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That's a lot of money
12/11/14

Let's say you're looking for a house for your family of four. You could live just fine in a $100,000 house, but you want one that runs more like $300,000.

You're going to pay about $1400 a month for that house.

So far, so good. Well what if you don't need or want that house? Would you still make that payment?

Oh, bad news: You have no choice. The US Government says that you have to pay that money whether you want to or not. $1400 every single stinking month. If you don't choose to make the house payment, you have to pay it as a fine with your taxes. It's the law.

Is it just me or is that crazy? Can you afford to pay $17,000 every year for something you don't get? 'Cause I can't.

$17,000 a year. Holy freaking mother of all . . .

$17,000 every stinking year for something that you don't get . . . .

How many times a year do you go to the doctor? For a lot of people that number is less than one.

But let's say you go a lot. Do you go four times every week? That's how many $81 doctor visits you'd have to make to pay $1400 every single stinking month of every single stinking year.

But actually that $1400 doesn't pay for all of that either. Even after you pay that you have to pay out of pocket for co-pays and deductibles and the endless list of things that they don't cover.

Insurance does not mean free health care.

In addition, when you have insurance your doctor bills the insurance company three times what he would charge you for the same service. This after you pay him the co-pay. This is because it costs him to staff an entire office to fight with an insurance company for months to get paid for looking at the wart on your tuckus.

I explained this. Let's say you have $150,000. You buy a piece of property and build a house. Now you don't have $150,000 anymore. But you do have a house worth $150,000.

In addition, the contractors and the building suppliers and all the people involved in building your house have $150,000. That's spreading the wealth.

And that's creating wealth. You took $150,000 that was in society and basically doubled it.

If you take that same money and handed it to the government you don't have it anymore. For your money you'll get about $50,000 worth of services—at the outside most. So you just turned 100 grand into smoke.

I'm going to make a macro that types "Here's what I'm talking about:"

For the $17,000 you pay to an insurance company a year you maybe got about 200 bucks worth of medical care. You could conceivably get nothing. If you're like me you have gone multiple years without ever seeing a doctor—your only medical costs being Band-Aids and ibuprofen.

But that's not how insurance works. You and a bazillion others each paid 17 grand. Some of them--some--got more than 17K in medical care. But most people got much, much less. Over the entire group each person's $17,000 probably paid for about $5,000 worth of actual medical care.

What happened to the other twelve thousand dollars?

It went to pay lawyers and insurance agents and the huge juggernaut that manages the obscenity known as the medical insurance industry. So you say, well, I'm providing jobs for lawyers and insurance agents and all the people who work in that big building in Omaha that process claims.

True. But that money didn't build anything. That money contributed to the entropy of the universe. When that money changed hands it made the lawyer wealthier but society as a whole more poor by a greater amount than that increase.

Here's what I'm talking about. When you buy a gun or a car or a welder you don't have the money anymore, but you have the product that you paid money for. When you pay money to an insurance company or a lawyer you don't have the money, and you don't have anything else that you didn't have before.

So all of those people who are getting money but not creating wealth are personally getting richer, but the society that they live in is decaying. That segment of society lives in the top floors of the skyscraper while the rust destroys the building. They don't see the decay, but they still fall when the building does.

Wow, that was lyrical . . . .

So who cares? It's just money.

What is money? Money is the way we store resources. Energy, time, life. That's what money is. So when you turn that to vapor you are destroying those things. Poverty is a train with many cars, and none of them are good. Disease, early death, childhood mortality, stress, families without time for each other, desperation, despair, hopelessness . . .

Poverty is misery. And it doesn't only hurt those that are poor. A society that doesn't prosper is a society in decay. That's the entire society.

So anyone that takes money without creating wealth for society is peeing on the stowage passengers, but they're on the same boat that's going to sink when it's full of their pee.

Now that was lyrical right there.

You probably saw Jonathan Gruber getting grilled for being a total schmuck and spilling the secrets about the evil that is Obamacare. For a minute I felt sorry for the guy. He's the cat that happened to be available to get kicked when people were pissed off over this obscenity called Obamacare.

But then I didn't. Screw him. He's not the only guy responsible for the atrocity, but he is one of the guys responsible for ruining my country.

So you say, Yeah, yeah, ruining the country, yeah, whatever. A country is a big nebulous thing.

Well what about this? He's responsible for ruining lives.

Have you seen what poverty does to people? Can you even fathom the effect on society that this bleeding of the wealth is doing?

Do you feel sorry for anything that happens to Adam Lanza? If a crazy man is running around my family with a loaded gun I wouldn't feel the least bit of remorse for double-tapping that waste of skin in center mass, followed by a finish shot to his head. I guarantee you a thousand times more people will die because of Obamacare than that psycho killed in the movie theater.

Again, back to the Republicans and their talk about "repealing and replacing" Obamacare. What the hell are you talking about? You've got a knife in your back. What do you want to replace it with? If it were me I'd like to replace it with "no knife in my back."

The democrats have (again) maneuvered the Republicans into a stupid position. Here's what you replace Obamacare with: Nothing. Why are we the ones maneuvered into a corner? Why can't we make the democrats explain why the government needs to be involved in the insurance business to any extent other than the regulations that any businesses have to prevent fraud?