McCain would provide refundable tax credits of $2,500 for individuals, and $5,000 for families, for all those who buy health insurance.
This, in itself, is not all that interesting, except that what McCain is offering is a huge give-away of our tax dollars to the insurance industry disguised as a health care plan. Coincidentally, Obama is offering pretty much the same thing. The problem with these plans is that insurance does not equal health care.
It is the job of the insurace industry to make money off of policy holders. They do not make money by paying out claims. Therefore, every insurance company has an army of people whose sole purpose is to deny paying for medical expenses. I am not faulting the insurance companies for this; they figured out how to make tons of money by not providing the services they promise, so bully for them. My issue is with the notion that having the government pay for peoples' insurance is the solution to the problem. It is not; it is merely feeding the beast.
But perhaps that is an issue for another time.
In the AP article, there is also this:
Employer contributions toward health insurance would be treated as income, meaning workers would have to pay income taxes on it.
Hmm... Couple that with this quote from the Houston Chronicle:
Companies that provide coverage to workers still would get tax breaks.
McCain's plan is to pay for health insurance credits by taxing workers for the amount that their employer contributes. According to the Chronicle, McCain's advisor Doug Holtz-Eakin states McCain's plan would raise "an estimated $3.6 trillion in revenues."
So to sum up McCain's philosophy, we need to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy; we need to reduce or eliminate taxes on corporations; but it's OK to raise taxes on hard-working Americans to the tune of 3.6 trillion dollars.
So to every non-millionaire conservative, I ask this: how do you reconcile voting for a candidate who states flat-out that he's going to raise your taxes?
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5 comments:
hey Mike, I think that this is only half of the problem. My republican brain tells me that spending needs to be in check before either candidate should get any more taxes from the peeps. the hard working americans you are referring to are already paying very little tax. The less you make the less you pay. The government needs to spend less period before any new programs get enacted IMO :)N
Nikki, You're right about getting a handle on spending. I thought it was interesting when the Dems took over Congress after the '06 elections and in the House one of the first things they did was enact pay-as-you-go, meaning they couldn't introduce any spending bills that increased the deficit. The first time they broke it, I believe, was for this year's economic "stimulus" package. So what we really need to control government spending is more Democrats in office. :)
"My issue is with the notion that having the government pay for peoples' insurance is the solution to the problem."
I sense a too-common perceptual glitch in that statement. The government won't pay for people's insurance under any circumstance, people will.
The real choice in all this is whether the insurer will be a government entity acting in the public interest as a service to all Americans, or a large collection of commercial outfits whose first priority is profit, not service, and whose first loyalty is to investors, not patients.
Here's an interesting side note on spending and the major parties.
Several decades ago, Democrats and some others used to joke about deficit spending, "Don't worry, we owe it to ourselves." It was kind of a double entendre meaning, in one sense, that we owed whatever the money was being spent on to ourselves, but also meaning that in the end, Americans were borrowing from Americans who would eventually benefit from being repaid with interest, and thus pay more taxes and spend more, thus strengthening the economy.
For all it was a joke, there was a strong element of truth to that.
Over the past three decades the game has changed drastically. We now borrow hand over fist from China, Saudi Arabia and other places we have no business being up to our eyeballs in debt to.
This means that along with all the jobs we're sending abroad, we're also paying principle plus interest on a staggering amount of debt — $750 billion in the short run alone for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And that particular debt is growing at a rate of $3 billion to $4 billion a week just for Iraq. Add interest in the out years and we're blowing up around $2 trillion on Mideast wars, one of which was completely unnecessary.
Being a somewhat liberal Democrat,I had no problem with open-handed deficit spending in the old days, provided the money was used for something worthwhile. Today, I'm much more in favor of restraint, unless it's to pull us out of a jam such as an imploding economy.
I can't speak for those in Congress, but I suspect their thinking and attitude is similar.
This much I do know: Republicans' runaway borrow-and-spend habit is far more dangerous, both economically and with respect to national security, than the deficit spending of days gone by, when we really did owe it to ourselves.
Actually, McCain wants to audit government programs, and Obama does not.
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