Word up, homely!
Martin, I generally agree with you, but your support of taxing tobacco to pay for government health care is off the mark. Yes, tobacco users should pay for the costs they impose on society. However, tobacco users don’t really impose high costs on society and the taxes they pay already cover those costs. Raising taxes on them now is simply trying to get a small minority of Americans (smokers) to pay for a popular government program.
See this study by the Tax Foundation that talks about the costs smokers impose on the government: http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/121.html
That was pretty much my point in suggesting shifting the tax over to soft drinks. People are very quick to suggest that smokers cover these programs with higher taxes, but come up with all sorts of reasons why that cost shouldn’t be spread over a larger group that may include them.
I don’t think I agree here. I’d like to take a look at the numbers for where they want to drop the CHIP line.
I know when I was working for Texas’s CHIP program, the line was extremely low – I was making $12/hr, barely able to afford my relatively inexpensive one-bedroom apartment and keep myself in food and insurance, and I wouldn’t have qualified had I been a single mom. For the crappy health insurance I had (I was a contractor, lucky me, I got health insurance that paid $2k for preventative care per year) I would have had to pay more than double my already inflated rate for health insurance for a child.
It’s not like they’re going to be taking their extra money and buying $200 tennis shoes and iPods. You can say “Well some of them will be”, but that’s needlessly affecting the people who want to feed their kids something better than Spaghetti-Os
(as an utterly side note, I really think there ought to be basic nutrition and cooking classes free for anyone on public assistance and for a nominal charge for everyone else. Not everyone knows you have to soak beans or that you shouldn’t boil vegetables white.)
Well, some states have incredibly high SCHIP levels. Texas may not be one, but other states are at 300% of FPL or even 400%. That would include many, many people.
The Tax Foundation also did a study where they concluded that almost 60% of U.S. children would be eligible for SCHIP under the new proposal: http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/22472.html
I don’t really believe that the Great State of Texas lilterally hates poor people, but for the life of me, I couldn’t prove it.
You don’t know what a farm subsidy is? :dubious: It’s money going to corn farmers that wouldn’t otherwise go to them. It probably doesn’t cross your mind because your not a corn farmer, but I bet subsidies going to oil companies cross your mind. (think ADM = Haliburton, if that helps). Let the farmers make up the shortfall, such as there is one, by charging a higher price. There’s your “tax” on the empty calories, delivered courtesy of the free market.
Corn. We are simply too enamored of corn. Corn is a crop ideally suited for the high-intensity farming practices so beloved of ADM, and we produce so damned much of the stuff, we are constantly looking for new and better ways to use it, subsidizing it and exporting it. Billions are wasted this way, while politicians blubber and sob about their abiding love of the family farm and its values.
The study says nothing at all about whether smoking increases the overall burden of an individual on society. It counts only the costs of cigarette smoking, and not the benefits (to the state, a benefit would be if a person dies before collecting Social Security). It also does not factor in the costs that would be incurred if a person did not smoke, and therefore died of some other cause.
What costs more: Dying of lung cancer at 55, or dying of Alzheimers at 92? Which person do you think is going to absorb more state resources? The one who was healthy and rarely went to the doctor, then required six months of treatments before dying of lung cancer, or the one who retired at 65, drew social security for 27 years, and during that time perhaps was hospitalized 10 times for various age-related illnesses and conditions, maybe had a joint replacement, cataract surgery, an increasing dependence on subsidized drugs, and eventually had to be hospitalized for the last five years in a hospice anyway before dying?
Your linked study would have only looked at the cost of the cancer treatments and concluded that the smoker caused an added burden on society. You can prove that any behaviour is an overall burden on society if you add up only costs of it, and not the benefits.
In fact, I think sports should be banned. According to the Youth Sports Safety Foundation, various sports related injuries for youth under 14 years of age cost the U.S. Public $49,192,781,832 in 1997. Forty nine billion dollars! Just for kids! Clearly, sports are bad news and should be banned. Let’s not consider the benefits of sport in this calculation, because then the numbers wouldn’t come out the way I want them to. Looking at cost alone, how can you not agree that sporting activities should be taxed or banned outright?
They are only clear in cases where smokers are in enclosed spaces with non-smokers for extended periods of time. Almost every jurisdiction in the country already has laws preventing the forced mingling of smokers and non-smokers in such environments. So your taxes are not needed here.
And yet, they want to allow smoking in some rooms. Imagine that! Are they suicidal? At what point is it the government’s business how companies decide to cater to their customers?
Hey, what if it turns out that smoking causes *less of a burden? In fact, shouldn’t Social Security payments have a ‘health tax’ associated with them? The state’s liability is much bigher for a healthy, thin person than it is for someone who weighs 500 lbs and is very unlikely to make it to retirement age. So really, isn’t it all those healthy people who are the real burden on society? They become old retired people who require heavy taxation to support, and they don’t contribute to the productivity of society at all. There’s not even a reason for them to be alive, if you discount the fact that they enjoy living. As commodities, they’re useless. And since we seem to be treating people as commodities in this debate, I think there should be a ‘health tax’, or at least tax credits for people who don’t take care of themselves and therefore aren’t likely to live to see a nickel of Social Security.
Hell, maybe cigarettes and pop should be free. Enouraged, even. That’s one way to solve the Social Security crisis.
Right. Because we all know the proper role of citizens in our society is to act as cattle to be milked of everything you can get out of them, especially if they don’t behave in the ‘correct’ way - as defined by you. Bleed 'em till they’re broke, I say.
Right. Because now that the state is paying for health care, none of us own our bodies anymore. The state has a right to tell us how to maintain them and how we must live and what we must eat and drink.
This is exactly the reason I oppose socialized health care.
Oh, and you still haven’t shown that smokers are in fact a net burden on society.
Holy crap. So you really do favor a couch potato tax? A tax on skateboarding? A tax on snow skiing? A tax on potato chips? An extreme sports tax? Go to an emergency room on a summer evening and count up the number of people who are there because they broke a bone skateboarding, or twisted a knee playing in the company softball game. Tax 'em all!
Have you ever eaten at McDonalds? When you’re finished, you don’t feel full. You just feel… different.
Having lived in New Jersey, the cost of living is a lot higher than many places. I have a hard time considering 300% of the FPL very, very well off.
I suppose if you consider a family at 4X the fpl rich. I must be super-rich then. I wonder whatever happened to my Rolls.
Cite? Not that I doubt that in some places they don’t spread the word to save money, I’d wonder if this was an attempt to blame the poor for not being able to make it through the paperwork - or not being up on all the benefits available.
No, but 300% of FPL is middle class in most areas (including New Jersey). 400% of FPL is wealthy in many areas (perhaps not New Jersey, but you certainly aren’t poor if you make that type of money there).
A family at 400% of FPL where I live could easily be considered wealthy.
It’s hard to get national figures since there are differences between the states in SCHIP eligibility. Let’s take Maryland for an example, though. Go to http://mhcc.maryland.gov/health_insurance/insurance_coverage/insurance_report_thru_2005.pdf and look at table 2, which discusses health insurance coverage of children. For those kids living in poverty (up to 100% of FPL), 28% are uninsured. Those up to 200% of FPL, 12% are uninsured. Those up to 300% of FPL, 11% are uninsured. Every single one of those kids is eligible for Maryland’s version of SCHIP (MCHP). Now go to table 6. It shows that 77% of the uninsured children in the state are in families under 300% of FPL. Again, every single one of those kids is eligible for MCHP but does not use it (although it’s not really all that bad, since a parent can sign his/her kid up for MCHP when he/she needs medical treatment). Other states are similar. Most “uninsured” kids are eligible for government health care programs but have not (or not yet) signed up for them.
I’m quite aware that they exist, but if you ask if I know how they work, the answer is no, I don’t.
Of course I know it involves money, but I’ve never familiarized myself with the details. Some issues, one simply has to take a pass on.
The fact that there are subsidies for corn farmers doesn’t explain that high-fructose corn syrup is subsidized, let alone how. For instance, if you pay corn farmers not to grow corn, that would keep the price of corn up, but it wouldn’t make it cheaper for Coca-Cola to pour corn syrup into its sodas.
It’s not that I don’t believe farm subsidies are subsidizing our high-fructose corn syrup habit - but I’d like to be sufficiently informed to reach a coherent opinion about them before I take a position on specific subsidy mechanisms.
I go years between eating at MickeyD’s. Of course, my wife tells me I’m ‘different’ already, so I guess it would be redundant. 
OK, how does he propose doing that?
Is he proposing the insurance industry reduce its profit?
Is he proposing that more preventive medicine be done so that illnesses are treated before they get dire?
Is he proposing government payments for children’s insurance so it’s more affordable for the consumer without harming the insurance industry’s profit?
If the latter, he is just proposing that you and I subsidize insureres.
Tariffs are another form of subsidy, and corn growers benefit greatly from cane sugar tariffs and quotas. At the expense of consumers, btw. Almost everyone agrees that Coke tasted better when it was made from cane sugar. But now American sugar producers are protected by annual quotas on cane sugar importation, so you get inferior beverages and an increased consumption of fructose.
There is some scientific evidence that fructose is worse for you than sucrose, (it seems to be more likely to cause high blood pressure and maybe be more readily absorbed as fat, but I think the evidence is still inconclusive).
I don’t think we need to get into whether or not HFC is better or worse for you than cane sugar-- both are bad when eaten in excess, which most Americans do. But right now, the cheap stuff in the US is HFC, and that’s what you see in many processed foods. Everything from breakfast cereal to tomato paste to BBQ sauce to coca cola.
And US agricultural policy is schizo (in the vernacular sense, not the psychiatric sense) when it comes to subsidies. On the one hand, we pay some people not to farm, which drives up the price of produce by limiting supply, but we also supply price supports encourages overproduction which in turn makes produce cheaper. It’s hard to say what would happen, overall, to food prices if we eliminated both types of subsidies, but if we just talk about the price supports they totaled over $50B to corn alone over the last 10 years. And now, with ethanol subsidies coming into play, that adds another variable that could cause corn based food products to increase in price by limiting supply.
But if we just look at the price support system, that’s $50B going to corn farmers over the last 10 years. The government guarantees a certain minimum price that farmers can get for some crops (wheat, corn and soybeans are 3 of the biggies), and when the market price dips below that amount, the feds make up the difference. Whether the farmers used that money to increase their yields or to pay for hookers in Las Vegas, we really don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because that’s $50B that came from us and went to them. It’s simple Econ 101 that that policy, taken by itself, will create an increase in supply. (When you subsidize something, you get more of it, all other things being equal.)
So, instead of taxing tobacco products which will 1) fall disproportionately on the poor and 2) increase the size of your government, if we need to find the money somewhere, let’s take from the folks like ADM and make the government smaller in the process. Now, that is win-win.
One, many insurers are non-profits, so they can’t reduce their profit. Two, please tell me how lower profits make health insurance more affordable? Three, government regulations that reduce profit are responsible in many states (especially here in Maryland) for driving insurers out of the state. That means less choice for consumers and higher prices.
OK, you say that reducing insurers profits won’t reduce the cost of medical insurance. It was stated that GW propose to make such coverage by private companies more affordable rather than go to a nationwide, government insurance plan. How does he propose to do that?
Yes. Please provide any evidence that high insurance company profits are making insurance unaffordable.
No, I don’t think it was. Bush supports SCHIP reauthorization. He merely doesn’t want it to cover people who are relatively well-off.
I think tax credits played a role in his plan. If you are making, say, 300% of FPL, it makes more sense for the government to give you an incentive to purchase private insurance rather than having the government shell out all the money to cover you.