NOW Do We Get To Say "I Told You So?"

"If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan." - Barack Obama, August 11, 2009.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/3 (video available as of the date of this post): "Linda Douglass of the White House Office of Health Reform debunks the myth that reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors."

"...if you've got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you." - Barack Obama, July 16, 2009.

"If you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance. Period. End of story." - Barack Obama, weekly address to the nation, July, 2009.

Associated Press, August 25, 2011:

"Nearly one of every 10 midsized or big employers expects to stop offering health coverage to workers after insurance exchanges begin operating in 2014 as part of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul...another one in five companies are unsure about what they will do after 2014. Another big benefits consultant...found in a June survey of large and smaller employers that 8 percent are either "likely" or "very likely" to end health benefits after the exchanges start.

"The surveys, which involved more than 1,200 companies, suggest that some businesses feel they will be better off dropping health insurance coverage once the exchanges start, even though they could face fines and tax headaches. The percentage of companies that are already saying they expect to do this surprised some experts, and if they follow through, it could start a trend that chips away at employer-sponsored health coverage, a long-standing pillar of the nation's health system.

"'If one employer does it, others likely will follow,' said Paul Fronstin of the Employee Benefit Research Institute...former insurance executive Bob Laszewski said he was surprised that as many as 8 or 9 percent of companies already expect to drop coverage a couple of years before the exchanges start."

NOW do we get to say "I told you so?"

Yet Another Big Lie

Greetings from the Left Coast.

There are several Big Lies that I'm getting really tired of hearing, but very near the top of the list is the one that says we could address our budget problems if only the "rich" would pay their fair share. If they were only willing to pay a little more, we could solve this thing - but those evil Republicans keep "coddling" them, to use Warren Buffett's words. The trouble is, the math just doesn't work.

Let's set aside, for the moment, the point that if Warren Buffett really thinks his taxes are too low, he could send a check to the U.S. Treasury at any time, and look at the facts and figures provided by the Internal Revenue Service.

According to the IRS, in 2009, 235,413 people filed tax returns reporting a million dollars or more in income. In aggregate, those people earned $726.9 billion. The federal deficit in 2009 was roughly $1.4 trillion. That means if you had taken all of the reported income away from those 235,413 people who made a million dollars or more, it would only have covered about half of the federal deficit for that year.

I'm not sure exactly how much more in taxes Mr. Buffett thinks he should be paying, but I seriously doubt that he is willing to contribute 100% of his income. So the fact of the matter is that making the rich (or better yet, the "super-rich") pay just a little bit more would be a proverbial drop in the proverbial bucket compared to our current level of deficit spending.

Here's another tidbit to think about. If you make $160,000 or more, you're in the top 5% of earners in America. You and your fellow five-percenters already pay almost 60% of all income taxes collected. (And the other 95% of taxpayers would like to thank you for your disproportionate contribution, especially the bottom 50% who paid almost nothing.) In aggregate, you and your fellow five-percenters earned slightly under $3 trillion. Therefore, if the government had taken all of your money, it wouldn't have been enough to cover Obama's budget.

So let's be honest about this. If you want to punish the rich people for being so successful by taking more of their money away, if that would somehow make you feel better, just say so. If you believe in income redistribution - that money should be taken from people who have earned it and given to people who have not earned it - just say so. But stop pretending that this is will somehow magically solve our massive deficit problem. It's class warfare, plain and simple. As many others have observed, we don't have a deficit problem because taxes are too low - we have a deficit problem because spending is too high. And "taxing the rich" won't solve the problem, because all of the rich people put together don't earn enough money to eliminate the deficit even if we took all of it! Don't buy into the Big Lie.

Thanks for listening.

Connecting the Dots...

"President Obama's economic advisers estimated Thursday that the economic stimulus package has saved or created about 1 million jobs...Republicans called the White House estimate unreliable, pointing to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showing...a net loss of 2.4 million jobs since Obama signed the stimulus law in February." - USA Today, 9/13/2009

"With unemployment hovering near 10 percent nearly two years after President Obama signed his economic stimulus package, Mr. Obama is acknowledging that, despite his campaign promises, 'there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects.'" - CBS News, October 13, 2010.

"The White House doesn't create jobs." - White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, August 3, 2011

Um...we've noticed that, Jay. Too bad it's taken you almost three years to figure it out.