it's no secret

while this post will not focus on the socialist smokescreen of "progressive" taxation (as if stealing more from those with more makes usurious taxation appropriate or justified, anyway) i did just want to point out the idiocy behind one of our more-recent "save the poor" pieces of legislation boosted by the non-thinking emoticrats on the left and the right:

as you may know, bush recently signed into law the SCHIP bill, which extended a certain government health-insurance program supposedly aimed at low-income children. well, the dems got in a fuss because they said the bill was underfunded. they wanted to hike the tobacco tax to pay for the bill (earlier vetoed versions contained that provision).

hmm, that makes sense. we're going to pay for health insurance (not health care, that's a completely separate ball of wax) for the "poor" using a tax on a product used by four times more people living below the poverty level than those who have college educations. these folks, republicans and democrats, want to do away with private "insurance" (which we don't really have any more, more about that later) – in which a person pays for his own insurance – with public insurance, the thought being that poor people can't pay the cost of their own insurance. meanwhile, the SCHIP bill they pushed in '07 would have almost entirely funded the expanded SCHIP spending with taxes on those living below the poverty level. (that assumes, of course, that demand doesn't decrease with the imposition of additional taxes. if this bill were funded by a tobacco tax and then people stopped buying as much tobacco, i suppose we'd need to raise taxes again, maybe on high fructose corn syrup or trans fats. or just some other regulation to pound this pesky market into submission. and make water run uphill.)

make no mistake, america isn't robbing the rich to pay the poor anymore. they're robbing everyone. who they're paying is anyone's guess.