Tag Archives: Obamacare

Random Stupidity

The Rational Middle today makes the natural progression from the insane to the sublimely stupid, as my depression of last week is turned to blunt astonishment by events local, national, and international.

Around The World

Afghanistan’s U.S. installed puppet leader (it would really be more appropriate to call him the Governor of Kabul, as Afghanistan lies outside of the Western views of nation-state) has apparently decided that it is politically expedient to not be friends with the United States. I guess I don’t blame the man, when we leave there will be a healthy number of folks ready to settle scores with Karzai, but is it really advisable to be so overtly belligerent?

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Anatomy Of A Lie: Responding To The GOP On ObamaCare

Chain emails have become the hip new way to spread lies and disinformation to voters. They are typically inspired by carefully constructed stories quietly published, and spread quickly from the naive to trusting friends and relatives. A recent chain I heard of describes a devastating tax imposed by ObamaCare on “middle class families” that is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2013. The excise tax on unearned income amounts to 3.8% and does take effect on January 1, 2013. Below is what House Republicans said about this tax on their website.

Beginning January 1, 2013, ObamaCare imposes a 3.8% Medicare tax on unearned income of “high-income” taxpayers which could apply to proceeds from the sale of single family homes, townhouses, co-ops, condominiums, and even rental income, depending on your individual circumstances and any capital gains tax exclusions. Importantly, the “high income” thresholds are not indexed for inflation so will reach increasing numbers of middle-class taxpayers over time.

In February 2010, 5.02 million homes were sold, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). On any given day, the sale of a house, townhome, condominium, co-op, or income from a rental property could slam middle-income families with a new tax they can’t afford.

This new ObamaCare tax is the first time the government will apply a 3.8 percent tax on unearned income. This new tax on home sales and unearned income and other Medicare taxes raise taxes more than $210 billion to pay for ObamaCare. The National Association of Realtors called this new Medicare tax on unearned income “destructive” and “ill-advised” and warned it would hurt job creation.

The missive contains the preferred key words that conservatives have taken to using when trying to smear anything; middle class, middle-income families, and “hurt job creation”. Especially irritating are the quotation marks around “high income”, as if folks earning more than $200,000 per year are not, in fact, high income earners. In the fantasy world of the conservative hierarchy, folks making that kind of cheddar are “normal” and “productive”. Apparently, judging by their policy proposals, the GOP believes that couples earning $60,000 per year (like a cop and a schoolteacher, or a roofer and a clerk) are “unproductive” because they aren’t “job-creators”.

To reinforce their fantasy, the notice is carefully and deliberately constructed to mislead working class folks about who speaks for their interests, but it does do the world a favor by perfectly illustrating why conservatism is so bad for the United States:

In what world do you live in, Mr. or Mrs. John Q. Conservative, that you believe that a family earning $250,000 (or an individual earning $200,000) is in the “middle class”?

How many of you know people that earn those incomes? Your doctor might earn that kind of money, as might an attorney, and even the occasional high end engineer. These are the classes of jobs that are likely to face higher taxes under our current president, but it is unlikely that any of the proposed or enacted tax hikes would, in the parlance of the House Republicans, “slam (any) families…”

Thankfully, the National Association of Realtors have crafted an honest assessment and explanation of the tax to ensure that its membership are well-informed. This document, which I have linked here, explains the technical realty of the tax in plain English, as well as displaying several easy to follow examples of how the tax would affect real people…wealthy or otherwise.

We all see chain emails, hear internet rumors, are struck by random and shocking Facebook postings, and are subject to inflammatory television ads on an hourly basis. The Rational Middle thinks it vital to the future of this democracy that citizens automatically assume the information shared is questionable, and do their level best to seek the true facts. But most of us don’t have time, so if you see or hear something that raises your antennae, let The RM know on Facebook or by commenting directly on the site. We will do our level best to find the information relevant to the story, and share the facts (whatever they are). As always, The RM tries to avoid other blogs and news services whenever possible, and go directly to source.

 

The Rational Middle is listening…

On The Job Of A Supreme Court Justice

Justice Antonin Scalia has a question; how can the people of the United States of America expect he or his clerks to read a law as expansive as the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act of 2010? It is a relevant question at the least, and one that has been thrown down as a gauntlet by conservatives opposed to the law they call Obamacare since the very beginning. At least one GOP Member of Congress brought the full printed version of the law to the podium to demonstrate his point as, apparently, something with a lot of words is necessarily bad.

The Bible has close on a million words, and Biblical “scholars” have a lively debate trying to figure out which ones are relevant to Christians in this century and which are meant to be ignored. I suppose, in the interest of being reasonable, that if the document is divinely inspired that it doesn’t have to pass the length test. Perhaps we should ask Justice Scalia? In any case, all of this talk of length has got me asking a question more important than whether size actually does matter; just how big is Obamacare?

I keep hearing about a 2,700 page monstrosity, but when I look up the law I find that it only has 955 pages. I also find that the Affordable Care Act is printed in the same format as all federal legislation is; 2″ margins all around and 14 point font. In fact, try copying a page of the law and pasting it into Word; you will find that a typical page has about 500 words, and some substantially less. That means that the law comes out to something less than 500,000 words. One half of one million is still a lot, you might say, and I would agree. But in law and business, as in life, context is everything. Is 500,000 words too much to expect of folks that get paid to read and evaluate laws?

At around 1,000 words per opinion, and with hundreds of opinions written, Justice Scalia himself is at least as verbose as the law he refuses to read. He has written as many books as J.K. Rowling although, in fairness, his were undoubtedly shorter than her last three. Speaking of Ms. Rolling, millions of Americans substantially less well read than Justice Scalia and his clerks, have read the last three books of the Harry Potter series. Those novels, it turns out, tip the scales at more than 500,000 words. Those millions who have read them, by the way, didn’t get paid to do so. Justice Scalia does in fact receive a substantial salary, excellent health insurance, and a lifetime guarantee of work, all under the auspices of him reading and giving judgement on the laws brought in challenge before his bench.

Lazy, flippant, petulant, and entirely too powerful for the amount of work he is willing to offer the people of the United States of America. Just 25 more words that describe Antonin Scalia, Justice of the Supreme Court. And one more…

Fraud.

The Rational Middle is listening…

The Death Of The Mandate

This bandwagon picked up passengers quickly:

“A federal judge struck down the heart of the Obama administration’s health reform law Monday, ruling that the individual mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.”-Politico

“A U.S. judge in Virginia Monday declared a key part of President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare law unconstitutional in the first major setback on an issue that will likely end up at the Supreme Court.”-Reuters via The Insurance Journal

“The Obama administration’s health- care overhaul unconstitutionally requires Americans to maintain a minimum level of health insurance, a federal judge ruled, striking down the linchpin of the plan.”-Bloomberg

The whole of what I like to call the conservative mainstream media has decided that the ruling by Federal Judge Henry Hudson is a blow to what they call the “linchpin” of the Affordable Care Act. Even the dreaded “sources within the Obama Administration” are concerned because the mandate is the key to the ban on preexisting conditions. The secret of this story friends, is that they are all missing the real point.