If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal

If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal of Obamacare's individual and corporate mandates instead of the stinker bill now being proposed by the Republicans in the Senate.

That way those of us who can obtain real insurance like we did before will obtain it again but at a cheaper cost than now, and those who can't will still have Medicaid, but funded by dead certain payrolls instead of the hodge podge of state and federal funding now.

Because of Obamacare, those who have insurance are subsidizing at enormous expense to themselves those who have become covered since 2009 under the plan, mostly under Medicaid. Medicaid alone has swelled by 25 million people thanks to Obamacare. It's a massive income redistribution scheme from those who have insurance to those who don't, which is manifestly unfair. There are easily 48 million people in this country making less than $15,000 a year who have no skin in this game yet qualify for Medicaid.

The answer, short of returning to the status quo ante where millions are kicked off of Medicaid, is to make more people pay their fair share. This means taxing every dollar of compensation with a Medicaid tax, just like we do with Medicare. The burden should be born by everyone, including those now receiving Medicaid.

Currently we have about 55.5 million enrolled in Medicare, supported by a 1.45% payroll tax. It isn't enough support, but there it is.

Medicaid on the other hand has exploded under Obamacare to coverage of 75 million, but state budgets, like individuals' budgets under Obamacare's outrageously expensive health insurance, are breaking badly under the burden. 33 will fall short of revenue targets in the current fiscal year.

The proportional Medicaid payroll tax rate implied by 75 million program participants is at least 1.95%.

This is Trump's opportunity to put Medicaid on a sounder footing.

Republicans won't like this plan because it involves a new tax, even though many people are already paying this tax to one degree or another depending on their tax obligation in their state of residence. The revenues, insufficient as they are, are already collected at the state level, but variably.

So it's not really a new tax. It's a new collector.

Democrats ought to love this idea, for the obvious reason. It codifies the nation's "obligation" to the poor's healthcare in the form of a tax, just as Medicare codifies the nation's obligation to the elderly's healthcare. With it they can claim Obamacare is still the law of the land in some form.

Pelosi and the House Democrats are well positioned to deliver this in the form of a bill to send to the more evenly divided Senate because Paul Ryan and a coalition of 75 or so liberal Republicans could get it over the goal line, just like they did so many times before in league with the Democrats, making an end run around the House conservatives.

The Senate would go for the bill because it is simply more liberal all around. Democrats there would vote for this, along with liberal Republicans.

Trump needs to get this done and off the table.

We've been arguing about it now in earnest for 8 years already and are just plain sick of it.

Enough already!

Repeal Obamacare root and branch, and institute a Medicaid tax.

Modern economists are unfamiliar with the Christian, his horse, plow, ax and box of dynamite

California, home of the 9th Circuit which shot down Trump's travel ban, bans travel to 8 states

From the story here:

California is restricting publicly funded travel to four more states because of recent laws that leaders here view as discriminatory against gay and transgender people. All totaled, California now bans most state-funded travel to eight states. The new additions to California’s restricted travel list are Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota. They join Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee as states already subjected to the ban.

Wind energy turbines kill 368,000 birds annually, but kitties kill far more

Reported here in early 2015:

Now, federal wildlife officials are cracking down on wind farms caught killing bats and birds. A peer-reviewed study issued last summer estimated turbines kill as many as 368,000 birds annually. ... House cats kill at least 1.4 billion birds annually, and possibly up to 3.7 billion birds, according to a 2013 federal study. And a single natural-gas flare at a liquid natural gas plant in Canada killed an estimated 7,500 birds in a single night.

38% of Americans shun crowds in 2017, up from 23% in 2006

Gallup poll, here.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: Karen Handel wins by nearly 4 points in Georgia, Rachel Madcow blames the weather

Story here.

Laugh of the Day: Mueller to investigate whether Republican winner in Georgia last night colluded with Russia

63% of Hispanic immigrants are illiterate in English, 41% of all immigrants are

Story here.

Democrats and Republicans look set to agree on something: A ban on travel to North Korea

Story here.

Uh oh, Trump gives up on China doing anything about North Korea after just two months

Trump met with Xi Jinping in April, here, after which he expressed the hope that China would lean on Fatboy.

Didn't work, but he sure didn't give it very long now did he?

Tucker Carlson skewers the libertarianism of Bret Stephens, who thinks you are nothing but a widget in the machine of global capitalism

Here:

He also shows little care for Americans as anything besides units of economic productivity, widgets to fuel the machine of global capitalism that pays Bret Stephens many thousands a year to write mediocre opinion columns in a dying newspaper. 

Finally somebody at National Review gives libertarianism the what-for and really, truly gets it

Here:

The alliance that has united conservatives and libertarians in common cause against bureaucratic bloat and its soft despotism is crumbling; indeed, it could never be maintained. The identity confusion that manifested as the splintering of the Right into neo-conservatives, paleo-conservatives, crunchy conservatives, tea-partiers, Trumpists, and all the rest is, in large part, the tension between the conservative and the libertarian minds. The individualism and myopia of the libertarian vision of society — atomized individuals self-defined and free from every native context in a world where everything is earned and nature mastered — is at fundamental odds with the conservative reverence for ties to family, place, and history, with its hope for nature in harmony, man’s with himself and the rest of creation. ... the fissure widens and the semantic gap between “liberal” and “libertarian” shrinks . . ..

SECDEF Mad Dog Mattis is mad as a hatter: Imposes mandatory transgender training on the US Army

From the story here:

As part of the Pentagon’s attempt to create an accepting environment for transgenders, the Army held a session Tuesday teaching officers and others how to implement existing military policy, particularly how to “assist soldiers who have a medical diagnosis indicating that gender transition is medically necessary through the gender transition process,” USA Today reports. ...

Conservative leaders have asked Secretary of Defense James Mattis to rescind directives allowing transgenders to serve, as “costly and distracting social engineering” that is standing in the way of combat effectiveness and readiness.

Pat Buchanan remembers a score of violent leftist attacks in America, and more

Here:

The campus violence and urban riots of the decade, from Harlem to Watts to Newark and Detroit, to Washington, D.C., and 100 cities after Dr. King’s death, were not the work of the Goldwater right.

F. H. Buckley doesn't have a clue how to kill the administrative state

Here. And I won't bore you with any of the impotent suggestions.

The only way to kill the administrative state is to cut off its food supply, which is taxes in quantity. That's why it took so long to get to the administrative state: The constitution effectively outlawed taxes in quantity by outlawing any taxation save for direct taxation and excises and tariffs.

We could start by abolishing withholding, on our way to abolishing the income tax. But frankly, this will require a revolution, including in thinking. And you won't find anything revolutionary from F. H. Buckley.

Real conservatives know that without the income tax there would be no administrative state to speak of. Fake conservatives pretend that we can have limited government short of abolishing it.

The Big Picture of the stock market funk

But nobody tells you that, either.

The Big Picture of the full-time jobs funk

Is that clear enough for ya?

Flashback: The New York Times Jan. 9, 2011, updated for today

Here, updated for today, but not by The New York Times:

It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans Democrats or Tea Party members Bernie Sanders' most devoted supporters. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans Democrats and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats actual incidents of violence against peacefully assembling Republicans, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right left have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants cops, or welfare recipients white people, or bureaucrats small business owners. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government Republican Party is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.

41% want Comey prosecuted, 66% of Republicans (but probably not Justin Amash)

Rasmussen, here.

Laugh of the Day: Putin mocks Comey, offers him asylum as a persecuted leaker like Snowden

Reported here:

How then is the director of the FBI any different from Snowden?