Your dumb House in action Tom Smith

I expected the House to come up with a really stupid way to finance medical "reform" and they did not disappoint.  Just a super-special extra tax on the super rich!  I say stupid, but I mean fraught with bad consequences.  By playing into the stupidity of us the voters, who knows, maybe it's a good idea. Let somebody else pay for it! always has a certain appeal.  Heck, I load up on the coldcuts and pickles when the university is paying for it, and get between me and an open bar at your peril.  Why not?  But try to drive in and hoover up 5% of the income of a wealthy NY or CA resident, and you are going to see serious tax planning in action.  It will not be easy to lay hands on that money, and lots of productive investment will be frustrated.  And the budget estimates over how much money this will raise anyway are probably wildly optimistic, because they don't take into account that our recovery doesn't seem to be quite on the schedule we were promised.

I'm still optimistic that this evil experiment in health policy teratology will be mercifully terminated. I just don't see anything very meaningful getting out of the Senate.  Rasputin Rahm is mumbling threateningly about reconcilliation again (which requires only a bare majority in the Senate) but if the Dems really try that, it will be holy war in the Senate, and the Republicans can throw up many parliamentary tricks to slow it down.  Reconciliation would really be a scorched earth strategy. Intrade puts passage of health care refore at 38%, which seems a bit high to me, but it's well under 50% anyway.

This is pretty darn consequential, however you look at it.  If health care does pass in anything like the House form, it will be really, really bad.  In addition to my prospects of a comfortable, pain free old age with all the drugs I need to keep those important parts running being much diminished, it will be a budget buster.  The talk of Save Money By Health Care Reform! is utter rubbish that no one believes, cheaper than cheap talk.  Indeed, it would be so bad, I just don't believe our Senate, philandering, ignoble squids though they may be, would do something so irresponsible. I expect the House to behave like rabble and they have done so.  So my cautious hopes lay with the Senate. Anyway, if health care goes down, and it should and probably will, it will be a major defeat for our young President.  It will be spun and spun, and the MSM will do all it can to ease the blow.  But it will still be a turning point in the history of this young adminstration.  Maybe it will mean a merciful end to the hyperventilating over the New Transmorgifying Even Better than FDR Super-New Deal!! and Big Government is Back By Golly!, and all that other post-election drunkenness that has been disgracing our public squares of late.  Maybe we will have heard the last of the painfully intelligence-insulting trophe of We Must Lay the Foundation of a True Recovery By Borrowing Astonishing Gobs of Money and Spending It on Nonsense! Our young president actually ran around saying such things as, we wouldn't be in the financial mess today if we had socialized medicine a long time ago!  I mean, huh? If this health care charge is beaten back, all will change, and it will turn out that it wasn't such a big priority after all and some new path will be shown to us that leads to Obama's transfiguration.  But I will still be able to get my bypass when the time comes.

Comments

[Jonathan]

Nonsense. The best 30-year-old minds in the country are working around the clock on this problem. What could go wrong?

[krome]

The problem almost every workaday person seems to have as to understanding why these tax schemes are futile (and counterproductive) is that very wealthy people don't get their money in even fortnightly check installments.

Wealthy people can exercise a lot of flexibility over how and when (and where) they get paid. And a million dollar a year guy - working like a dog for it, will eventually find a tax rate where it is no longer worth the great effort and relax his eforts down to a merely comfortable salary range.