Would you buy it if I called it “half full?”: A question about the Health Care Bill mandate.
Filed Under Domestic Politics, Economics, Health, In the News, Jeremy, Politics, Taxes | 3 Comments
Recently I was thinking more about the recent Health Care Reform Bill that passed and was signed by the President. As part of the bill, as I am sure you know by now unless you live on Mars, is a mandate requiring everyone to purchase health insurance or face a fine imposed via your tax bill. My first response to this provision was that it was necessary to allow for the elimination of the pre-existing condition clause employed by most insurance companies because otherwise, the problem of asymmetric information would result in the complete collapse of the health insurance market (look it up in an economics textbook). The most common rhetoric against this part of the plan was that this was the first time the United States government has required citizens to purchase a good or service and that this requirement is not only beyond the scope of powers given the Federal government in the Constitution, but purely un-American. While I will leave the Constitutional issue to more experienced and knowledgeable sources, I do have a question regarding the case of this being the first time the federal government has forced us to buy something.
As stated, the law states that if you do not have health insurance, your tax bill will increase by some amount $X. One can imagine the new 1040 instructions now: “Insert policy number and company on line 48a. If no policy number exists, insert the amount $X on line 48 and add it to your tax.” But wait, this instruction actually sounds very familiar. If you do not see it, consider re-writing the instructions accordingly: “Insert policy number and company on line 48a. If no policy number exists, insert the amount $X on line 48 and add it to subtract it from your tax. Now does it look more familiar?
The government employs this tactic all the time. For example, if I am married and have no children (so I do not enter their social security numbers at the top of my 1040) and my AGI after exemptions and deductions is $80,000 and I have no other credits, then my tax would be $12,375 ($9,350 + 25% on everything over $67,900). NOW, let’s change the conditions to where I have two small children. I get to reduce my post-deduction AGI by an additional $7,300 (two more exemptions on line 42). This reduces my taxable income to $72,700 and thus I save $1,825 on my tax burden. I then get to take the child credit equal to $2,000 reducing my tax burden further to $8,550. This is a 30% reduction in my tax simply because I have two children. No big deal, right, kids cost money to raise and the government has not forced me to have kids, they are just giving me a break if I do.
But look at this example another way. Start again with $80,000 and married filing jointly. Now multiply by a tax rate of 10.7% to get a tax burden of $8.560 (ten bucks off, if you don’t like it, you do the rounding). Now, instead of getting exemptions and credits for kids, let us re-write the tax code to say: “Enter each child’s social security number on line 7a. If two or more numbers exist, then put $0 in line 46 and add this to your tax owed. If less than two numbers are present on line 7a then multiply the number of empty lines by $1,912.50 and add that in line 46 and add to your tax.” If I have no children, this adds $3,825 to my tax bill bringing my bill to $12,385. Does that number look familiar?
Am I not correct in saying then that one could logically argue that giving exemptions and credits for children is equivalent to forcing childless couples to add a penalty to their tax bill for not having children?
I cannot help but to wonder if the same outcry would exist if Congress would have instead raised the marginal tax rates by whatever is necessary for the additional tax burden to equal the penalty payment and then offer a tax credit for those that purchase health insurance? They are not forcing us to purchase it, right? They are only giving those that do purchase it a discount on their taxes. So it does bother me a bit when people claim that this is an unprecedented case where the government, for the first time in history, is forcing us to buy something. No, I say, the government has been doing this for decades and we have, for the most part, liked it. Specifically they force us to have children, go to college, save money in a retirement account, and give to charity, just to name a few, and then penalize us with higher tax burdens if we fail to do so.
The ONLY thing different is that in these cases they are offering to fill our empty glass half way whereas with health care bill they are threatening to take half the water out of our full glass. The real question is who to blame for all of this rhetoric. Congress for writing the bill wrong or the public for not getting the point?
J
O Ebert, Where Art Thou?
Filed Under Cinema, Comics, Dale Cooper, Entertainment | 6 Comments
O Ebert, where art thou? Surely not in this embarrassingly knee-jerk review of “Kick-Ass.”
Now, let’s make clear: I am not the enraged fanboy voice. I haven’t read the “Kick-Ass” comic(s?). I haven’t even seen the movie yet, though I plan to. What I’m trying to be here is the all-purpose voice of reason.
Ebert comes at “Kick-Ass” with two execrable arguments:
1. If you are into this stuff, you are a bad human being. This is how Ebert starts his review:
Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find “Kick-Ass” morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.
Heather Havrilesky, is that you? When did it become such a popular critical approach to level moral condemnation at everyone who finds value in art that you yourself don’t care for? Has Ebert been pod-replaced by the ChildCare Action Project? I dealt with this subject at length before so I won’t get into it too much again – suffice to say, much art deals in complexity and ambiguity, and invites interpretation. We take away its very status as a work of art when we proclaim its meaning and declare its defenders to be morally bankrupt. We make it equivalent to pornography, snuff films, propaganda. That is a dangerous road for a critic to go down.
2. Won’t somebody please think of the children? This is really the meat of Ebert’s one-star blasting:
I’m not too worried about 16-year-olds here. I’m thinking of 6-year-olds. There are characters here with walls covered in carefully mounted firearms, ranging from handguns through automatic weapons to bazookas. At the end, when the villain deliciously anticipates blowing a bullet hole in the child’s head, he is prevented only because her friend, in the nick of time… [spoiler excised]
This movie regards human beings like video-game targets. Kill one, and you score. They’re dead, you win. When kids in the age range of this movie’s home video audience are shooting one another every day in America, that kind of stops being funny.
The second section alone could offer the hope that Ebert merely finds the material too grotesque and dark in light of real world events – although it makes me wonder how he can find any black comedy funny, given the subjects it routinely uses as a source of humor. Did he laugh when Vince Vega shot Marvin in the face in “Pulp Fiction”? (Oh yeah, he really, really did.) And yet, criminals are shooting various people in the face every single day in America! How dare he make light of the end of someone’s life? Does he think accidental deaths resulting from unlicensed, illegal firearms are funny? What a horrible person! (End sarcasm.)
But of course he gave the game away already. He doesn’t just find it personally repugnant – he worries that it is warping children’s fragile little minds. Is he aware that the crime rate is in a long-term, steady decline? (I just read Freakonomics - hurray for happy coincidences and, apparently, Roe v. Wade.) Is he aware that the homicide rate of child offenders has been dropping as well? Is he aware, in short, that much of our fear of crime, violence, and the moral degradation of the young is media-manufactured and has no basis in statistical reality? In the era of “Grand Theft Auto” and “Kick-Ass,” kids aren’t killing each other at unprecedented rates – just the opposite is actually happening. Any argument that these morally inappropriate entertainments are damaging young minds is based on individual cases and not on measurable trends in violent crime, which – not to be callous, but it needs to be said – is what should really matter when we try to pass judgment on this issue. Roller coasters kill an average of two people per year but we aren’t racing to shut them down because statistically they are quite safe (1 in 1.5 billion chance per ride of being fatally injured). I’m sure someone who saw the media report on the ‘coaster decapitation of a teen and was in a certain frame of mind might become convinced that roller coasters need to be done away with, for all of our safety. Especially for the kids.
But we have made a general, unspoken social agreement that roller coasters contain a very slight acceptable risk, when compared to the massive amount of entertainment they give. We don’t shut them down. We just put up bigger safety fences and install better belts and harnesses. Likewise, I have no problem with trying to keep “Grand Theft Auto” out of the hands of young consumers… or selling fewer tickets for “Kick-Ass” to six year olds. But of the probably hundreds of thousands that will slip in, how many will be influenced in any appreciable way? We really don’t know, but the numbers seem to tell us it’s very, very few. And an esteemed critic having a scaredy-cat reflex doesn’t change that.
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