Well, Poly, my good friend, speaking for myself, I would hope to give you more choices than just between the devil or the deep blue sea. Ninety percent tax is ten percent away from slavery, and slavery benefits the man on only one side of the whip. If you were to believe that you are doing me a favor by seizing another man’s wealth, I would beg you to stop. Give me the freedom and dignity to ask the man for help myself. If he says no, then I will ask another man. If in the end no one will help me, then we will know the truth after all — everyone who preaches that his passionate liberalism is on behalf of the poor is lying.
Lib, my brother, I hope that you did not see me advocating that sort of taxation – I’m coming much closer to your position over the last few years (though I do still feel that, mankind being what it is, there is a corporate as well as a personal duty to ensure that all have the minimum needs of life). What I was doing, rather, was to attempt to bring home to milroyj the absurdity of the comparison he drew – and I made it clear that I wished neither on him – which I meant and will continue to mean.
Back to the topic of the use of words, you may recall a novel set in a fictional totalitarian world of the distant past*, where War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery, and so forth.
He little know how well he had predicted. The government is quite as totalitarian as he projected, but, by George**, he certainly nailed the way language is used for deception.
- Sarcasm
** Deliberate word play
That’s part of the reason why you’re taxed up the wazoo. Although I must say that at this point I’m so concerned about health care for the people who can’t afford it (read:me) that I’m half-tempted to advocate a Canadian-type system down here. What stops me is the certain knowledge that someone will have to finance that at my expense, and that is about as close to stealing as you can get without slapping the cuffs on someone.
From the Pro-Tax Group: Too Much
Too Much is America’s newsletter dedicated to the proposition that the USA would be a considerably more democratic, prosperous, and caring nation if we narrowed the vast gap between the very wealthy and everybody else.
<snip>
You can’t afford free health care? You do have it bad.
Why should there be a penalty for me in the first place? I strive to do no harm.
Exactly.
High Cheese, he’s American and doesn’t have free health care per se. Although, being in the Air Force, one would think he’d be eligible for military medical benefits.
Maybe not per se, but certainly de facto. The US has an astounding number and array of charity hospitals. Like this one, for instance.
Ah, sorry for not clearing up that misunderstanding.
I’m in the Air National Guard. I do a LOT of active duty, but when I’m not on active duty I’m on my own. Unfortunately, when you spend 30 of the last 36 months on active duty people are not inclined to hire you, and that’s my dilemma. Getting insurance is well nigh impossible for me, so I have to do even more active duty… you get the picture. It’s a vicious cycle.
But that’s the origin of that comment.
Just as is the case with my father, who knows considerably more about constraining back surgery and fibromyalgia than any human (outside of medical professionals seeking such knowledge) deserves to know, given the setting - his body, not a medical text. Sometimes shit just happens, and I’d happily take a 70% tax rate in exchange for my father being able to live with no - hell, half the pain he currently has.
That, I think, was the point of Poly’s post - not what you deserve but what life will throw at you without asking if you deserve it.
But no one is begrudging you your choice to pay 70% for your father to live. In fact, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be willing to pay 100%. It is only a problem when you decide that your needs are so compelling that you must force others to recognize them — no matter what they might perceive their own needs to be.
Since I’m currently unemployed (moving will do that), 1% or .000001% would be the same as 100%, so the question is a bit more difficult to consider;) My point to milroyj is that (at least in my case) 70% taxation, which would be financially crippling but still leave me able to function, is a better choice of two than crippling back pain, which would both financially hurt me (treatment alone can be an impossible financial nightmare without quality medical care and coverage) and physically hurt me. There wouldn’t be a hell of a lot left after 70% taxation, but it’s a good bit more than what would be left after 70% taxation of a job I could A) do and B) reasonably expect to get, given pain severe enough that staying in one position, walking, bending over, kneeling, etc. were all painful. Other than disability benefits, there really isn’t a whole hell of a lot he can do to get money in a steady, reliable manner.
I’d have to have guarantee from someone whose guarantee was worth something to give up 100%
But then you’re also talking to someone who is perfectly willing to be taxed more than the current amount if it means those unable (or able, but at serious cost to themselves) to fend for themselves. Things of import to me and things of import to milroyj probably represent an impasse of significance, and one that probably makes what debate is here theoretical at best.
Is this a thread about how politicians twist the meanings of words? … or about who should bear the cost of medical treatments?
I will toss your own thoughts back at you, Liberal. You want me to pay taxes for things like the police department, and I say, bah! Let those who need them and use them pay for them. Why should I have to pay for them? I’ve never needed police protection, so I shouldn’t pay for it. When you call the police, you should be charged for their services. Similarly, fire departments.
Roads, too. My mother doesn’t drive, why should she pay taxes for road construction? There should be a fee every time you drive on a road, right? If you take routes that don’t involve stoplights, then you shouldn’t have to pay for them. Instead, there should be a toll box at each stoplight, and each car tosses in a quarter each time they pass it. No highway taxes!
OK, end of sarcasm. There are some resources – like police and fire departments, like roads – that we believe are properly paid for by everyone (by all taxpayers) and available to everyone. Every other civilized country in the world believes that medical care should be treated the same way – the services paid for by everyone and available to everyone. Only the U.S. thinks that medical care should be a matter of each individual to pay for on their own.
Pun, as one who has availed himself of the kindness of medical charity before, I would advise that you assist your father in contacting one of the countless charitable agencies in the US that may help him. Believe me, it is well worth the minimal effort, and you won’t have to seize anyone’s property against their will to mitigate your own need.
I agreed with you all the way to that remark. Let government be illegitimage without the voluntary consent of those it governs, and let us eliminate all so-called “public property”.
I greatly appreciate the thought and have tried to get him to do what he needs (the really amusing thing is that he tries to get me to do stuff I ought to do, and we fail far more often than we succeed). The trouble is that the approach that has been taken with him regarding fibromyalgia is such that he quickly lost patience with folks who didn’t know what they were doing, so he is hesitant to try yet another thing that will fail (or will not give him what he really, truly wants, which is far indeed removed from money). He also is less enamored of the phone even than I am (the last ten people I called span a time of two weeks, if not more, and most of those were to fizzy). This combination, with the added fun of if hurting him to be upright for long (rules out walks, driving and sitting, among other things), makes his own pursuit of help less than ideal. He has also seen several of his relatives (and his father in law) deteriorate and just lay there rather than trying to get better (or accepting the help of others). His grandmother one day up and decided to be bedridden (this from others’ accounts of her, so it is possible that this is not completely accurate), his mother was a social sponge at the expense of the sanity of a few of her children, etc.
You can lead a person to help, but you cannot always get that person to take the single step toward it. This would be more bearable if not for the drain he is on his immediate family (and knows it, but … well, I’ve said enough here).
I wish I could remove your burden, Pun. It is always sad when a man wishes to help, but is rejected for whatever reason. As you say with such eloquence and amazing calm, money is not the answer in this case whether by tax or by charity. God go with you.
He and I have seen the same situation come and go (though the going was never nearly as easy as the coming) before with other relatives. In some cases it took decades for the end to come and in some cases it took a few years (one of whom - his father - he cared for through two cancers. With the second cancer it was essentially a Hospice stay). I am reasonably confident that it will take a trainwreck to kill my father, because beyond even his fatigue at dealing with the pain he has more resilience than almost anyone else I’ve met.
I can’t take his burden away any more than you can, and who is to say another would not come along? Between knee surgeries he had four children and his father’s prolonged (or so it seemed) cancers (interrupted by the false hope that he would live), and an ulcer right after his father died. His mother died after her health had been slowly but surely deteriorating for at least a decade and probably longer, but not before the sibling to whom he was closest lost her son (born with anencephaly; lived 15 minutes). Among all this he also started remembering being molested by the same father for whom he’d cared through those cancers. His mother, for her part, ensured that she would not allow her children to heal through admission of her (or her husband’s) guilt or wrongdoing. They are buried together, and I can think of little greater reward or insult.
I shudder to think what next plague might get an invitation if the current ailment went away. Money does him little good (it would help my mother, but that’s another thing entirely); what he needs is for someone to give a good strong bitchslap to whoever wrote this infernal tragedy of errors, because to save my life I can’t figure out where he fucked up so disastrously as to deserve this.
So now you see part of why I’d happily pay 70% of whatever I earn to ensure that life’s troubles are eased for other people. Can’t solve my own, Og knows, but there’s someone somewhere whose life would be more than proportionally improved with a little more money and time. Given my desired occupation I don’t think I’ll ever be in a 70% bracket (grade school teachers aren’t often featured in Forbes magazine), but it’s the thought that counts;)
I reckoned that was it; or you were considering separation soon. Since you don’t mind being AD most of the year, why not go AD and shoot for the big R? Then you only have to worry about the quality of healthcare and not the price.