| sebastian_dangerfield |
03-10-2010 03:03 PM |
Re: Sea Change
Quote:
Originally Posted by LessinSF
(Post 418777)
|
That's why you need the mandate, and the mandate won't work not only because the penalty's too low, but because enforcement of that penalty is near impossible. How do you compel compliance or in lieu of it payment of a penalty in a country where 40% of people already pay no taxes? Garnish their wages? Are the Dems going to withhold people's unemployment benefits? Even if the answer there were "Yes," you know how much that process costs the govt? And how ineffective it is with child support and back taxes already?
This program is set up for the upper middle class and well-off to subsidize the lower middle class that makes too much for govt safety net health care programs and too little to afford private insurance. That's what's going to happen. And you know what that does in the immediate? Sucks a big pile of consumer spending out of the economy. Which keeps the lower middle class right where it is. Well, except that it keeps some of them alive longer, in poverty, at cost to the rest who might move upward in an economy allowed to be more vibrant. |
