LET'S PASS A LAW THAT ELECTED LEADERS MUST TAKE ECONOMICS 101.

You know, I promised not to use this as a political mouthpiece and I only wrote 3 posts that even mentioned my view on the election last year. I heard from several readers that while they had a different opinion than mine (the way it is supposed to be), they appreciated my attempt at striking a balance and not being off the edge in my views.

You may recall my ideal ticket was a Republican and a Democrat for President and Vice President. And when Obama won I said the people have spoken and I would support him. And I continue to do so.

From my point of view, the jury is still out on him. I think he has done a bad job domestically with the banks, auto companies and the stimulus bill, but in fairness, he may not have had a lot of choices.

And I think he has done a decent job at taking the first step to rebuild our reputation in the rest of the world. He isn't changing anything as he probably really can't. Every President is almost always limited by their countries geopolitical realities regarless of their political party.

So he is forced to follow almost all of Bush's policies internationally (Iran, Russia, Guantanamo, Iraq, etc) just as Bush had to follow for the most part Clinton's policies. But Obama's tremendous gift of communication is allowing him to reframe the same old issues in a much better way and create in the minds of the rest of the world that we are more willing to negotiate their concerns (even though we can't really do anything much differently). I think he has made much progress by just telling people he cares about them and is listening to their concerns.

So, this post is not about Obama. It is about his bedfellows.

But tonight, as I am nursing my hernia operation I had today and feeling sorry for myself, I received a Breaking News alert that said the Democrats are going to try and institute a surtax on couples making more than $350,000 to pay for $550 billion of the ridiculous health care reform plan that is being bantered about in DC.

On top of that, they said that if the health care savings that they anticipate in the plan aren't met, they will raise the tax on these taxpayers even more. In other words, if the Democrats are wrong in their estimates of the savings in health care costs they guess can be obtained by going to a government run system (read rationing) that still leaves 36 million or so people uninsured (and they are wrong) they will punish themselves for their lousy analytics by making the taxpayers pay even more. This is America?

I am so livid I cannot believe it.

I am aware of and sensitive to the fact that the majority of people in America do not make over $350,000 a year so it is easy to say "Screw em-they have too much money anyway." And that might be the logic behind the Democrats proposal given their track record this year to date.

The error in that thought process is as follows: It is true that it can be possible to not have people make $350,000 a year or more. There are several models of that in real life-Somalia (except for the pirates), Sudan, Eritrea, Moldova, Afghanistan, etc. And since these countries are heavily dependent on aid from American based charities, the poor (which are the majority) in these countries will suffer more since a large percentage of the contributions that charities raise here to send to poorer countries is from couples making over $350,000. Now they won't have the money to give because the government will have it.

One could argue that this will be okay if the money goes to give Americans better health care (you know-the "keep it at home instead of helping those "other people" argument). But that is not the case-the health care proposal will deliver worse health care, not better. It will provide coverage for 13 or so million people that are uninsured and that is good, but the rest of American's who are happy with their health care other than the cost will wake up wondering if they should take French lessons since they will have moved to a Canadian type of system of socialized medicine.

Which brings me back to the title of this post.

The last I looked, the unemployment rate had gone much higher than the Administration said it would and VP Biden said this week "We (the administration) simply got it wrong". Well, they have this wrong too because it is contrary to basic economics. I, for one, will not feel better when they increase taxes $550 million dollars and then say "Oops, we got it wrong".

If you tax couples making over $350,000 annually $550 billion more in taxes, that is $550 billion less they will have to donate a portion of to the charities mentioned above and a lot less to invest in companies through the purchase of their stocks and bonds which would create jobs.

Therefore, all the jobs that would have been created to solve the unemployment problem (you can hire a lot of folks for half a billion dollars) will not be created and so we will continue in this recession, created during the Bush years and now being supercharged in the Obama years .

When you have Democrats in Congress that are so gung ho to get even for some of the dumb things Bush and Cheney did that they are determined to get their pound of flesh by ruining the lives of so many Americans we have reached a sad state. And this is coming from someone (me) who is solidly behind the well thought out and doable programs that will give all of us not just universal access through a government/private industry program that was put forth a couple of years ago. So my anger is not at the idea of fixing our health care industry-we must fix it. My anger is in doing it the wrong way because you are mad at the past Administration and deciding to make a small group of Americans pay for over half of it.

And I think they are doing it (to make the point again) because they are still angry with Bush and because they never read or understood Economics for Dummies (if there is such a book) or took a basic Macro economics class.

Okay. Probably the only political posting by me this year.

As you can tell, the knife didn't slip today during the surgery. I still have a fire in my belly, especially on this topic.