This is semi-serious.
I know exactly how Ayn Rand would answer this question, but she's gone and this is not a seance. I'm not asking Ayn Rand.
I live surrounded by Bubba, and he's not mean. If Bubba sees me, an old gray guy, struggling with a flat tire, Bubba will stop his truck and help me change it.
Bubba will mow the lawn for the elderly lady next door. He drops his pocket change in the collection jar for the family hit by cancer, and it's Bubba who serves the hot dogs at the ball games that allow the Band Boosters to buy the musical instruments for the kids that Gov. Perry has hacked out of our budgets--they always hit the arts and foreign languages first when money gets tight.
For all these reasons, I'm not nervous that Bubba keeps a rifle in a rack on his truck. I know he's not going to shoot me.
I'm nonplussed that Bubba voted for Gov. Romney.
And the question below the fleur-de-kos is real.
On the tube today, there was Bubba lamenting that Obamacare just began to ruin his life and the country today. He said "My taxes went up $400 to pay for Obamacare!"
His taxes did not go up $400 to pay for Obamacare. John Boehner's might have, because of the amount of time he spends in a tanning solon, which is subject to a new tax.
Then there's ending tax deductions for high end health insurance, but those are deductions and not credits so it's highly unlikely that Bubba would be subject to that unless he had a great union contract and still more unlikely it would amount to $400.
There's a medical device tax of a little over 2%. The logic of this is that, with 40 million new insured, more medical devices will be sold.
So, as I was inventorying the Obamacare taxes in my mind and trying to figure out what in the world Bubba was talking about other than what Rush and Faux Noise told him, the following question hit me like a blinding flash of the obvious...
If 40 million of your fellow citizens had no access to healthare
and you, personally, could change that for $400, a little over a buck a day for a year,
would you?
If not, why the hell not?
NOTE: They just replayed the film clip and he said four THOUSAND dollars, leading me to believe he must be a business owner, but he's still wrong. Small businesses get subsidies for covering their employers, not extra taxes. So I still don't know what he's talking about and I'm going to go ahead and post this diary based on my misunderstanding of the number he claimed, because my question still gets at the observed gulf between how Bubba lives his life and the Ayn Randian nonsense he sucks up so eagerly. Ayn Rand would say that stopping to change a flat tire for somebody else just makes you late. Bubba does not believe that any more than I do.