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Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Chris Charles: Less For More
Part II: Of
Mice & Medical Insurance
Sure 32 million Americans will now have health
insurance, but what kind of insurance will they be getting? More importantly, what kind of health care will the other 350-plus
million Americans that already have health insurance receive?
Many people without health insurance could afford it but choose to spend their money
on other things. This group (mostly younger people without medical conditions) might be convinced to purchase coverage if
the cost was not so high. Too late, now the cost will be even higher. If you don’t believe me, just ask President Obama,
he said the health care premiums would ‘necessarily’ rise as a result of this legislation.
What about illegal aliens? I’m willing
to bet most of the 20 million illegals living in the United States are uninsured and I’m sure the Obamacare mandate
to buy health insurance will not change their minds. Now before you start worrying about the illegal population dying in the
streets, emergency rooms are still required to treat illegals for everything from triple heart bypass surgery to tummy aches.
As for impoverished
Americans and retired seniors that can’t afford health care, there is still Medicare and Medicaid government assistance
programs.
83% of Americans
enjoy the best health care system in the world, illegals have the ER’s, and the poor and elderly already have government
programs to help them out. The only people left without coverage are the rich that can afford to pay out of pocket and young
people that would rather spend their discretionary income on iphones and plasma televisions. I’m sorry but to me it’s
not worth it to destroy our entire system to extend coverage to 20-somethings that would rather buy beer and blue ray players
than health insurance.
What about their right to choose? People should be free to choose NOT to buy health insurance, if they so desire. The
same people that say the government has no right telling women what to do with their bodies is now going to tell men and women
exactly what to do with their bodies.
The Democrats are going to fine people that don’t have health insurance but how are people going to
afford to buy health coverage when they don’t have jobs? Unemployment is at 10% and with the cost of business going
up, I don’t see that number improving any time soon. Employers with over 50 employees will now be compelled to provide
health coverage to their workers or pay a fine of $2,000 per employee. For a company with 50 workers it will be easier to
fire a worker and avoid the government intrusion into the business. Even more worrisome is now that health care premiums are
going even higher it may be cheaper for companies to pay the fine and not provide health coverage. Oh how the best laid plans
of mice and men can go awry.
The champions of health reform have little interest in reducing costs, nor do they care about the level of care we receive.
It is only important that we have health coverage not that our health coverage be GOOD health coverage. In fact, it would
seem that the Democrats behind this bill are discouraging people from buying good health insurance.
If you have what the Feds determine to be
a premium or ‘Cadillac’ health care plan, you will pay a 40% tax every year on that plan. They same people that
insist you have health coverage are going to punish you if you have too much coverage, unless of course you happen to be a
member of a public employee union.
Paying more for less? To me all of this seems like a big price to pay to extend health insurance to only
12% of Americans. 83% of Americans have health coverage 5% won’t have it even under this new bill; this means that 88%
of people will not be helped by this legislation at all.
Just to recap:
Payroll taxes UPCapital
gains taxes UP
Insurance
taxes UP
Business taxes
UP
Health care premiums
UP
Health care fraud and
abuse UP
Frivolous malpractice
lawsuits UP
Quality of
health care DOWN
All
of this, massive spending, massive bureaucracies, massive tax increases will hit Americans where it hurts, their wallets.
Worse yet, it will hit Americans where it REALLY hurts, their wellbeing.
1:53 pm pdt
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Chris Charles: Less For More
Part I:
A Taxing Situation
The health care reform bill does not improve
health care nor does it reform anything. But it will raise health care costs and taxes.
Sure 32 million Americans without health insurance will now have
health insurance but at what cost? What will the cost be for the other 350-plus million responsible Americans that already
have health insurance? 83% of Americans already have health insurance (at least until taxes premiums skyrocket as a result
of this legislation).
The
CBO estimated the health bill to cost nearly $1 trillion dollars over 10 years but so called benefits won’t kick in
until 2014. This means that it will cost the government (taxpayers) a billion dollars (at least) to insure 32 million people
for only 6 years. That equates to around $3,333 a year for each and every American without health insurance and that’s
if costs do not run higher.
How will the government pay for this? The 83% of Americans that already have health insurance will be paying more, a
lot more. In Higher payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, higher Medicare taxes, tanning salon taxes, investment income taxes,
medical devise taxes, pharmaceutical taxes, and in a 40% tax on ‘Cadillac’ health care plans.
President Obama and the Democrats think it
is a tragedy that 17% of the country lives without health insurance, I think it is amazing that 83% of Americans are able
to have health coverage. Think about it, you can’t get 83% of Americans to buy that Elvis is really dead, much less
to spend thousands of dollars every year on something you may not even need.
The biggest problem with health insurance in America is the cost; the
US has the best standard of care in the world. The gripe the Dems have is that health care coverage costs too much, and poor
people can’t afford it. That is true! It does cost too much but the bill recently passed does nothing to reduce the
cost of health care. This bill simply mandates that everybody buy health care, it doesn’t reduce the cost, it will raise
the cost. Health care is too expensive, 17% of Americans are uninsured because they cannot afford it. The Democrat solution:
Issue mandates that will make the cost of health insurance go up, so that more people will be dependent on the government
to pay for their health care.
“The cost of health insurance will NECESSARILY go up” to quote an infamous Democrat. This bill prohibits
insurers from turning anybody away with a pre-existing condition. This is like forcing automobile insurers to cover a car
that has already been in an accident. Of course, this will cost insurance company’s billions of dollars or to be more
specific, this will cost us billions of dollars more after the insurers pass along their costs to us. Don’t forget,
we are already going to pay billions of dollars in tax money for these ‘reforms’.
What does this bill do to address original problem, the high cost
of health insurance? What reforms are in this bill? None. Thousands of pages of legislation and a trillion dollars of tax
money, yet there is not a single provision that will reduce costs of premiums. The issue of tort reform is not addressed,
neither is the issue of health care fraud and abuse. There is also no provision in this bill that will allow people to shop
for lower cost insurance providers over state lines. If you thought health insurance was expensive before, just wait until
the government bureaucrats get involved.
If health care costs went down we could probably get many of those 32 million Americans without health insurance
to purchase a policy, without the government forcing them to do so. This bill was not designed to reduce costs. It does get
more people covered but the real intent of this bill is to expand government, limit personal freedom, and make more people
dependant on the federal government.
11:50 am pdt
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Chris Charles: At The Hotel
California
Here in California, our fiscal situation is
worse than most states in America and that is really saying something. Relatively speaking, California is in worse shape than
the Federal government, unlike the Feds, California cannot simply print money.
They say we have a revenue problem, they say that taxes must be
raised or cops and firefighters will have to be laid off. But how could this be? California is at or near the top in nearly
every tax there is.
In
Los Angeles County sales tax is 9.75%, LA is home to countless millionaires and even a few billionaires and yet LA’s
fiscal outlook is bleak. So what gives? What are they spending the money on? It certainly can’t be education; LA public
schools are among the worst in the entire country. It can’t be on highways because LA roads and freeways are in terrible
disrepair and the city has the worst traffic of any city in America.
According to the Los Angeles Times, while the money is running out for cops, hospitals
and highways, the money keeps flooding in for members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. County Supervisors are
allotted $3.4 million annually for ‘discretionary spending’ which basically means they have nearly three and a
half million dollars to burn every single year.
I know you’re asking why they need all that money, but I’m asking why LA even needs county supervisors
at all. LA has a mayor and a city council and a police department and about a thousand other bureaucracies. Why does Los Angeles
need a board of supervisors? Just to fleece the taxpayers? It seems to me, without them, the county and the State of California
would have a lot more money to spend on highways and cops.
Oh well, I am sure the LA County Supervisors are spending their millions wisely…or
not.
It stands to
reason that as prominent members of the community, supervisors need to drive luxury cars but they are so important that they
need to hire chauffeurs to drive their luxury cars around town for them. What’s next? Private jets? They are COUNTY
SUPERVISORS for crying out loud, it’s not as if they are Nancy Pelosi. They should be driving stock model Chevy Cobalt’s
(without A/C) if you ask me, and that is more than most private sector workers receive. If they don’t like that, let
them drive their own cars to work like the rest of us.
One Supervisor recently spent $25,000 in tax money on a party for media personality Tavis Smiley, a longtime
friend. The same Supervisor, Mark Ridley-Thomas, spent another $25,000 to be included in the publication ‘Who’s
Who In Black Los Angeles’. Ridley-Thomas could have been included in the publication ‘Who’s Who of Self
Serving Politicians’ for free. It seems to me that if somebody’s really a ‘who’s who’ in black
LA would they would not have to pay $25,000 for it.
If you are going to be a ‘who’s who’ in black LA you’ll need an office to match,
that is why Ridley-Thomas was to spend over $700,000 to renovate his downtown office. Public outrage derailed that project,
but another Supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky has hired no fewer than three full time workers to administrate his various ‘online
projects’. One of these workers made an astounding $142,000 plus benefits, until recently, when he received a 5.5% RAISE!
There is no money
for schools or new hospitals but California can afford to pay this guy $150,000 a year to update a no name local politician’s
Facebook page? Cops in LA are lucky to make $50,000 a year, and Zev Yaroslavsky’s internet czar is making three times
that?!? I don’t even want to know how much the other two are making.
It takes THREE full time workers to manage a County Supervisor’s
internet propaganda? The taxpayers are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on these idiots to work 120 hours a week
on what a local high school freshmen would do for $8.50 an hour after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
You might expect that at least Yaroslavsky
would have an outstanding website and Facebook page given how much money WE spend on it, but that’s not even the case.
Visits to the Supervisors website have declined since he hired those internet experts and Zev has a whopping 70 friends on
Facebook. Is this for real? My grandmother has more than 70 friends on Facebook.
Now would seem like a good time for State officials to stop wasting
tax money, given that California is teetering on the edge of financial solvency. The State is near bankruptcy and still the
politicians feel it necessary to blow through tax money like trust fund kids with daddy’s credit card. California is
forced to borrow billions of dollars every year just to remain afloat and average Californians are made to bear an ever increasing
tax burden so that State and local officials can continue live the high life.
12:41 pm pdt
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Chris Charles: Jihad John &
Jihad Joe
Real
American Leftist Dirtbags
For the second time in less than a month we had a leftist radical go on an anti government rampage, but
Homeland Security would have you believe they were right wing militia types.
Two crazy white guys upset with the government, sounds like your typical
right wingers right?
If
Janet Napolitano would do any sort of critical thinking on this she would see that these guys aren’t right wingers at
all, they’re left wingers!
First we had Jihad Joe Stack go 9/11 on an IRS office in Texas. At a glance, you might assume because he is 1. White
2. Anti-tax and 3. Anti-government, that he is a member of the vast right wing conspiracy. A closer look into his suicide
note reveals that Jihad Joe was an anti-capitalist, anti-American nut job of the lowest order, not exactly Joe the plumber.
There aren’t too many conservatives that HATE George Bush, big business, and Christians much less all three as Jihad
Joe does. It is true that Joe Stack, the Texan Taliban was anti-tax, but he was against PAYING taxes. Conservatives are against
high taxes, not paying taxes.
Last week Jihad John Bedell, another lunatic, decided to go on a suicide mission at the Pentagon. Thankfully nobody
was killed, oh except for the shooter but he doesn’t count.
Jeez, American leftists make really poor Jihadists; I don’t think that
Jihad John (or Joe for that matter) will be receiving his 72 virgins in the afterlife. A half-a-dozen Rosie O’Donnell’s,
maybe.
Again, Johnny
Jihad is being painted as your typical right wing militia type that attacked the government because a black guy is President.
Anyone with half a brain could figure out that this guy is about as much a right winger Michael Moore is. Jihad John attacked
the Pentagon! He attacked the military. He wasn’t a limited government, fiscal responsibility conservative;
he was an anti-American, Anti-military leftist. One of the reasons he hated the military so much was that he believed 9/11
was an inside job. How many conservatives do you know that are also 9/11 ‘truthers’?
Other so called right wingers
that DHS is on the lookout for are neo-Nazi and skinhead groups. I hate to break it to you liberals but Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi Party were LEFT wingers, the same must to be true for neo-Nazi’s as well. Hitler was a left wing totalitarian dictator;
although I must say he wasn’t as much interested in communism as he was in killing millions of Jews. Mass murder and
Genocide was Hitler’s first love but leftist style totalitarianism was a close second.
I think because Nazi’s were and are racist, liberals assume
they are ultra-conservative because as any good liberal will tell you conservatives, especially right wing conservatives,
are inherently racist. The Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers Party. Any time you hear socialist, People’s
Republic, or Worker’s Party you know you’re dealing with UBER leftists.
It seems to me that we
have an epidemic of LEFT wing extremists in this country. DHS is so worried about crazy, radical, racist, right wingers when
they should be worried about crazy, radical, racist, leftists instead. Oh and don’t forget about crazy, racist, radical
Islamists either because they are much better at killing Americans than liberals are.
11:21 am pst
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Chris Charles: The G.R.E.E.N.s
Globalist Radical Eccentric
Environmentalist Nazi’s
Have you ever noticed that global warming
is whatever global warming activists need it to be? I rarely hear talk of global temperature rise from the likes of Al Gore
when New York City is buried under multiple feet of snow or when Washington DC is shut down for a week thanks to record cold
and snowfall. That’s not to say they disappear entirely, some extra committed GREENs don’t need the weather to
be warm to claim global warming.
According to the GREENs, if the weather is hot, it is caused by global warming. If the weather is cold it is also caused
by global warming. In fact, mild, cool, warm, chilly, balmy, brisk, sweltering, and freezing temperatures are all caused by
global warming.
It
is hard to wrap my inferior brain around these theories, to me they don’t make much sense but I am assured by GREEN
climate geniuses out there that they are one hundred percent right. Case closed.
It’s not only temperatures that are affected by global warming;
everything weather related is somehow caused by global warming. Intense hurricane seasons are caused by global warming just
as mild hurricane seasons are. Heavy snowfall is caused by global warming just as a lack of snowfall is also caused by man-made
global warming. GREENs claim that clouds, rain, jet streams, ocean currents, high and low pressure systems, tornados, monsoons,
drought, the Olympics, tsunamis, El Nino, wind, river flows, sea bass, and possibly moon beams are in one way or another affected
by global warming.
Really cleaver GREENs will refrain from calling global warming, ‘global warming’ during winter
months or during times when the globe is not so warm. Instead they go with the more ambiguous title, ‘climate change’.
Whoa, very cleaver GREENs! Given that climate is constantly in a state of change nobody can deny that global
climate change exists!
Yes, I will concede that the climate is in fact changing, from minute to minute, from hour to hour, from day to day
and so on. Sometimes it is hot, sometimes it is cold. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it snows. How often are TV weathermen
wrong about the weather forecast? Know why? Because weather is constantly changing! Know-nothing GREENs like to think that
they know exactly what the climate will do over the next fifty or so years when professional climatologists and meteorologists
can’t even predict weather over the next 50 hours.
If global temperatures are both rising AND falling, if we are experiencing wetter AND dryer periods what
is the big deal? The GREENS get all worked up if the Atlantic, for example, see’s a higher than average amount of named
hurricanes in a given year. What they won’t tell you about are the years before and after that particular hurricane
season when the Atlantic saw fewer named storms.
It is awful ‘convenient’ for the GREENs that any and all weather is evidence of global warming,
even global cooling is evidence of global warming somehow. To borrow from George Orwell, the GREEN mantra is ‘the earth
is warming, it has always been warming’. Until it is cold and then the line becomes, ‘the earth is cooling, the
earth has always been cooling’. If someone disagrees with the orthodox GREENs on that one, they are a kin to holocaust
deniers and they are in serious need of reeducation.
Since the beginning of time, there have been some that thought
man could control the weather by praying to Zeus or some other God. Today the GREENs feel that man can also change the weather,
only they pray to Al Gore. The GREENs would laugh at the notion that Greek Gods or tribal rituals could affect global climate
but human emission of CO2 affects the Earth’s climate about as much as a Cherokee rain dance does.
11:30 am pst
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