Two things, EV. First, my understanding of it is that if you selling your house increases your unearned income to more than 200K (250k if filing jointly), then you'll be subject to the tax. That is NOT the same as everybody pays 3.8% when they sell their home. A far cry, actually. I suspect the unearned income part would actually be largely based on your equity vs. debt financed.
Also, where was all this anti-health care venom when the Republicans insisted on funding high-quality health care for the Iraqis? Much better healthcare than what we're going to get. I'm a little fuzzy on why we should pay for a single payer system in Iraq but it's every man for himself here. A paradigm I'm sure you supported with all of your GOP zeal.
EB, can you post an article about the Iraqi healthcare issue..I gotta say Im not facile on it.
Under the new health care bill - all real estate transactions will be subject to a 3.8% Sales Tax The bulk of these new taxes don't kick in until 2013 If you sell your $400,000 home, there will be a $15,200 tax. etc etc
Well, it would appear that our
liberal media hasn't really bothered to spell it out. Shame. It mostly appears to be the writings of bloggers that I won't bother posting here. However, there are some simple and verifiable facts. Healthcare is a constitutional right granted to all Iraqis. A constitution based on the Transitional Authority Law which we crafted for them, which also inferred upon them the right to health care.
First: Every citizen has the right to health care. The state takes care of public health and provide the means of prevention and treatment by building different types of hospitals and medical institutions.
Second: Individuals and institutions may build hospitals or clinics or places for treatment with the supervision of the state and this shall be regulated by law.
Because it was suggested that Saddam decided who did and didn't get medical treatment, it was deemed important that everybody would. Therefore, Iraq gets universal healthcare. Something we deem too socialist for ourselves, since healthcare isn't a right in America, but a privilege.
This leads to the question of who pays for it. Well, obviously we do. Here's the
GAO report for Iraq spending as of 2005. Pages 30-34 deal with healthcare, but the nutshell is that we spent 866 million at that point. Since we've spent a shit-ton on rebuilding the infrastructure we destroyed, there's really no telling how much of it was related to their
communist style medical program. As of 2006, the Iraqi Minister of Health said they desperately needed another 8 billion. I have no idea if we gave it to them or not, but considering that we're still shelling out >100 billion per year, we damn sure better have.
To be fair, I'm not generally opposed to this. Obviously, I think spending 1-3 trillion dollars to destroy and then rebuild a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with us was the dumb-fuck act of a bumbling idiot. However, I tend to think that healthcare
should be a right afforded to any citizen of a civilized country. Plus, since we're largely responsible for turning the Iraqi medical system from one of the region's best to third world over the last thirty years, we pretty much owe it to them. I just find that the people who are so terrified of Comrade Obama's socialist plan to insure healthcare for all Americans tend to be the ones who supported forcing a similar but better system on people who never asked for it, and that to me translates to something between simple hypocrisy and outright sadism.
Topic: State of the Union (Read 5558 times)
