I have no problem with extending healthcare to people who cannot afford insurance.  There are a number of very practical and cost-effective ways to do this without impacting the health insurance or economic situation of those already insured.  Unfortunately, this is not the law that passed Congress last Sunday.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story about the recently passed healthcare reform bill.  The story points out that one of the aims of the bill is to redistribute wealth by adding taxes on the wealthiest Americans.  They seem to forget that the ‘weathiest Americans’ generally run the businesses that provide the jobs for the rest of us. 

On July 30, 2009, the New York Times reported:

“The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.42 percent of total federal income taxes in 2007, according to the most recent data from the Internal Revenue Service.”

These are the people who do not work forty-hour weeks.  They are people who studied hard and worked hard to get where they are.  If we are going to tell our children to work hard and study hard to succeed, we need not to punish the people who have succeeded.

The gripe in this article is that for the past thirty years, the taxes on the wealthy have decreased more than the taxes on the less wealthy.  Has it occurred to the writer that since the tax burden on the wealthy was disproportionally higher, logically, it would decrease more?

As can be expected from the New York Times, the article blames Ronald Reagan for the inequality of income in the United States.  Has it occurred to the writer that when you begin to tax success (as was done in the Clinton years), you slow down economic growth (although the results are not immediately obvious)?  When you offer people a free lunch (free health care, lower taxes for lower achievement, longer term unemployment insurance which lessens incentive to find a new job or possibly take one that is less than ideal), the level of achievement will go down.  You have taken away incentive.  Why work sixty hour weeks if you aren’t going to be allowed to keep what you earn? 

The healthcare bill represents a cultural change in America–hard work and success will now be punished–not rewarded.  This will not mean good things for our future.