Couldn’t Help But Notice (072407)
Star Parker hits a perfect SCHIP shot — “No to Medicaid for the middle class.” Giving in to start-up of SCHIP in 1997 was a very big GOP mistake, as it fed health-care inflation during the ensuing decade. It was one of the earliest signs that the Gingrich Revolution was over. Making the same mistake by expanding the program will solve nothing.
This might solve almost everything, but it’s almost a guarantee that government bureaucrats wouldn’t give it a chance.
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Woe Is Wisconsin, if Governor Jim Doyle and his merry band of statists prevail — From today’s OpinionJournal.com, we get another reason why SCHIP expansion should be stopped. It comes in the form of how much a state-run “universal” health system, the ultimate goal of SCHIPsters, would cost, courtesy of Wisconsin (bolds are mine):
Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is “free” health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.
Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.
This employment tax is on top of the $1 billion grab bag of other levies that Democratic Governor Jim Doyle proposed and the tax-happy Senate has also approved, including a $1.25 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, a 10% hike in the corporate tax, and new fees on cars, trucks, hospitals, real estate transactions, oil companies and dry cleaners. In all, the tax burden in the Badger State could rise to 20% of family income, which is slightly more than the average federal tax burden.
….. As if that’s not enough, the health plan includes a tax escalator clause allowing an additional 1.5 percentage point payroll tax to finance higher outlays in the future. This could bring the payroll tax to 16%.
To roughly estimate what the feds would charge for a nationalized system, you need to throw in a few layers of bureaucracy, a wider range of items that must be covered, and a lower level of efficiency. That’s worth at least a few percentage points above the Badger State’s mind-numbing figure.
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Nice T, Justin.
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“Oops” of the Day –
23 July 2007
BRUSSELS (AP)-Yves Leterme, the head of the Flemish Christian Democrat party trying to form a coalition government, broke into the French anthem “La Marseillaise” when television reporters asked him to sing Belgium’s ‘La Brabanconne’ on Saturday.
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Talk about impatient –
Cash incentives fail to trigger baby boom in Germany
20 July 2007Wiesbaden, Germany (dpa) - Germany’s population is continuing to decline, despite financial incentives designed to encourage couples to have more children, according to figures released Friday.
The Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said deaths outstripped births by 57,200 in the first three months of 2007, causing the population to shrink by 0.5 per cent.
A total of 149,300 children were born in the first quarter of this year, only 0.4 per cent more than the corresponding period of 2006 - the year with the lowest birthrate in German history.
The figures indicated that measures introduced by the government last year had stopped a decline in the birthrate but had failed to trigger a baby boom.
The measures passed at the beginning of May 2006. I count nine months later as early February 2007. To have a baby boom in the first quarter of 2007 you’d have to assume that every couple interested in starting or expanding a family was paying close attention to the news, and that a significant number would change their plans within 60 days.
Someone needs to tell the story’s source, DPA Germany, that they should stop acting like a bunch of nagging in-laws and give the new policies a chance to come to be, uh, fruitful.
