The Reactionaries Speak

Well, that was more of the same was it not? Beloved Leader’s new pitch for the takeover of healthcare was really nothing new, he just introduced some new strawmen to be assailed.

1. Heathcare reform will cost less that the tax cuts enacted by the prior administration.

Obvious claptrap, anyone that has been alive long enough, and has a disposition towards facts knows that when taxes are lowered, business flourishes and increased tax revenue follows.

2. Government plans create competition.

False again, Government has never created a product that anyone actually wants to pay for!! The incursion into private industry, the GM and Chrysler bailouts and the ensuing “cash for clunkers” debacle proves that this is true, even with a bribe, an overwhelming percentage of buyers chose non-GM or Chrysler purchases. Moreover, the idea that if your business does not provide health care, they will be fined 8% of their payroll. If I am running a business, and I am given a choice between paying an 8% fine, or paying say, 10-12% to insure my workers, as a business what path will I be inclined to take? More on this at the end.

3. Health care reform will cost less than the Iraq and  Afghanistan wars.

This is a complete sham, and unworthy even of a Democrat. What the military does is apart from the rest of government, and to try to equate the removal of dictators, and taking out those who want to do harm to our country and citizenry to Obamacare, is to coin a phrase, bullshit.

There is no justification for trying what is being tried here, the amount of people that are legal citizens that are truly deserving of help with health care is nowhere as large as portrayed. Let’s just say there are 5 million families that are legitimately out in the cold heathcare-wise. And we subsidize these people to the tune of a $10,000 insurance voucher a piece. That is 50 billion a year, slightly over half of what is being projected by Beloved Leader. (Whose numbers about anything his administration has tried have been tragically low.) That combined with tort reform, and the opening of selling insurance across state lines, would give insurers a real chance for competition. What company in their right mind would pass up a chance at another 50 billion a year? Most, if not all of the bureaucracy is already in place to administer a program like this, and with this many new customers coming into the game, there would be real competition for these new dollars. Not a false competition with 50+ new federal subsets and fiefdoms coming into play.

Business at that point will not have the heavy hand of government in their pockets any deeper than they already are. With tort reform, defensive medicine will drop and doctors will be able to practice without the fear of losing all they have worked for.

If the stimulus program was stopped right now, and put into play towards this end,  with 20% gone, my program would be funded for the next 12 1/2 years!!!!

Yay! Minneapolis Mike for President!

Here is my original article on the “cash for clunkers” debacle-in-progress.

As of yesterday 8-21-09, from news i was watching there have been approximately 486,000 cars purchased under this program. And with the program being ended on Monday, I am sure there will be a rush to “get the free money” over the weekend.

So, there will be in all likelihood be at least 500,000 “clunkers” taken off the road. For the sake of argument, let’s say 25% of these are really in need of coming out of service on day to day use.  So we have 375,000 cars that could be re-purposed for use by non-profit organisations to provide training for low-income students looking to get into a trade. Then those cars can be donated to low income families who have a need for reliable transportation. The remaining 125,000 would have had a greater effect being donated to veteran’s or other organisations who could use the money to help their own, and in turn help the auto recycling industry.

All these do one of two things, they provide training to assist people to get jobs, and when you are recycling these vehicles you create jobs. The vehicles put on the street need to be maintained, and the the ones being scrapped need to be disassembled.

Now let’s turn to who benefits from the program as it is. The inability of the government to react to the program is being well documented right now. Dealers are not being paid back in a timely fashion, and are having to float the government out of their own pockets. One dealership I saw on the news yesterday has 5.5 million out on this program, and has only received back less than $50,000. Dealers in NY are bailing on the program, and rightly so. Oops, I guess the dealers aren’t benefiting right now.

Well how about the car manufacturers? Well, 70% of the cars sold under the program are imports! To be fair, The import players have factories here in the US, but the point of this exercise was to sell Big 3 autos, right? So now, all the factories are ramping up for a short run of product to make up inventory levels. How long do you think this will last? 30-90 days? Or to quote myself  “And lets not forget the the lapdogs of the administration, the UAW. By creating an artificial demand, (with your tax dollars) there is an opportunity here to show a quarter of growth on the books, which can be trumpeted as proof that bailing out GM and Chrysler was yet another genius stroke by beloved leader and his cronies.”

So what have we done here?

1. Proven that the Government is incapable of administering a simple program. No timely payments, and it takes 12 different forms to get the dough in the first place.

2. Proven that hardly anyone wants to buy a car from a Government car manufacturer (i.e. GM and Chrysler).

3. Proven that without Taxpayer financing no one is interested in replacing a so-called clunker.

4. Proven that the Administration will take your money to fabricate false economic numbers to prop up their bad decisions. (GM and Chrysler)

5. Proven that the Administration really doesn’t care about middle to low income people. (destroying rather than re-purposing vehicles)

Given all this, why would anyone even consider that there is any quantifiable reason to let them into health care?

The hoopla has settled down regarding the cash for clunkers program after a fresh injection of cash from our “friends” on the Hill.

But to what end has this come to? Just thinking out loud here, who really benefited from this 3 billion dollars?  Is it:

1.  Your Mother, the Earth?

Nope, producing new cars uses more energy and natural resources than keeping an existing vehicle running in top form, even if it does not get government approved mileage figures.

2. The Middle Class?

While I can’t say for sure, my thinking is that a middle class family, who has watched their retirement and other investments being halved in the economic downturn, are not in the market for a new car, and if they were, chances are they may not have an extra car or truck around that gets less than the 18 mpg you would need to qualify for the program.

3. The Lower Class?

Fail again for Washington, lower class families, who may have the needed vehicles to qualify for the program, may not have the credit needed to buy a new car, or the means to make the monthly payments.

4. Independent Business?

With the rules imposed by the program, each of the vehicles that qualify are removed from service permanently, by having their engines destroyed, and then being crushed. So if you do business in used parts, you repair older cars and trucks, or re-manufacture parts for older vehicles, your base for usable cores has been ravaged.

5. Government?

Here is the big winner in this scam, by taking an estimated 250,000 older vehicles off the road there are that many fewer vehicles that less than flush folks may be able to purchase to use. What happens then? If you are the government you can move those folks into public transportation, which limits their ability to live and work where they want to, keeping them in primarily urban areas where their movement is easier to control and monitor. And lets not forget the the lapdogs of the administration, the UAW. By creating an artificial demand, (with your tax dollars) there is an opportunity here to show a quarter of growth on the books, which can be trumpeted as proof that bailing out GM and Chrysler was yet another genius stroke by beloved leader and his cronies.

Conclusion:

Those who benefit from this program appear to be those who really don’t need it. If you can qualify to buy a new car, that $3500-$4500 may go towards a nice down payment, but taking your rarely used extra pick-up off the road can hardly be called an ecological win for the country. People now have less choices than before, and 250,000 usable vehicles are gone forever.  Here is a link to an article which seems to indicate that interest in the “cash for clunkers” is starting to wane already. Yet more proof that Washington isn’t really qualified to run much of anything more complex than a lemonade stand, and even then they would more than likely have to legislate their competition into oblivion to push their substandard product onto people.

Face the facts, government produces nothing of value, cannot “create or save jobs”, or do anything that is not corrupt and flawed beyond redemption.

A personal aside:

I am not what would be defined as middle class, maybe lower middle class is closer. I drive a mid-nineties 4 door sedan that gets 30+ mpg on my daily commute. My bike gets 40 mpg, and even my old crappy s-10 gets 20+mpg on the road. So even if I wanted a new car I would be unable to qualify for this program. Not that i would buy a new car anyway, I get a perverse pleasure from keeping the oldies running like new, and it has nothing to do with being “green”. It does have everything to do with not giving the government one more dollar in any kind of taxes that I can avoid.