From the “if we don’t want it, what are our elected officials doing pushing for it” file, comes this latest Rasmussen report:

The health care reform legislation working its way through Congress has lost support over the past month. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 44% of U.S. voters are at least somewhat in favor of the reform effort while 53% are at least somewhat opposed.

Today’s 44% level of support is down from 46% two weeks ago, and 50% in late June.

Opposition has grown from 45% in late June to 49% two weeks ago and 53% today.

As in earlier surveys, those with strong opinions are more likely to oppose the plan rather than support it. The current numbers: 24% strongly favor and 37% strongly oppose.

[ . . . ]

There is a huge partisan divide on the health care plan. Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Democrats favor it. However, the plan is opposed by 80% of Republicans and 60% of those not affiliated with either major party.

via Rasmussen Reports™: The Most Comprehensive Public Opinion Data Anywhere.

It’s what the Tea Party movement is actually about, isn’t it? Taxation without representation. Sure, those are our elected officials inhabiting Washington, but are they representing our wishes? Are they doing what the majority of the population wants them to do on issues such as health care? Well, the answer is surely ‘no’ if they succeed in cramming this rotten apple of a health care ‘fix’ down our throats. And if our officials are no longer representing us?

Who are they representing?

Our officials MUST be sent the message that they serve in Washington at OUR sufferance. They are not elected to go be ‘avant gard’  and to enact the pipe dream fantasies of their socialist forbears.  Inasmuch as they’re doing that, they’re doing so without the approval of the people, and without that approval, they should be bounced when their terms are up.

Will we do it? Will we hold these people accountable? Not if the press has any say about it (and they most certainly do). They know that what these officials are doing is counter to the wishes of a large majority of the country, so they won’t DARE let you know about it in their daily newspapers and television shows. If you knew, you’d of course bounce them, and the pipe dreams will die….which is a bad thing when you’re a 14 year old trapped in the body of an adult news professional. Don’t you know that the world stopped when they turned 14 and we owe it to them to give birth to their adolescent fantasies?

Turn on, tune in, drop out. That’s the advice I’m giving you (in the spirit of the counterculture still unfortunately so relevant to many of our press and elected officials). Turn in to the new wave of citizens taking back their government. Tune in to the message being broadcast load and clear beneath the frothy veneer of “acceptable” political commentary at the NYT, the WaPO and MSNBC. Drop out from the zombie rank and file.

Cancel your subscriptions.

AUSTIN, Texas – Just nine people accounted for nearly 2,700 of the emergency room visits in the Austin area during the past six years at a cost of $3 million to taxpayers and others, according to a report. The patients went to hospital emergency rooms 2,678 times from 2003 through 2008, said the report from the nonprofit Integrated Care Collaboration, a group of health care providers who care for low-income and uninsured patients.

“What we’re really trying to do is find out who’s using our emergency rooms … and find solutions,” said Ann Kitchen, executive director of the group, which presented the report last week to the Travis County Healthcare District board.

The average emergency room visit costs $1,000. Hospitals and taxpayers paid the bill through government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, Kitchen said.

Eight of the nine patients have drug abuse problems, seven were diagnosed with mental health issues and three were homeless.

via 9 patients made nearly 2,700 ER visits in Texas.

Doesn’t seem like an efficient usage of scarce resources to me. And we wonder why medical care is so expensive.

Imagine you sold gumballs. It’s the way you make your living and feed your family. In exhange for a gumball, people give you a dollar.  Not so novel a concept (I hope). Now imagine that the government said that you had to give gumballs to whomever knocked on your door and asked you for one, regardless of their ability to pay. You still had to clear $1,000 a week because after all you’ve still got your mortgage and your kids have to eat and every now and then you like to catch a ballgame. That’s 1,000 gumballs, right?

Wrong. It’s only 1,000 gumballs so long as you’re selling them for a dollar apiece. But since the government dropped its edict on you about the freebies, you’ve been overwhelmed by people who just can’t seem to scrape together the dollar for their gumballs. So last week alone you gave out 250 free gumballs. What does that do to your $1,000 nut? You’ve got 250 less gumballs to sell now, but the same 1,000 paying customers at your door. What do you do? You charge the paying customers more of course. So instead of a dollar apiece, to make up for the 250 gumballs that the government forced you to give away for free, you’ve now got to charge $1.33 apiece for those 750 remaining gumballs just to break even.

Why not sell more you say?

Well you’re by yourself don’t forget. You don’t have the resources by yourself to produce and distribute any more than 1,000 gumballs a week. You could produce more, but then you’d have to go out and hire a staff. Maybe also rent some warehouse space to store an invetory. All that stuff costs you money though, which will have to be passed along to the consumer also…at least for a time.

Doctors don’t do anything except sell gumballs. When you ask that they give away their gumballs for free, they’ve got to charge the paying customers more to break even. There’s no such thing as a free lunch after all. Or a free gumball. Someone always pays.

How much do you pay?

Unintended consequences, here we come!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved legislation to curb employee pay at financial firms that receive government bailout funds, a measure that could supplant an earlier effort to heavily tax executive bonuses.

The bill, which passed on a 247-171 vote, would give the U.S. Treasury broad powers to prohibit “unreasonable and excessive” compensation and bonuses that are not based on performance standards.

The Pay for Performance Act is among a number of efforts by Congress to claw back bonuses and curb pay in the wake of public anger over executive bonuses at insurer American International Group, which has received a bailout worth up to $180 billion.

via U.S. House backs new pay curbs at bailed-out banks | Politics | Reuters.

Of course what nobody seems to understand is that these businesses have to have good people in charge in order to recover. Good people demand top pay. If companies can’t pay what top people are worth, they’ll end up with secondary and tertiary talent.

If a law was passed in NY that said the Yankees can’t pay any player an “unreasonable and excessive” salary (such reasonableness to be determined by a team of politicians in Albany), which of the best players in baseball would come to play in NY? The Yankees would become the Pirates (sorry Pittsburghers). All the top players would spurn NY and go play where their value would be compensated.

The same will happen to these firms.

To say nothing of all the tax money we’ll end up LOSING when all the bonuses and high salaries are outlawed.

As Jimmy Breslin once asked:

Because yeah, after all, in an economic downturn, what everyone wants is a law that will “curb pay”.

Yes, it is a dirty word. How dirty? We’re all about to find out.

[Obama] is declaring war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds.

That is the meaning of his anti-growth tax-hike proposals, which make absolutely no sense at all — either for this recession or from the standpoint of expanding our economy’s long-run potential to grow.

Raising the marginal tax rate on successful earners, capital, dividends, and all the private funds is a function of Obama’s left-wing social vision, and a repudiation of his economic-recovery statements. Ditto for his sweeping government-planning-and-spending program, which will wind up raising federal outlays as a share of GDP to at least 30 percent, if not more, over the next 10 years.

[ . . . ]

Study after study over the past several decades has shown how countries that spend more produce less, while nations that tax less produce more. Obama is doing it wrong on both counts.

Why do governments that spend more end up producing less? Every dollar that government spends must first be confiscated from someone who has actually earned that dollar. The more government spends, the more it must take from earners (either directly through taxes or indirectly to service debt). The more government takes from earners, the less is earned. Therefore, increasing spending will decrease growth.

It should be obvious by now why governments that tax less produce more. The lower the tax RATE, the more an earner can keep for himself, which is in itself an incentive to produce more….which….will result in MORE tax revenue for the government! Imagine that.

So why does Obama want to take us in the opposite direction? Why are his policies all geared to make us produce less through higher spending and higher taxes? Don’t you know?

He doesn’t want us to produce more. That’s simply not his objective.

He’s a Socialist. A Statist. A Big Government drone.  What he desires is for the Government to replace the individual. He doesn’t want insurance companies to compete to bring us the most comprehensive policies at the most efficient rates. He wants the government to offer a single one size fits all policy that’s really expensive and not efficient at all.

But WHY?

Because he’s a social engineer. He thinks that that government acting as a single behemoth can do better for its citizens than those citizens acting for and among themselves can. But it isn’t really that either. Because his system won’t benefit all citizens at all. It’ll benefit the takers only. Democrat voters.

The trouble is that this entire system is flawed. It depends on a small percentage of the population carrying the water for the rest. Taxation depends on people earning money to be taxed. Wall street execs. Middle management. Investors. Small businesses. Large businesses. Despite the fact that he’s taxing them into the stone age, the entire Obama system depends on them nonetheless carrying on. Working extra hard for all those dollars that the government is going to end up taking 75-90 percent of anyway.

Which of course they won’t do. So we’ll produce less. And never recover.

But who cares if by that time the government has become so entrenched in our daily lives and we’ve become so regulated that we’re too dumb to even notice?

Well this is refreshing, isn’t it?

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal announced Friday that he will decline stimulus money specifically targeted at expanding state unemployment insurance coverage, becoming the first state executive to officially refuse any part of the federal government’s payout to states. 

In a statement, Jindal, who is slated to give the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s message to Congress on Tuesday, expressed concern that expanding unemployment insurance coverage would lead to increased unemployment insurance taxes later on. 

“The federal money in this bill will run out in less than three years for this benefit and our businesses would then be stuck paying the bill,” Jindal said. “We must be careful and thoughtful as we examine all the strings attached to the funding in this package. We cannot grow government in an unsustainable way.” 

Careful and thoughtful, huh? Would that our bretheren in DC would heed the call.

Watch Bobby J. deliver the response to Obama’s address to Congress Tuesday night. I know I will.

It’s obvious what’s happening. The question is why. It’s clear that this glib, self-important aristocrat from the South side of Honolulu by way of private schools in Indonesia named Obama thinks that America works better for him as a Socialized welfare state despite all evidence suggesting it works better for ITSELF as a free market enterprise. That much is clear. What’s not clear is why. Why are we ignoring the lessons of the Depression and barrelling headlong into the same failed economic policies that caused so much harm to America during the ’30’s and ’40’s? Is he a fool? A scoundrel? A fraud?

Na…he’s just a Socialist. He doesn’t actually want to “fix” anything. Failure is just fine by him. In fact, he’d rather this whole country imploded so that he might rebuild it as a good old fashioned Socialist state. Capitalism and free markets get in the way of all that. They must be destroyed. That’s all we can take from his actions of the past 2 months. That’s all we can take.

To the Socialist, what’s important is that the citizenry become 100% dependent on the STATE. To do that, there can be no other viable private option. All roads MUST lead to the State.

There’s no other rational explanation for some of these outrageous policies. This today from David Harsanyi:

Your president loves his country so much that he would sacrifice up to $275,000,000,000 of your money to keep the housing bubble bubbling, with almost no legislation or debate required. Obama claims his new mortgage bailout would give a second chance to those “homeowners who have played by the rules (and) have been making their payments on time.”

Who knew that playing by the rules comes with a government warranty? After all, I may play by the rules and engage in bizarrely self-destructive behavior. You may not. You may have played by the rules — invested in the stock market, a home, a business, a career — and found yourself stuck with a financial dud.

But as every 2-year-old knows, consequences are the incentive to avoid risky behavior. So why are we rewarding failure and attempting to abolish consequences? Many of the homeowners government is bailing out took the unnecessarily chancy loans that helped fuel the financial jam we’re in.

Why indeed. Because by INCENTIVIZING bad behavior, Obama hopes to get MORE of it. There’s just no other rational explanation. It isn’t that he doesn’t realize that this is bad behavior or that by throwing money at it he’ll get more of it. He completely gets that. In fact, he’s COUNTING on it. Why? Because the more rapidly he breaks down responsibility and individual accountability, the more readily he can fill that gaping whole with GOVERNMENT. Face it. You and I have just been told that we should go out and get in over our heads. Go ahead. Do it, says Obama. We’ll be here for you. We’ll pick up the pieces.

But there’s a catch. The government plays for keeps. It gives nothing back. When it picks up the pieces of an economy that it CAUSED to shatter, the goal is to remake things in its OWN image. Obama’s government has a vested interest then in the failure of our economy. Every fix that it implements should be viewed in this perspective. Everything it does to HELP is done because it actually wishes to HARM. What will survive at the end of the day will be THE GOVERNMENT…to which we will all be beholden. To which we will all be enslaved.

Read this and see if you believe that any semblance of objective reporting remains in today’s media:

WASHINGTON: Republicans are preparing to pounce on any wasteful spending in the $787 billion stimulus package as they refocus their criticisms of a measure whose success could hurt their 2010 election prospects.

Another way to say the same thing?

“Democrats, who voted nearly unanimously to pass a $787 billion stimulus bill laden with wasteful spending, now face the difficult task of defending the bill from Republican critics eager to capitalize on its failure and improve their 2010 election prospects.”

Go ahead, this is fun. Try it yourselves at home.

The latest poll from Rasmussen:

When it comes to the nation’s economic issues, 67% of U.S. voters have more confidence in their own judgment than they do in the average member of Congress.

Nineteen percent (19%) trust members of Congress more, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fourteen percent (14%) aren’t sure.

Republicans and unaffiliated voters by double digits have more confidence in themselves than Democrats do, but even a majority of the party that controls Congress trust themselves more than the average legislator.

Forty-four percent (44%) voters also think a group of people selected at random from the phone book would do a better job addressing the nation’s problems than the current Congress, but 37% disagree. Twenty percent (20%) are undecided.