Mis-Quote of the Day

No, I'm saying I want to pay for everyone's health care (even Bob's) with my tax dollars instead of paying for executive yachts with my insurance premium dollars. Eliminate private health insurance, transfer our premiums to taxes, and we get broader, better coverage that can't be taken away by pre-existing conditions or the profit motive.

You say "I want to pay for everyone's health care (even Bob's) with my tax dollars." I assume then that you are one of those wealthy few who actually pay taxes?

According to a NYT article "The top 1% of income earners paid about 36.7% of federal income taxes." The top 1% paid 36.7% of federal income taxes "and 25.3% of all federal taxes in 2004. The top 20% of income earners paid 67.1% of all federal taxes. By contrast, families in the bottom 40% of income earners, incomes below $36,300, typically paid no federal income tax and received money back from the government."

So if we are going to fairly allocate health care based on taxes, what are we going to do with that bottom 40% that don't pay taxes?

I haven't crunched all the numbers, but from what I can tell watching the dog and pony shows put on by Obama, et al, the people sreaming the loudest for "free" healthcare are the one who pay the least in taxes.

If you want to pay for my health care, have at it, Cory. Get your checkbook ready and I'll give you my address. We don't go to the doctor often, but with you coughing up the loot for us, I'm sure (like others do when someone else is paying the tab) we can find it in our schedules to go more often and for trivial things we might have dismissed before. After all, you have the freedom to do with your property whatever you wish, even waste it if you want to.

But as for me and millions of other Americans, we want to use our property the way we see fit. That's our God-given right, backed up by the U.S. Constitution.

And not you or anyone else is entitled to get government thugs to take our property away from us to give to you or anyone else. God says so, the Constitution says so, and the Founders and early statesmen of our great nation have affirmed that truth.

Here's what God tells us about proper charity (hint: it's private, not coerced and dispensed by the government):

- If one of your countrymen becomes poor and sells some of his property, his nearest relative is to come and redeem what his countryman has sold. (Leviticus 25:25)

- Do not show favoritism to a poor man in his lawsuit (Exodus 23:3)

- Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. (Leviticus 19:15)

- If a man will not work, he shall not eat. (2 Thessalonians 3:10)

- These should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family (1 Timothy 5:4)

- As for younger widows, do not put them on such a list…they get into the habit of being idle and going about from house to house (1 Timothy 5:13)

- If any woman who is a believer has widows in her family, she should help them and not let the church be burdened with them, so that the church can help those widows who are really in need. (1 Timothy 5:16)

This is what the Founders and early statesmen have to say about it:

- Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. St. Monday and St. Tuesday, will soon cease to be holidays. Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them. - Benjamin Franklin / letter to Collinson May 9, 1753

- I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. - Benjamin Franklin / On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor November, 1766

- Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. - Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson / Notes on Virginia, Query 19 1781

- It is a duty certainly to give our sparings to those who want; but to see also that they are faithfully distributed, and duly apportioned to the respective wants of those receivers. And why give through agents whom we know not, to persons whom we know not, and in countries from which we get no account, where we can do it at short hand, to objects under our eye, through agents we know, and to supply wants we see? - Thomas Jefferson / letter to Michael Megear May 29, 1823

- A wise and frugal government…shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. – Thomas Jefferson

- To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it. — Thomas Jefferson

- We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. - Thomas Jefferson / letter to Samuel Kercheval July 12, 1816

- Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated. – Thomas Jefferson

- I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. - Thomas Jefferson / letter to William Ludlow September 6, 1824

- The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.” — John Adams

- [Congressional jurisdiction of power] is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any.” – James Madison

- The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined . . . to be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce.” – James Madison

- With respect to the two words ‘ general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. – James Madison

- I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. – James Madison

- Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. – James Madison

- We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. — Congressman Davy Crockett

- I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. - President Grover Cleveland vetoing a bill for charity relief, 1875

- I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. [To approve the measure] would be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded. - President Franklin Pierce's 1854 veto of a measure to help the mentally ill

As for what the Constitution says about it, look in Article 1 Section 8 which outlines the enumerated powers that authorize everything the federal government can do; you won't find any form of government charity or care program in there. And while you're in the Constitution, check the Tenth Amendment; it says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Me, I don't think I'm smarter than the Founders, the Constitution, or God. And I darn sure don't want to show disrespect to any of them and find myself on the opposite side of their profound wisdom.