Hi Peter,
I first discovered you on youtube a few months ago and have been listening to you every now and then. I’m a staunch fiscal conservative and really just wanted to introduce myself to you and let you know how much I appreciate the work you’re doing. In 10-15 years, I also want to own a company – I will start my own private practice one day. Unfortunately, the healthcare situation is only getting worse and the current administration certainly isn’t making matters any better. All this federal regulation by the FDA, etc. is stifling innovation. No matter what the issues with cost of health care in the US, we have always been at the pinnacle of health care technology…until now. Did you know that for the first time ever, we have more people leaving the United States to get operations done than we have people coming here for them? Many other countries now have better technologies that we cannot use because they haven’t been stringently tested enough in US despite a preponderance of evidence for their success worldwide.
Here’s a little more about me – I’m 21 years old and finishing up my second year of medical school in Philly. My parents emigrated from Sri Lanka in the early 1980s with the clothes on their backs and a suitcase full of $1 bills. They lived in a studio apartment while my father worked upwards of 16 hours a day and my mother went to college to become a nurse she wanted to become a doctor but didn’t have the means. Eventually, they both did extremely well for themselves – my mother is now a nurse practitioner and my father is a civil engineer for the NJDOT. He actually started a small company Janoct Home Builders on a whim and after several failed endeavors he lost a lot of money on the first house he tried to design and sell, he started selling homes upwards of $1 million. He hasn’t tried to design and sell a home in the past 5 years because of the housing market, however. We are by no means rich, but we are a successful middle class family. My parents’ story proved to me that the American Dream is still alive and well. They even raised two doctors-to-be in the meantime my brother is in the last year of his neurosurgery residency.
Anyway, I just wanted to show you where I come from and start this conversation with you. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of your minimum wage videos and I couldn’t agree with you more. I do have one question, however. Do you have any statistics/evidence for the claim that even though taxes on the rich were higher in the past, there were many deductions/loopholes, etc. so people actually paid less? It seems like there should be a record of that somewhere but when I have this conversation with my extremely liberal peers, I get stuck there because I have no hard evidence for it.
Thanks for listening,
Hareindra
