Soaking the Rich and Other Rainy Day Thoughts

Ladies and gents - thanks for checking back frequently. As some of you know, I gave birth on June 7 to a healthy little girl. We've been resting and recovering from the surprisingly rapid labor and delivery (four hours!), and so I've decided to return with quite the thorny issue:

Jack Cafferty asks his readers: Fair to soak the rich to pay for health care reform?

Thorny indeed. (Full disclosure - we're in a middle class bracket.) When reading the comments, I see one word that most of the readers are alluding too: UNFAIR. Unfair that there are millionaires with their "inbred doggies", endless loopholes in the tax system specially for them, and that by being (or getting rich), the upper classes deserve to be hosed for universal health care. The GOP gave tax cuts to the rich and that is unfair. The rich got lots of money and won't share the toys in the sandbox and that's unfair.

Sorry about being bitter. Don't get me wrong - when I was in California and we lost our corporate benefits, I agonized over my health history and wondered if there was a preexisting condition that would prevent me from getting my own health coverage. I have a clean bill of health, but there was a small skin tag I had treated, and I was wondering if that was reason enough to hit my wallet with a higher deductible. It was expensive, too. I understand the pains and risks of not having health insurance - I dreamed about all of them before we were able to get covered. However...

I find it hard to understand why the rich and upper classes are being harangued by the middle and lower classes because they feel that they need some punishment. If America provided them the opportunities to get rich, some people reason, then they should be taxed to pay for all the nation's problems with funding government programs. Even though that same government has a few spending issues of their own.

My problem rests within the government, not the rich. The government makes the rules, and the rich know how to bend them; it's something that has been standard for decades now. They will find ways to reduce that little income number on their taxes every year and finding ways to deduct their assets. What I'm more concerned about is that the government will find a way to get more money to spend on a universal health care plan that doesn't work. This is why my husband and I are not depending on Social Security returns when we are old enough to get them: Social Security and Medicare are in trouble. We had predicted this when we first got married, and our retirement plans do not include this to fall back on.

This is a comment from Cafferty's talking point. I'm 99% sure this guy is being sarcastic, and it sums up an important difference between conservatives and liberals:

Why don’t we just make it illegal to make money? We should cap income at $100,000 and tax away whatever is left and give it to those who haven’t worked as hard their whole lives. Let’s tell people they don’t need to worry about working hard to get ahead because as long as you are breathing, you deserve as much as the next guy. Let’s penalize people who get higher education and those that acquire unique skills that are worth a premium. We can all live the utopian dream and live in the same cookie cutter home built by the government and go work every day in our government designated jobs. It will be a dream. Personally I cannot wait until the government starts outlawing “junkfood” in the name of preventative care because it may lead to more health problems it has to pay for.

Yup, like taxing sugary drinks. (Interestingly, the above commentary comes from a gentleman in California, the king state of tax-now-pay-later and law books that could paper the square footage of the moon.)

Conservatives want small government. They want to operate on their own terms, build their own businesses. Liberals generally want big government. They want to help resolve issues for the lower and middle classes through social programs, more operating like a coherent unit rather than a bunch of small villages. Neither way is perfect and both have great advantages.

So who do we go with? Do we follow a more conservative approach by letting insurance companies battle for our health business? Or do we follow the liberal street and let the government try to solve the problems created by private insurance? Mind you, if we take a socialist view of this, there are going to be other problems; neither way is perfect.

I say we start with not looking to the rich class as an enemy. While the press tends to focus on rich folks who swindle their way in this life, there are many more who quietly live and work like the rest of us, some even providing jobs and charity. Once we get past our jealous chants of "UNFAIR," we should look at the bloated health care system and figure out a way to keep more folks out of hospitals. I worked at a hospital once, and the cardiology floor was always full. Always. The floor that housed diabetics was nearly as full, too. We are a fat bunch of folks who need to stop depending on the health care system to cure our fat kids of childhood obesity, our chronic need for blood tests for cholesterol and diabetes, and incentives for people who stave off preventable diseases.

Sure, dumb things happen and accidents are unavoidable. But I'm sick of listening to the poor and middle classes screaming at the rich, pointing their fingers at them and saying it's all their fault whenever there is suffering that involves high taxes or being poor. It's not. The disparity between the rich and poor gets bigger every day, but forcing the rich to stoop down to lower standards and ambitions is not the way to solve this problem. We need success stories more than ever right now, to be honest. We need folks to stop complaining. We need to find a way to cut our own health care costs before we can expected a bloated, indebted government to "fix" it for us. Don't just answer the question; how about find a solution?

As a postscript, I'm not sure what I believe in regards to how our tax brackets are set up. Some commenters in Cafferty's talking point bring up the percentage of taxes they pay, the ultra-rich paying a smaller percentage of their income than middle classes. A socialist tax method, similar to the GST tax in Canada, may be part of the solution, but the bottom line is that the government badly needs our money to operate their unbalanced books. If it's not for health care, it will be for something else, and the middle class will continue to bear a lot of the burden, likely more so than their poorer counterparts.

I leave you with a quote from Scott, from Cafferty's talking point. While Scott is pretty blunt with his thoughts, I do tend to agree: The amount of folks who truly need social services is small compared to those who want an easy way in this world by crying UNFAIR. I think we could easily support those who are truly disabled or in need of help if we all had a bit of honesty in us:

Why is it ok to take money from people who work and give it to those who don’t? We were all born with brains, maybe we should use them and accept responsibility for the choices we make in life.