JO3 ✝️🙏

I was surprised at how much Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security are now propping up local economies and personal incomes If you look through the data, Medicare/Medicaid have become the biggest sources of income for particularly non-metropolitan areas. Some stats in the data: - Government transfers are now 17.6% of all personal income in the US, up from about 8% in 1970. Medicare and Medicaid are 46% of all government transfer dollars! - 53% of counties get more than 25%+ of their income from government transfers (this covers about 72M people). - Kentucky seems to be the home of the Colonel and government transfer programs. Twelve of the top fifteen counties receiving government transfers are there. Owsley County gets 63% of personal income from transfers, and Medicaid alone is 32% of all income in the county. Those government transfers via Medicaid/Medicare get transmuted alchemically into jobs. Phoebe Putney Health System has 6000+ workers and is the largest employer in southwest Georgia. Dougherty County, where it's based, gets 34% of its personal income from government transfers. In New York we have a program that pays friends and family as caregivers. In 2023 it grew by 57,000 jobs and became 38% of all job growth in the state (they’ve made changes to the program now that have flattened it). We have become a country of healthcare jobs with a propping of government dollars. Is that fine? I think this grand bargain worked for a while. We were still seeing economic productivity, government spending hadn’t yet gotten too crazy, etc. But a few things are happening now that suggest the bargain is falling apart.