You’re missing nothing. This is a scare tactic used to recruit stupid people to make a lot of noise. Reforming health care would make it far less profitable to be in the health insurance business…the more robust the reform, the more billions will evaporate from their profit margins. Therefore, they are willing to spend as much money as is necessary to buy influence in Congress. And when a Congressperson realizes the simple inescapable math that the better the insurance companies do, the better the Congressperson does better, so the Congressperson needs to gauge what his/her constitutents think and find the one hot button that will make the constituents agree with the position the Congressperson wants them to hold. And when the overwhelming evidence demonstrates clearly and logically that the Congressperson’s stand is wrong and harmful overall to his constituents, the best tool he or she has is fear. If you scare people into thinking that if they don’t support what you want, the consequences will be dire, you can effectively silence the majority of rational, fact based debate. And fear is not based in facts, it’s based in persuasion. Talking loud, shouting over what anyone else has to say so you get heard…that’s persuasive. Getting large crowds to assemble in a protest, that’s persuasive. Getting an elected official (even one who’s as crazy as a shithouse rat like Michelle Bachmann) to speak out on your behalf…THAT’s persuasive.
Did they provide any facts? Any figures? Anything to support their arguments? Did they indeed even articulate what their argument is? I’m going to guess no. Essentially, they don’t want to make the argument concise…they want to keep it foggy so anyone who is disaffected and afraid can latch onto this cause and interpret it to fit his or her own beliefs…that’s the most effective way to make fear go viral. So, here’s how the game works.
Most people who watch Rush and Hannity and Beck, who go to the tea party rallies, these are people who don’t really understand what Socialism is. They’ve been told that Obama has a Socialist agenda, and you know what, he is spending a lot of our hard earned tax dollars, which is what Socialists do, they take everyone’s money and redistribute the wealth. That’s downright unAmerican. Problem is, true Socialism would be the government takes ALL your money and gives you what you need, that’s FAR from what we have or anywhere we could even conceivably get close to in this country. Even when we had a top tier rate of 95% on income over $1 million, people still got rich, that first $1 million (which was worth a hell of a lot more than a million is today), was taxed at a much lower average rate…even then we still had rich and poor and in between. People still made millions and became very wealthy. But now, you try to institute a top tier tax rate of over 28%, and this is not on ALL income, but just on the income you make over and above a level that 99.999% of people will never see, suddenly you’re a Socialist. And to these easily led fools, Socialism = Communism. They remember the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which had a communist rule, so Socialist is the same as Communist, right? Wrong. Communism is more of an authoritarian concept (which is what people are afraid of), Socialism is an economic concept which has nothing to do with freedom.
The only argument that can even kind of be made about freedom being taken away if we get healthcare is that IF (and no one is talking about this, but don’t tell the tea baggers, um I mean tea partiers this), we put all health insurance AND health care under the umbrella of the Federal government, the government would be able to tell people where they had to go to get health care. This isn’t what is happening, not even close, not even the slipperiest of slopes could ever get us there, but even if the government DID own all the means of both health care payers and providers, then the government COULD dictate what conditions can and can’t be covered. The great irony is, private health insurers do that NOW and a good part of reform is making sure that insurers can NOT refuse to cover medically necessary treatment. So basically by holding out the specter of Socialized medicine equals Socialism, equals Communism, equals Authoritarian regime, they are able to convince people that fixing a problem they don’t want but already have would actually do the very opposite.
And I guess the other “freedom” argument comes from the Libertarian side of the coin. We should be “free” to keep ALL our own income and spend it on what WE want, not have the government take it from us via taxes and spend it on other people (the implication being that the others haven’t worked for it and don’t deserve it like “I” do). It misses of course the point that a blue collar worker could work 80 hours a week at 3 jobs paying 7 bucks an hour, have no health care, could make barely enough to feed, clothe and house his family in a neighborhood that is unclean and unsafe, where his kids have to go to a subpar school, ensuring that they too will be underpaid wage slaves…the only food they can afford is fast food which makes them fat and unhealthy, and they can’t afford to go to the doctor when they’re sick because none of the part time jobs offers health insurance, private insurance is too expensive and a trip to the doctor is expensive, so they get sick and take years off their lives. This person comes home mentally and physically exhausted every single day and uses every bit of his skill to make it in the world, but has a myriad of worries to occupy his free time. The CEO also works 80 hours a week, but spends it in a chair, talking to people and making decisons. He brings home $50 million a year, and most of that is in the form of capital gains on stock options he’s been granted, these aren’t taxed until he cashes them in and even then he pays 15% tax on them. The guy working hard physical labor 80 hours a week also pays 15% tax on the majority of HIS income. The CEO lives a life of wretched excess…and he can afford to lobby Congress if they want to make him pay 20% on his capital gains, the money which was raised could be spent to give health care to people like our worker friend. But you take away some of the CEO’s money, even if he doesn’t even kind of need it, and use it to improve the quality of life for countless others who work just as long and hard as he does but which the companies run by the aforementioned CEOs don’t value enough to pay a living wage for doing the jobs they do (because that would be less money for them), and it’s “not fair”. You’re “threatening their freedom” by not letting THEM decide how to spend THEIR money, even though when you get right down to it, the way they acquired so much money is structurally dishonest in the long run.
But even if you buy the argument that a specialized set of skills SHOULD be worth a lot more, you’ll often hear, why SHOULDN’T the rich and the poor pay the same percentage of their income in taxes. And OK, basically my big problem with that is, you SHOULD at minimum be sure everyone is making a living wage BEFORE any taxes are taken, our government should NOT be in the business of destroying the very viability of its citizens. But let’s say, OK, we should establish one tax rate on every dollar made over and above say $30k a person…first off, it would be fair to also say that anyone who works a 40 hour week should be able to make a minimum wage of this amount, or whatever amount we decide is a fair living wage based on one wage earning working 40 hours a week…that’s just fair and decent, but since the people who have all the money have the deck stacked in their favor, we’re lucky to get 7 bucks an hour for the unskilled and uneducated…even if it’s this lack of skill and education that keeps future generations from breaking through into the skilled and educated sector. All that aside, let’s say you give a 20% tax rate on every dollar earned over and above the minimum living wage, and everyon paid it. That WOULD be fair, except for all the other taxes people have to pay…state, local, property, sales, licensing, gas, etc. These taxes on things that you consume at the same rate whether you’re rich or you’re poor eat up a huge percentage of your income if you’re poor..but if you’re rich, you don’t even notice them. The only way to make it fair would be to collect ALL taxes at the Federal level and distribute them downward. But then the Rethuglicans would say you’re making Federal Government too big, too powerful, and it threatens our freedom. So, what do we do instead? We have a progressive tax system, where if you make x dollars, they are taxed at a certain percentage, then the next so many dollars are taxed at a slightly higher rate, and the next so many at an even higher rate. This offets the effects of all the otherwise regressive taxes. But then they look at this and say, why should I have to pay a higher percentage of MY income just because I’m more skilled. It’s a catch-22, and the only way it’s kept going is by lies and misinformaton and scare tactics. And it leads to guys like “Joe the Plumber”, essentially a liar who was neither a liscenced plumer, nor a guy named Joe, saying he was a business owner (when he mostly some day wanted to be a busines owner, but would probably never pull it off), worrying that an increase in the top marginal tax rate would affect him (it would not) and actually make it worth it for him to work less hard because the more he made the less he would bringv= home (a complete misrepresentation/misunderstanding of how a progressive tax works).
So, what’s going on here is the wealth and powerful are scared shitless that they are going to be less free to waste their money and are going to have to see their money used to help the less fortunate about whom they don’t give two shits, and so they’re working tirelessly to convince the scared, ignorant masses that their freedoms are at risk because Obama’s going to raise everyone’s taxes (even though he’s already cut taxes for over 98% of households) and use it to take over their freedom to make their own health care decisions.
Liars and idiots, that’s all they are.
