If anyone deserves anything, I do!
Filed Under (Politics) by Don C on 14-10-2007
Yes, I’ve been over to Malkin’s site a few times lately. She’s good, I just haven’t been over there in a while. I like the way she has her front page setup too.
Anyway, in her “top story” Friday Michelle asks:
Question for grown-ups: Who deserves government-subsidized health insurance?
Well no matter which side of the argument I’m taking, I want to go ahead and get it on record now that I deserve government subsidized health insurance. If anyone deserves it, I do. Actually probably more than anyone else.
Of course Michele is right in the strict sense that any such plan will not be insurance. The Chips plan as well as Hillary’s upcoming plan completely redefines what the term “insurance” means. It’s still the same old Hillary Care as before; it’s just being called “insurance” now. It all depends on what the meaning of insurance is, isn’t it? We’ve seen this tactic used before by the Clintons? Very clever.
But I have a couple of problems with leveraging these useful idiots, the Frost’s, for a counter-attack against socialized medicine. First and foremost is that the debate should not be about who deserves government subsidized insurance, but rather it should be about whether the government should be involved in subsidizing health care for anybody in any way whatsoever. I say no.
Other than that, as someone who tends to lean more towards the conservative point of view, I don’t think it is a good idea to give a bunch a free stuff to poor people just because they are poor just like I don’t like to light my cigarettes with dollar bills. Rewarding people who are willing to take responsibility and who try to give something back in exchange for the air they breathe is a much better way to distribute the government’s largese. What someone deserves is much different than what one needs.
Take this guy Frost for example. He might not be the brightest bulb but he–along with his parents, obviously– is raising four kids who will be amongst those paying for most of our social security benefits if we of a certain age manage to get anything at all. I’m only kicking in two kids. How many are you kicking in? A lot of people aren’t having kids or they only have one or two. So, do the math for yourself, its not that hard. I’m just saying, it seems to me like a good investment to be sure as many kids as possible grow up to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Unless we import a lot of worker’s — that would be immigrants — we of a certain age can kiss any socsec benefits goodbye. Maybe there will be something else in place by then; maybe there wont. But I’m getting way off-topic here.
Michele convincingly lays it out that the Frost’s are not needy by any reasonable measurement of poverty, they are just irresponsible ne’er-do-wells. Well here:
What if I told you I drove these three cars (photos are showroom models [Go there to see them]):
A Volvo SUV… A GMC Suburban… And a nice, big Ford F250 Pickup work truck…
(I bet MM would look hot driving that big truck!)
And what if I told you, further, that I owned a large home and commercial property worth at least $400,000 in total–property for which I paid a total of $215,000?
And what if I told you, in addition, that I was resourceful enough to cobble together financing (through scholarships and other means) for private school education for four children?
And what if I told you that neither I nor my spouse were employed full-time–one of us working “intermittently” and the other “part-time”?
Would you consider my family “exactly the kind” and “precisely the type” of family that should benefit from S-CHIP, the government-subsidized health insurance program intended for the “working poor?”
Too bad we can’t all afford to kick it in la-la land while someone else foots the bill. However Frost’s description is too damn close to a regular entrepreneurial type trying to get a small business rolling to feel comfortable with him taking a shellacking like he is. Maybe he is suffering from depression, or something. Ever think about that? If we could help him out a little bit maybe he could manage to get his assets to work in a way that better serves the community.
I wouldn’t have as much problem doling out some health benefits to someone who had an employee or three working in that $400,000 commercial property for whom he was struggling to provide health insurance; someone not afraid to take some risks, to get out and do their own thing; someone building a business and providing opportunity for others to make a decent wage and to have some decent health insurance; someone trying to provide a decent education for his own children. Now that’s somebody who deserves a break. Other than the lazy part, Frost sounds just like me and a lot of other entrepreneurial types I’ve known over the years.
Or more accurately, his circumstances sound just like how I was a few years ago. Now I don’t occupy any commercial property or own any work trucks or employ any people or provide health insurance to anyone. I was audited by the state comptroller and was slapped with a $100,000 tax bill for not collecting sales tax from giant out-of-state multinational corporations who maintained the position that out of state entities did not have to pay state taxes on services. According to a finding by an administrative law judge, the out-of-state corporations were supposed to be paying the sales tax. Furthermore, since I didn’t collect the taxes correctly, I was responsible for paying them. Yeah right.
Of course I could have back-collected the taxes from my customers, companies like CitiBank and Household Financial. Mom and Pop vs. Citibank. Right. The state of Texas should have slapped the small business owners on the wrist and went to the large financial companies to collect the taxes, but they knew better: big corporations don’t like to let go of a dollar and it’s much easier to bully the money from mom and pop than to get it from the ones who actually owe it. Doesn’t matter if the government puts several small businesses so far in the red it’s not worth trying to climb out of.
Like Hillary once said in answer to those who complain about the heavy financial burden of regulatory compliance funding socialism, “I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized small business in the country.” The reason why it is so outrageous to propose giving socialized benefits to the middle class is that it amounts to taking money away from people and giving it right back to them in the form of government services. Subtract out the percent that covers all the graft and corruption that exists in any operation run by the government and there is just not enough money to do it. Even more maddening is that if regulatory compliance funding socialism didn’t already cost so much, more people and small businesses could afford to buy their own health insurance.
If you keep pulling the thread to see where it goes eventually socialism always leads to the government taking everything and providing for everything and the eventual collapse of a civilization. So taking that into consideration, the best way for conservatives to defeat these never-ending attempts to socialize America is to include everybody from the get go. Any benefits proposed will have no means testing and if it’s available to one, it is available to all.
Heck, if you don’t want to give free money/insurance/health care/cheese to people like Halsey Frost, give it to his father since he’s the one spending his retirement to raise his grandchildren.
If you think SChips is bad, wait till Hillary Care. It’s coming right down our throats if Hillary gets elected. To Hillary it doesn’t matter what’s in the plan, or what it’s called. All that matters to Hillary is that Hillary gets to finally be in charge of it all. Mwuhuhuhu!
The best way to win the war on terror is to elect Hillary and then tell her we can’t do Hillary Care until the terrorists are out of the way.
