A Little News - A Month Late

So, I meant to blog on this a month and a half ago, before the health care debate got into full swing, when one of the proposals coming out of the Obama administration was running directly counter to the idea of "insuring everyone". He proposed making injured vets cover any cost of their injuries out of private insurance if they had it. To me, this is ludicrous. These are men and women who volunteered to help their country, to protect freedom, and to ensure the safety of not just American citizens, but many citizens from many countries. If they are injured in the line of duty, it should be the nation's obligation to take care of them. They were hurt in an endeavor to take care of us. Think about it - if they were injured on the job, their employer would be culpable - this is why certain industries have such high insurance rates and death benefits - because they are so inherently risky. Trying to make these people pay for injuries acquired in the line of duty is just silly.

Not to mention that it is a killer for these men and women when trying to find a job. What employer is going to want the level of liability of caring for a long term injury? The unemployment rate for military personnel returning from duty is already about twice what the national average is, and this will only exacerbate the problem.

So I guess this administration wants to provide health care for everyone... unless you are an injured veteran. I don't think that this is an attempt to "get revenge" on soldiers following the Bush Doctrine, as some paranoid nuts might; rather, it is a cost cutting technique to shave money away from the defense budget to try and cover the massive outlays in spending that are projected over the next several years by the CBO (and by the way, the CBO is non-partisan, but always tends to undershoot spending projections, and overshoot income predictions from raised taxes, so look for the deficit numbers to be much worse than they project). Either way, however, it is a horrible idea, both morally and fiscally.

Basically, they are trying to find any way possible to pay for health care - a segment of our economy that is something like 20% of GDP (not sure on this number, just going from memory - look it up and verify if you want); if the government subsumes this responsibility it will be taking over a huge segment of the national economy, something it is seldom, if ever, successful at.

Speaking of paying for health care, why do you think the carbon tax was actually passed? Everyone on both sides agrees that it will not help the environment (this is borne out by the data coming in from Europe, check it out - carbon emissions haven't declined at all, unless you pick a baseline that is favorable, and even then, that only works with the numbers from Britain). Why do you think he floated the idea of taxing your health care benefits as income? Oh yeah, those are both huge regressive taxes, by the way - the carbon tax is based on consumption of a good that everyone uses, so the poor and middle class bear the brunt of that one (since they are larger segments, they pay more) and it amounts to a greater percentage of their income, and health care benefits again make up a larger portion of the income of the middle class, so who do you think is going to be impacted by this? For example, my employer pays 3/4 of my premium for my insurance, amounting to an expenditure of about $4000 per year - taxed at about 25 or so percent, depending on my deductions and income for the year, just a rough guesstimate there, that would be about $1000 extra in taxes per year, or almost $100 less a month if this were to pass... and guess what, I make well under $250,000 per year (who am I kidding, I don't even make half that), so I guess that whole promise about only taxing the rich was a bit of a stretch, huh? How else do we pay for a trillion plus in extra spending?

More forthcoming, even if you don't want to hear it.

And, yes, I know that the money my employer pays for my health insurance is effectively money paid to me and therefore could be legitimately taxed as income (though I have no choice in how that money is spent) that wasn't the point - it really is just that this is yet another broken promise. Are all you moderates who bought the rhetoric, hook, line, and sinker happy yet? And do you really think that if an employer pays for a government premium, that it would be taxed? If you do I have a bridge to sell you, and that would be even more unfair "competition" for the private sector (like there is any fair competition between public and private sector - the only place this even sort of happens is in education, and that is because public education - no offense to all the good teachers out there - is a bureaucratic nightmare, and people are willing to double pay for education to avoid the public system - once in taxes for the public system, once in tuition for the private system - that is how inept government is at running things. You want you health care run like the VA, the post office, the public school system, and the IRS? You can have it, but that is not my idea of a healthy America).