Can You Afford McCain's Health Care Plan?

With the nation's attention focused on the economy (the feds bailed out AIG), it's interesting to note a column by Bob Herbert of the New York Times. He talks about the McCain-Palin agenda for health care, specifically health insurance. To say the plan is an eye opener is an understatement. Herbert says, correctly, that with the focus on lipstick and who invented the BlackBerry, The Republican candidates' proposals haven't gotten much attention. Hopefully, that may change.

What jumps out about the McCain-Palin plan is the fact it would treat employer-paid health benefits as income. That means workers would have to pay taxes on it. That of course means your employer will have to withhold a bit more from your paycheck to cover the estimated tax. Now for McCain, who paints himself as a tax cutter, to propose taxing healthcare is radical by itself. McCain proposes to make up part of the tax by offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit of between $2500 and $5000.

The question then becomes this. If you're going to offer a credit, why tax the benefits as income in the first place? Oh yeah, the agenda, which is to eventually relieve employers of the pesky responsibility of helping to pay for workers' healthcare. It would put more and more Americans in the private health insurance marketplace. That means, left to their own devices, workers will opt for the cheapest possible plan, or opt out of the health care system entirely.

A new study of the McCain plan projects that 20 million Americans will lose employer based health insurance if McCain and Palin get their way. In other words, this is the very kind of deregulation that has helped cause the current mess in the financial markets. Do you want that kind of chaos facing you if you or a member of your family gets sick?

John McCain and Sarah Palin think government regulation is part of what's wrong with America. They may try to dress it up a bit due to present circumstances on Wall St., but as they mouth their platitudes, ask yourself this.

Can you afford the McCain-Palin health care plan?

Masters No More

If you have any doubts that the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the fire sale of Merrill Lynch, and the ongoing woes of AIG don't have global consequences, take a look at the international media. You'll quickly see that financial markets from London to Berlin to Tokyo are shuddering as the Dow lost 504 points yesterday. Most financial experts are saying it will get worse before it gets better.

What's already worse is the paucity of information about how this meltdown will affect the average hard working American. We told you yesterday it's likely thousands will be thrown out of work. Lehman Brothers alone has (or had) 25,000 employees worldwide, about 11,000 of them here in the US. However, a close reading of the foreign press tells you some will make out better than others, just as they have in the past.

The so-called "Masters of the Universe", the highest of the high flyers, never seem to actually get seriously hurt by these economic gyrations. As the newspaper The Scotsman puts it:" Masters of the Universe will never know what it's like to live in a subprime home". Richard Fuld, Lehman's boss of all bosses, certainly took a hit on the plummeting value of his company's stock. After all, he was Lehman's biggest shareholder. Yet he'll still walk away with eight figures.

And so it goes with any number of financial titans who leave as their firms struggle or go under. Those who were compensated largely in stock options saw the value of their paper evaporate, but they still had enough left over to keep both their homes and their memberships in fancy country clubs. And those fat bonuses many high flyers got when the markets seemed on a never ending roll? Nobody thinks about asking for them back.

And so, while millions of Americans worry about their 401Ks, the bigwigs who presided over this meltdown lick their wounds, knowing the little guy will never understand what it's like to be worth over a billion dollars one year, and only $60 million the next. The little guy just wants to know how it happened, and what anyone will do to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Right now, nobody's talking.

Bankers on the Block

The nation awakes Monday morning to the news that one of its most prominent securities firms has filed for bankruptcy. Maybe you've been reading about the troubles Lehman Brothers has been having of late. It came to a head over the weekend, as neither the feds nor a corporate angel was willing to bail the company out. There's more, however. Other prominent firms in the financial sector are also teetering on the brink. Merrill Lynch agreed to sell itself to Bank of America yesterday. Insurance giant AIG and savings and loan bigs Washington Mutual also find themselves strapped for cash, and looking for help.

All this comes on the heels of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout, which in turn followed the shotgun wedding of Bear Stearns and JP Morgan Chase. Keeping in mind these aren't mom and pop operations we're talking about, a fair question to ask is, how come? How is that financial names Americans have come to know and trust are falling apart like this? The easy answer may be greed. It seems many of these companies invested heavily in the mortgage market that's now dragging the whole country's economy down.

Beyond that, it would appear a lack of discipline in the financial sector and regulation on the part of government also brought these firms to the brink. It gets like that when everybody at the top is making out like bandits. Six figure bonuses, lavish parties, and a never ending boom market come together to create a sense of entitlement to good times for all on Wall. St. And then it ends.

There's no telling how this market meltdown will affect the average American. There will no doubt be a huge shakeout on Wall St., meaning thousands will be out of work. They will join the hundreds of thousands of everyday folk who struggle to find comparable work. The guess here is most won't feel sorry for the high flyers. There may not even be much pity for shareholders who've seen their money evaporate before their eyes.

Recession? What recession?

Palin, ABC Shoot Blanks

Now we know Sarah Palin is clueless about foreign policy, and even national security. Her answers in the interview with Charlie Gibson on the Bush Doctrine and war with Russia told us that. This is a person who, if elected, would be a heartbeat away from the presidency, and she muddled through an answer about whether the US has the right to send the military into Pakistan without telling them first. All in all, she was in over her head, but that's only part of the story as far as the interview(s) are concerned.

First, ABC ought to be ashamed of itself for the amateurish edits during the segment shown on World News Tonight. It looked choppy, and at one point there was an edit before a sentence was finished. For his part, Charlie Gibson didn't pitch softballs. But who decided to take parts of two different interviews and spread them over four shows on two nights? Sure you want to milk Palin's popularity and the nation's curiosity about her for all it's worth but isn't this overkill?

Yet coming out of this first broadcast test, another question looms. Are those people inclined to view Palin favorably going to be swayed because she doesn't know the Bush Doctrine? The answer may be no. Her Teleprompter answers and clumsy attempts at interview intimacy (how many times did she call Gibson Charlie?) may not matter as much as what she represents to the Religious Right, some women, and, if blogs and comment sections of newspapers are any indication, lustful men.

Those who look at Palin from a political perspective may be licking their chops, waiting for Joe Biden to deliver a series of knockout blows in their one debate. They may be missing something a very wise man once said to me.

"Be in error, but never be in doubt". Can that old adage save Sarah Palin?