Curmudgeon's Corner

Income Redistribution

Posted by Al Campbell on April 2, 2010

Healthcare, Political, Quality of Life, U.S.

Byron York, the Chief Political Correspondent for the Washington Examiner had an article titled “ObamaCare was mainly aimed at redistributing wealth” published in today’s edition.

He quotes Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) as saying, among other things, that health reform is “an income shift”.  It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans.”  Baucus went on to explain that in recent years “the maldistribution of income in America has gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle income class is left behind.”

He also quoted Howard Dean as saying, “The question is, in a democracy, what is the right balance between those at the top…and those at the bottom?”  “When it gets out of whack, as it did in the 1920s, and as it has now, you need to do some redistribution.  This is a form of redistribution.”

We Americans may well come to understand that we would’ve been ahead of the game if we had simply written out checks to “redistribute” our wealth.  This redistribution may well accomplish the redistribution of wealth, but it certainly will do so at the harm of health care.  It would have been more effective and far less costly/intrusive to simply have purchased health care coverage for all those who didn’t have it, and still don’t even though taxes are about to begin to be collected as if they do have it.

It is somewhat refreshing, I guess, to hear some of those who were in favor of this new program admit that this was about something in addition to/instead of health care.  It was the vehicle that was convenient and that could be used as the “Trojan Horse” to begin the ‘revolution’ they viewed as necessary.