Health Care to Be Capped at One Trillion

I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

---Barack Obama
September 12, 2008

YAY! Congress is now vowing to come up with a health care reform bill which will only cost us a trillion dollars. That is good, because I really did not want to pay any more than a trillion. Let's not forget, however that Obama got elected by promising the people that only the rich will pay for all the change he hopes to stick us with. Everyone else will see no increase in any tax whatsoever. Especially not the middle class. Obama is all about protecting the middle class and doing for the middle class and strengthening the middle class and never making them pay for any of the lollipops. He said it and he meant it and he said it more than once. And a lot of voters believed it.

The rich will pay and we shall all party! And they won't mind because the "rich" people in this country are loaded! How much does the bill for the health care bill come to, per rich person? If "the rich" comprise two percent of our society which currently stands at about 304 million people, that amounts to 6.08 million people paying the entire bill for the new health care plan.

A trillion dollars spread over 6.08 million rich people is $163,447 per elitist, good-for-nothing rich taxpayer. Piece of cake! That is hardly a drop in the bucket for the rich, right? Well not exactly. Remember, that is more than half the pay of many of the rich. And those people have other taxes to pay (state income tax, for example). Will they have anything left over? Or will they become poor through taxation? (Wow, the irony.)

Rich is anyone making over 250K. Obama said so. And 163K is more than half of that! But wait, I may have overstated that cost. Congress for some reason is giving us a ten year cost and not an annual cost.

Why a ten year estimate? I don't know why they don't want to figure it on an annual basis instead of on a ten-year basis. They are saying they will keep costs to one trillion over a ten year period. What happens then? We all are cured, no more health care needed? Plan canceled, no more payment necessary? No...... No. I am afraid there are going to be continuing costs to this dreamy health care plan, from now until we are all dead and gone. So that is 100 billion needed every year. And that brings us down to having each nasty old rich person pay only $16,447 per year to foot the bill for the entire country. That sounds a lot more affordable. Oprah Winfrey and Sean Penn etc, won't even notice. Quite a few not-very-rich, rich people might have to pull their kids out of private school or not buy a new car or not move to a new house, but who cares? (Well, actually, the people who are making the fancy houses and cars that the rich people buy will care when some of them get laid off. And the kids attending the private schools on needs-based scholarship will care when some of those schools close or severely cut back on programs due to loss of revenue. But I digress.)

And truly, it IS a graduated tax scale. So those at the bottom of "the rich" won't pay the average. But those who are at the top of "the rich" will see their taxes increased by more than the cost of my house each and every year. If they decide to stay in the country, that is. And they all will, because Biden has said it is very patriotic to pay taxes. And what is more pleasant than to write a nice fat check in the amount of several hundred thousand dollars to the IRS when you know you are helping out a whole nation?

Oh darn, there is more to add in to the final bill, however. Now I see that I have actually UNDERstated the cost. Health care is only one small part of what we are all going to get, and what the rich are going to pay for. They are also going to pay for everything else! EVERYTHING ELSE!

If you make less than a quarter-million dollars a year, which includes 98 percent of small-business owners, you won’t see your taxes increase one single dime. Not your payroll taxes, not your income taxes, not your capital gains taxes, nothing.

Barack Obama
October 16, 2008

So who is left? The poor are not going to pay. In fact we are already paying the poor, so they really don't pay taxes at all. So there is only the filthy rich. They will get the whole soaking. Obama promised.

Just go ahead and add in Cap and Trade and the 787 billion dollar stimulus bill we already had, and stimulus bill number TWO, which we are told is coming whether we like it or not. And pretty soon you are talking about some real money you can add to the 16K per year each rich person is going to pay for health care. So it adds up, but we are talking about those disgusting greedy rich people here and everyone knows the rich have money to throw away. The rich will handle it. None of those rich people are going to retire early, or move to a more tax-advantaged Caribbean Island or anything. They and Obama know that we need them, and they have got our backs. So they will be staying here and working harder than ever. And working very long hours and even neglecting their families to keep making lots of money. Just for us. 'Cause we're special. We're the middle class and we deserve it.

So what are you worried about? You can go back about your business. Nothing to see here.

Three Percent Sounds so Small

Gag me with a spoon.

If you can stand to read the White House propaganda linked above, you will find that, on top of everything else we have already forked out in his first 100 days, our man Obama thinks we ought to devote another 3 percent (at least) of our GDP to research and development...(creating) new policies that invest in basic and applied research, (creating) new incentives for private innovation, (promoting) breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and (improving) education in math and science.


New policies that invest in basic and applied research?? What does our young green president think we have already been doing? Is he trying to make us believe that this country does not already invest massive amounts in basic and applied research? We have colossal government taxpayer money pouring into research already, through NASA, through the Department of Agriculture, through federal grants to a huge number of universities, through NIH. And we have an amazing level of private investment as well in a large range of scientific and technological areas, or as he would call it, basic and applied research. A free market economy excels at investing in the scientific breakthroughs of tomorrow, allowing its people to invest where they see the problems, to find solutions a government could never imagine.


Our GDP was 14.33 trillion dollars in 2008. And Barack Obama wants to spend at least another three percent of that. Three percent never sounds like a lot, but why the heck isn't he man enough to come right out and say that he is talking about 420 billion dollars?? I'll tell you why. Because that is one heck of an unaffordable lollipop and Obama knows that the working, taxpaying people of this country are sick and tired of spending another several hundred billion dollars every time he gets out of bed in the morning. Especially on things like education, energy, medicine and private innovation, for gosh sakes, which we already spend PLENTY ON! We already outspend any other nation on education, but he wants to take more of your money away from you and fritter it away on a problem which can't be solved with more dollars. If more and more money has not fixed education by now, there is little reason to believe that spending more money will bring us results. Breakthroughs in energy and medicine? Helloooooo! We are the most innovative country on Earth with regard to both! It is time to appreciate what we have been doing, and more importantly, it is crucial for Mr. Obama to learn a little something about the country he lives in, and to try to understand HOW we managed to do it.


We elected a very naive young man. He said in his address to the National Academy of Sciences,

I believe it is not in our character, the American character, to follow. It's our character to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again.

Obama seriously thinks we lead because it is somehow embedded in our character? Surely not! The reason we have been leading is that we have a framework which allows our people to live largely government-free, and to do the things which only people (not government) are capable of, including keeping a lot of their money so that they (the people who know best how to spend their own money) can invest it as they see fit and use it to create amazing things. We call that framework our Constitution, and that is what makes us great, not the fact that we are some kind of natural leaders. We are really just like any other people, no better, no more talented, no smarter. It is our framework which allows the individuals of this nation to be all we can be and to create things which are rarely, if ever, dreamed of in more tyrannical or totalitarian societies which control the people through socialistic economies driven by oppressive taxation.

By taxing the people enough to devote an exorbitant three percent of GDP to governmental research, Obama will quickly kill everything which he says he wants to bring about in this country which is already great for reasons obviously unknown to Obama.



Hot diggity damn, if you want Obama's wishlist of inventions to actually happen, you have to let the money and the rule-making stay with the people. Only the people, using their own money and resources, and free of onerous government regulation and control, can create what the current leader of the (current) free world says he wants, things such as

solar cells as cheap as paint; green buildings that produce all the energy they consume; learning software as effective as a personal tutor; prosthetics so advanced that you could play the piano again; an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge about ourselves and world the around us.

Bureaucrats will never make any of the above happen. No one can legislate genius into existence, no one can collect enough tax to force people to create clever things. No one can make government large enough to bring the world to perfection. Not even Obama.

If we want to keep advancing as a nation we have to keep reminding Obama and all the congress people who seem so very much in love with him, that governments don't create. Only people create. And the government has to be kept very small to allow the people to blossom. The best way to create new incentives for private innovation is to leave the resources in the hands of the individual and never let government get its grubby hands on them!

What Lincoln Removed, Let Obama not Bring Back

Obama is trying to model himself after the great Abraham Lincoln, who, by the way said and believed this:

"Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."

But Obama does not seem to share Lincoln's view. Obama wants to hand out a long list of goodies for the populace, a list of goodies which will be given continuously, now, and forever more. Obama does not particularly want to encourage people to amass wealth on their own and become rich as Lincoln admired. But there is an issue with all of that so-called "giving". The problem with a president who hands out lollipops, is that someone has to pay for all that expensive candy. And who might that payer be, you may ask? OOH, I know! The rich! The rich are just swimming in money, so let's take the money from them, how about that? We are an incredibly wealthy nation, and if we can't manage to share all the trappings of the rich, with all the unfortunate people, then what good are we? How can we look at ourselves in the mirror every morning? No, this will never do. We must take from the rich and give to the poor so that we will have "equity".

This is the thinking of the Obamas. They think the rich are loaded with ill-gotten gains, and that they ought to be made to share all that wealth that somehow just landed on them because they were so lucky. But here is the little secret. The rich, as it turns out, are rich, because the rich work. And they work very hard, most of them. A lot of the wealth in this country is held by very hard-working small business owners, many of whom have taken on a considerable amount of risk to get to where they are today. And here is another truth about the rich. They tend to have a few brain cells.

The rich can see that, under an Obama administration, they are speeding towards higher taxation. They know, too, that they already pay a huge percentage of the entire tax bill for the country. Do you think they want to pay more? Maybe. But maybe not. Particularly when they see the money wasted, going to bail out losing businesses, and to keep Nancy Pelosi happy and smiling, as she flies herself and her family around the world in her special DOD airplanes; and as they subsidize those who don't pay their fair share....our Secretary of the Treasury among them.

No, the rich may decide to go on a bit of a strike. They might decide to cut back on those long hours they work. They might decide to hire less people, giving themselves less to worry about. Why work hard and spin so many plates in the air? Maybe they are close to retirement age? A lot of them might just throw in the towel and retire early. Doctors, for example. The most experienced doctors in your community might soon be closing up shop and heading for no-tax states, such as Florida. All of that will result in less work done by the rich, less spending by the rich. And less tax paid by the rich.

We have already seen the destruction of many of the rich, courtesy of Madoff and the many Madoff copycats. Guess what? The rich ponzi scheme victims won't be paying so much tax any more, now that their holdings are wiped out. Ditto for people who lost half their stock market holdings since it became clear that Obama was going to be elected. And we have seen tens of thousands of jobs lost on Wall Street. Oh darn....some of those people were making big salaries and paying a shedload of tax. That is over now, for many of those people, as they head off to other careers at lower salaries. And the tax they once paid? Well that is over for US now. Gone. Those receipts will never be so high again.

It will be interesting to see what happens as we go forward. Will the rich continue to work extremely hard and take great risk so that they can have the great privilege to buy all the lollipops for the rest of us to enjoy? I hope so! Because if the rich go on strike and stop paying just a portion of the massive share of the tax which they now pay, there is only one group of people left to pay the the remaining, still massive, tax burden.....now let's see.....which group of people would that be?

Oh wow.....looks like you and I are going to have to work ourselves to the bone to pay for the unaffordable lollipops Obama has foisted upon us. We will be paying for years, for decades, for centuries (if this country which Lincoln fought so hard to keep together, lasts that long). We will soon be working to keep the government going, even though the government is supposed to be working for us. Great. So maybe Obama's delusions of grandeur involving himself and one of our greatest presidents are not so crazy after all.

A List of the Lollipops

Here is a veritable treasure trove of information about how stimulus money might be spent, especially intriguing because you can register your opinion! Citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed "shovel-ready" projects in their own cities can find, discuss and rate those unaffordable lollipops, from the new silver led recreation center in Annapolis, Maryland, to the Tannery Arts Center Working Studios in Santa Cruz, CA. If you are already familiar, you can even go so far as to use the wiki feature to add the facts you know right into the description. If you don't know about a project near you, maybe you would like to give your local officials a call and start asking questions. Your local officials will spend the money more wisely if they know you are watching.

Obama has promised to invest stimulus money in a wise way and now it is up to us to make sure that happens, holding public officials to account for the FEDERAL taxpayer money they spend for their local projects. Should federal moneys be used in this way? No. It is not the province of the federal government to tax the citizens all over the land in order to help local areas clean up playgrounds and make nice little bike trails and outdoor museums, etc, etc. After all, the job of the federal government is to pay for federal responsibilities, like defense. But as Obama and Pelosi have pointed out time and time again, they won the election. So they are going to engage in this crazy big spending anyway. Let's just not roll over, however, and let them fritter away this money without hearing an earful from us.

The lollipops on this list of stimulus projects seem to come in two varieties:

ONE: Projects which the local population do not believe are worthy of funding. We all have limited finances, and therefore, we have to set priorities. It is safe to assume that large numbers of items on this list are items the locals did not feel were worthy of their own local tax dollars!

TWO: Projects which the locality had already budgeted money for. (The jurisdiction involved will now simply shift the moneys, and spend their own local taxpayer money on something else). Kind of a shell game, with the federal taxpayer (that would be you and me) being the dupe.

You can find projects by searching or by browsing by locality or program type. Once you find a program, there are three things you can do:

1) vote on whether you believe the project is critical or not; (and see how others are voting)

2) edit the project's description and points in favor or against, and

3) post a comment in the conversation about the project.

Dig in, and let us know what you find. A lot of this stuff sounds just lovely and sweet, as unaffordable lollipops so very often do. But other projects are just unabashed horrendous wastes.

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The Fast Track to Redistribution of Wealth--the Destruction of Your 401K

The Wall Street Journal knows what is going on in today's economy and it is not pretty. Notable lines:

Most of (Obama's) "stimulus" spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest....The market has notably plunged since Mr. Obama introduced his budget last week, and that should be no surprise. The document was a declaration of hostility toward capitalists across the economy.

Health-care stocks have dived on fears of new government mandates and price controls. Private lenders to students have been told they're no longer wanted. Anyone who uses carbon energy has been warned to expect a huge tax increase from cap and trade. And every risk-taker and investor now knows that another tax increase will slam the economy in 2011, unless Mr. Obama lets Speaker Nancy Pelosi impose one even earlier......................The powers in Congress -- unrebuked by Mr. Obama -- are ridiculing and punishing the very capitalists who are essential to a sustainable recovery. The result has been a capital strike, and the return of the fear from last year that we could face a far deeper downturn. This is no way to nurture a wounded economy back to health.........
Listening to Mr. Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, on the weekend, we couldn't help but wonder if they appreciate any of this.

ARE YOU LISTENING, PRESIDENT OBAMA?

And, perhaps more importantly, to those who were excited to cast a vote for Obama: Are you understanding now what kind of change you have voted in?

I have trouble believing that this is really what America is hoping for, and it certainly ought to be becoming clear now, that when the capitalists take their ball and go home, it becomes increasingly impossible to buy the unaffordable lollipops any society would, in a perfect world, like to have.

One way to equalize the income differences in a population might be to simply remove a massive amount of wealth from a large number of people. Let's hope that this kind of redistribution of wealth is not in any way a part of Obama's plan.

Send a Tea Bag to the White House!

There are many things we want in life, but some of them are just unaffordable. And so it is with government. That is why it is important to keep government small and run it as cheaply as we can. BUT, It is now crystal clear to Americans that the man who seeks to "make government cool again" has climbed aboard a freight train of spending. He wants big government and he wants it now. This we must stop, because otherwise we are going to have to pay, and we will be paying too much! As always, the middle class will bear the burden, because there are not enough so-called "rich people" to fund these wide-reaching and permanent costs. Already the congress is approving bills which will limit the tax deductions which the middle class are used to having. Removal of deductions is known as a tax increase! So no matter what we were told by the Obama campaign, the middle class will indeed see substantial increases to their taxation. Don't put up with it!

The time to speak up is now. Perhaps you would like to join the New American Tea Party and send a teabag to the White House. Address in the clickable bumper sticker at the top of the page.