The Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac model was based on a government-sponsored entity offering affordable housing to people who weren’t profitable under normal business conditions. Didn’t take us too long to figure out how that turned out. If you create a semi-public company that is forced to loan out more than it can collect, it loses money and the government has to bail it out.

Fast forward, now it’s health care. A government-sponsored entity would offer affordable medical insuranec to people who wouldn’t be profitable under normal business conditions. So this entity will have to pay out more in claims than it takes in, as premiums. It will lose huge amounts of money and the taxpayers will have to bail it out.

Only the health care version of Fannie Mae will be much worse, because people will only sign up for the government-sponsored insurance when they get sick. Healthy people won’t sign up, so the ratio between premiums collected and claims paid will be astronomically, inconceivably bad.

In this book I’m reading, Buck Wild, the author points out that Bush’s Medicare drug plan was only supposed to cost $400 billion (estimated by the Congressional Budget Office) between 2005 and 2015. Not it’s looking like it will cost closer to $750 billion.

The CBO says Obama’s health plan will cost about $1.4 trillion over ten years. Going on past experience, I’d say that’s a low estimate. And it will be sheer, unadulterated liability. Fannie Mae on steroids, gone nuclear.

But since the government option will still come with premiums, some workers who’ve lost their employers’ private insurance won’t even be able to pay the small fees for the public health plan, and they will end up being …. uninsured.

Imagine: D=Dinner, S=Sales Tax, T=Tip, V=Vat tax

If S=10%, and your dinner costs $10, then S= $1 and your first subtotal is D+S, or $11.00.

If you want to tip 15%, then T=1.50

If V=10%, then it will be .1*11, or 1.10

So you would give your server $12.10 for the check, then slip him $1.50 separately for tip.

And your $10 dinner ends up costing you $13.60.

I know it sounds nutty, and I could never figure out why Canadians taxed a total that included a tax, but that’s the way it worked as I remembered it. It was very expensive.

I could never figure out what the heck the tax was but I figured out, at the time, that you ended up paying about a third of the original bill in sales tax, VAT, and tips, if you were cheap.

The point is

Though I think that will only work until the government realizes that they’re not making money off you, and then they’ll start forcing you to pay a breathing tax. Or else they’ll re-enact that phony story they tell about Lord Amherst, and they’ll give you a free blanket infected with smallpox and then tax your corpse when you’re dead.

This is all getting so, so dreary. When do we get to try a different party in power? Maybe the Constitution party? The Greens?

a thousand thousand-notes would make a million, so that’s why the stack would be 4 inches.

a billion is a thousand millions, which is like 4,000 inches. Divided by twelve, I get 330 feet.

a trillion is a thousand billions, or 330 feet X 1000, which makes 62.5 miles.

So I think your formula makes sense if you use thousands instead of million-dollar bills.

Any way ou cut it it’s a lot of money!

Right now I am reading “Buck Wild” a book about how the Republican Party lost its way and became the party of big spenders. The irony is that the book was published in 2006, and now all the numbers that were shocking to the author in 2006 feel like, well, pennies. The Democrats have dwarfed the big spending of even the Bush years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....&NR=1

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Don’t we WANT to be like them? Truly?

(yeah, didn’t even sound right in my own head)

What in the hell is a “Value-added tax”?????? Is it like the old days when Honda and Datsun dealers added a “market value adjustment fee” to the cost of a new Japanese vehicle? “We think that the company has under-valued this car so we are just bringing it up to the price it should retail for,” was what some sales wienie told me one time when I priced a Civic in the late 70′s. I told him no thanks and bought a Ford. What planet do there butt-munches come from? This one may be the straw that breaks the camels proverbial back.

Let’s all meet at our nation’s capitol to discuss this with Barry. I’ll bring the ammo.