The challenge is picking just one per day.

I get the feeling that I’m the idiot today.  And yesterday.  And probably for many more days to come.

You may have heard about the Senate plan to ram through healthcare on Christmas Eve.  Perhaps it is the conspiracy theorist in me, but I feel like the current plan for those supporting this bill is to take our current system, which admittedly needs work, and screw it up to the point of complete dysfunction.

They want to super-tax (40%)  “gold-plated” plans, which are really more like brass-plated plans for big companies, and tin-plated plans for small companies or individuals.  This will drive companies to cut benefits well before any magical cost savings appear.

They want to kill tax benefits that allow big companies to pay for their retirees prescriptions, rather than having them participate in the Medicare drug plan.

They want to regulate the private health insurance industry to death.

I could go on and on, but I’ll keep this short.  The crazy person in me says that the reason they want to do this is to drive everyone into the arms of a government health care option (be it Medicare or some nascent public option).  When everything else really is crap, the government alternatives begin to look pretty good.

As much as I don’t like being that crazy paranoid guy, I find myself hoping that this really is their conspiracy.  Because if it is not, it looks to me like they are simply trying to make an even bigger wreck out of our current mess of a system without having any ideas for how to actually fix it.

Old and Busted: Paying for retirement benefits using future workers taxes

New Hotness: Spending 10 years worth of new taxes in only 7 years

No worries Nancy.  You won’t have to sign up for the new plan.

The headline is meant to be a statement of fact, not an endorsement of the idea put forward by Brenda and Robert Vale that people could save the planet by eating their pets.  Chances are that a proponent can be found for even stupid ideas, but the folks who front them usually don’t see them as quite so idiotic.  Of course this particular idea is absurd and the authors are using it mostly as a shock tactic to get people to think of the various ways in which they use resources that are not absolutely essential.

What this book title should do, however, is make people realize the extent to which our modern lifestyles depend upon energy.  In the final analysis, everything we do depends on energy (it’s physics.)  And furthermore, it should point out the kinds of absurd possibilities that are opened up when some third party gets to determine what activities are and are not acceptable usages of energy.  After all, you may feel your pet is a member of the family, but the carbon regulation board may view pets as “non-essential personnel.”

Yeah, sure, a diving catch you say?  Stuck up to the elbow?

Taxing medical devices to help pay for government funded medical care is one of the most idiotic ideas ever proposed.  How does a 10%, 20%, or 40% (actual number is unknown, but bear with me for a moment) tax on a medical device, of which probably 80%, 90%, or 100% of the cost will be paid for by the revenues from the tax even make sense?  Especially considering the fact that whatever the tax is, 100% of it will result in overall increased costs to medical consumers.

The answer is that the only possible thing this tax may accomplish will be to raise the cost of medicine for those with non-government sponsored insurance (or those who pay out of pocket) in order to fund the cost of medicine for those with government sponsored insurance.  Furthermore, as more people migrate to government sponsored insurance (because of the added taxes which are subsidized for the government sponsored plans), the tax will eventually become an impotent ruse which results in no net revenue, but merely serves to inflate the total cost of all medical goods.  The government subsidized insurance plans will use the funds collected by the tax simply to pay the tax.

*Extra Credit: Replace “medical device(s)” with “Gold-plated health insurance plans” in the above to determine the mechanism by which the Baucus option will eventually drive everybody to government funded health care.  (Caveat: if the government options include enough waiting lists and rationed care, the rich may still choose to buy private insurance in order to make sure they get the health care they need in a timely fashion, thus allowing a niche private insurance industry to remain indefinitely.)