Free Cough Drops vs. Strangling Taxation

From Thomas Sowell comes this tidbit of reason:

"Any one of us can reduce medical costs by refusing to pay them. In our own lives, we recognize the consequences. But when someone with a gift for rhetoric tells us that the government can reduce the costs without consequences, we are ready to believe in such political miracles.


"There are some ways in which the real costs of medical care can be reduced but the people who are leading the charge for a government takeover of medical care are not the least bit interested in actually reducing those costs, as distinguished from shifting the costs around or just refusing to pay them."

Now seriously think about this: would you really prefer to lower your medical costs by shifting their expense (and control over them) to the government while you pay higher taxes and make do with whatever level of health care government bureaucrats deem best for you? If so, support the "worst bill ever."

What More to Say?

TEAPARTY,   FALLON, NV

Da Data Obfuscates

A "Beer Tax Won't Reduce the Clap"...well, this is just a caution from Forbes.com for lefty loonies public health luminaries and a plug for the condom industry.

Cheers!

Salud!

In trying to get the college students in my remedial English classes to understand pronoun "voice," I'd point out that the first person voice is the one most important to everyone: me, myself, and I. Next important is the second person: you (or the archaic, but descriptive thee... with whom I am most familiar). At the bottom of the totem pole is the third person: they and them (can you hear the curl of the lip?).

There are of course some economic and political corollaries here: foremost for me is good for me, second good for thee, and after that good for her or him or them...way over there. It is human nature to seek our own good first of all. Of course that's selfish, so in our better moments we strive to be altruistic, and that's when we mess up.

We err because, as economic guru Thomas Sowell explains so logically: everything is connected to everything else (even ice cream and catchers' mitts), so "it makes no sense to declare some given goal a 'good thing,' without regard to the [economic] repercussions, which spread out in all directions..." His example is the "good" of home ownership, which brought about the [bad] financial repercussions, including job losses, we suffer today.

Repercussions are something to think about now that the Obama administration has declared health insurance for all Americans a "good." The administration claims its interference in 17 or so percent of our economy can be done painlessly...without increasing the tax burden of average, middle class Americans a dime or reducing existing coverage or hampering medical innovation  or souring doctor/patient relationships or increasing the national debt... or falling victim to any of the multiple dislocations suffered by any of the existing national health plans in other nations. These claims are incredible.

But the political corollary may well be that national health care is a political boon for Democrat politicians...perhaps lasting just long enough for Obama to maintain his current (somewhat depressed) popularity and even to insure his reelection in 2012  before the full catastrophe becomes apparent to the least informed citizen. In that case, our only hope may be to drink to our health.

Waltz Me Around Again, Willie!

It's so much fun being courted. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) kept mum until the last minute today before casting her vote with the Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee in support of the still-to-be-written Baucus health bill.

BUT, it was just her vote for today and today only, she said. There will be many more days when the attention craven apostate Republican will drag her feet before crossing the aisle to vote with the opposition once again. Why not just switch parties? Well, who would fawn over her then?

Choose to Lose?

Here's some serious, and therefore a little long (8 printed pages), reading for the day for those whose attention span was forged without the impediment of electronic media. Writing in The Weekly Standard, the inimitable Charles Krauthammer points out that if America is in decline, it isn't because there's a "post-American" world out there cutting our hamstrings, "decline is a choice."

Unfortunately, decline is a choice the left and the Obama administration want to make. From Obama's inability to understand American exceptionalism (NB his idiotic response that everyone is exceptional) through his apology tours to his acceptance of a peace prize for diminishing US leadership, the president displays a willful ignorance of international politics, coupled on the home front with policies that weaken the nation's defenses and undermine the national economy...all to the cheers of our enemies and the consternation of our allies.

Krauthammer believes this nation should accept its role as hegemon, "as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen." Resistance to falling to the status of a "normal" nation among nations (say, Italy or Lichtenstein) means having "moral confidence" and also a big wallet.  Krauthammer points out that we are not in "inherent" economic decline...we can choose to end the slow suicidal bleed of deficit spending. We can  strengthen the dollar not by protecting unskilled labor but by continuing to champion the technological innovation and new industries of the information age and by responding seriously to our energy crisis with drilling offshore and in the Arctic and moving to nuclear energy.

Brass Brains and This Isn't Fiction

Here's a story of your stimulus money in action...meet Benny, De'Andre, and Jesus, Chicago scholars in "Walk Fast" from American Thinker.