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A note by Maynard

This SFGate article caught my eye.

Lower 2014 income can net huge health care subsidy

People whose 2014 income will be a little too high to get subsidized health insurance from Covered California next year should start thinking now about ways to lower it to increase their odds of getting the valuable tax subsidy.

“If they can adjust (their income), they should,” says Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It’s not cheating…”

Used to be we worked to increase our income. Rising income was good; falling income was bad. Working more (if you wanted and needed it) was good; being out of work was bad.

In short, we had a system that made sense for both the individual and the society. You earned more because you produced more. You were motivated. The result was good for everybody.

As taxes grew, of course, it became less profitable to earn more. The more you made, the more the government took from you. But you still had more money; just not as much as the raw numbers said you had.

Okay, if the government needs more money, I guess it has to go after the people that have more money. We can argue the morality but not the pragmatism. (As Willie Sutton famously explained when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” Thus we have Sutton’s Law, which states that one should never ignore the obvious. But I digress.)

In time, the progressives became unsatisfied with merely steeply graduated taxes. So we advanced (if that’s the word) to the era of subsidies. Rebates. Whatever.

The practical effect of modern policy is the less you make, the more you get. Thus today’s wise advice, trumpeted in the mainstream press by the modern sages, is to earn less.

I guess there’s some political expediency at work here. Used to be, if you couldn’t get a job, you were encouraged to blame the president. Now your falling income becomes a blessing. Heck, you should thank the president for for your unemployment.

But where does this path take us? Soon enough, the guy with the most money will be the one who figures out how to have no income whatsoever.

Am I indifferent to the needs of the poor? No, I just want the system to work! Because we’re not going to be helping anyone when things fall apart.

All this sharing is wonderful and lovely and everything, except that we’ve demotivated the ideal of actual productive work. You know, work, the thing where you go and offer a good or service that somebody actually wants and needs.

Me, I’m a dinosaur. I do my job, earn my bread, pay my taxes, don’t ask for gubmint cheese. This is the only framework I know, and I take comfort in it.

But as the world tilts against me, us dinosaurs will die out. And then who will pay for all those subsidies? I wonder.