporting, he also said that healthcare would kill the economy. What he ignores, of course, is that healthcare has been, and is, a very strong employment driver. IOW, healthcare does good by doing good. Or, to put it another way, your taxes drive wages and thus inflation by producing un-consumables as nucular bombs and aircraft carriers. Healthcare, OTOH, produces a consumable product. A virtuous circle, as different from the vicious cycle of defense spending.
This time, the Oracle is wrong.
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