Monday, December 27, 2010

Freeloading poor should be taxed!!! That'll turn them against Social Security and Medicare.

The poor apparently don’t have enough skin in the game when it comes to our nation’s future. If they don’t pay something in, they’re just freeloading. 

You know, kinda like mandating everyone have health care coverage, so no one free loads of those who already have health care. Conservatives will consider this  to be a bad analogy, even though they’re the ones who originated the concept in the 90's, well before “Obamacare” became law.

But check this opinion out from George Will, who seems to make perfect sense of taxing the poor, while ignoring the ironic contradiction:
Washington Post: Indignant children, holding in trembling hands their first paychecks, demand to know what FICA is and why it is feasting on their pay.
FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax) is government compassion, expressed numerically: It is the welfare state; it funds Social Security and Medicare. Sometimes it makes young people into conservatives.
Dave Camp … about to begin his 11th term in Congress, will chair the House Ways and Means Committee, where he will try to implement the implications of his complaint that "the tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news."
Many conservatives, including Camp, believe that although most Americans should be paying lower taxes, more Americans should be paying taxes. The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard - incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes.
"I believe," Camp says, "you've got to have some responsibility for the government you have." People have co-payments under Medicare, and everyone should similarly have some "skin in the game" under the income tax system.
But they shouldn’t have any skin in the game when it comes to not having health care insurance.
I get it. We could call “convenient confusion.”  

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