As to home prices, you have to look to Congress and their creation and expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the causes of that problem. The stupid decisions leading up to the mortgage crisis have been underway for a couple of decades now, with pretty clear indications of the risks that were being introduced into the system and have now come to fruition. The best suggestion I have heard on this subject is to break up Fannie and Freddie and sell them in pieces to the private sector.

As to the woman you cite, I have no information about which to respond. Insurance is a contract into which parties enter. Contracts can be, and are, canceled all the time for all kinds of reasons. I’ll speculate, without really knowing, that she probably reached the maximum total expenditure covered under the contract, which would have been one of the clauses in the agreement into which she willingly entered when she was healthy. I’ll further speculate that she could have picked a different contract by paying a different premium.

Nowhere is it written that a business is forced to lose money in its contracts.

Our healthcare financing system is broken, I’ll give you that, but because of too much government, not too little.

Most boomers know not to cooperate with polls, anyway. You don’t give away your position. You don’t tell people how you’re going to vote. That’s a private matter, not something to share broadly, or at all.

Somebody’s trying to drive wedges.

What we now have is a system in which 50% of people pay nothing. They have no incentive to keep tax rates low. That’s why they are prey to the class warfare of people who hate (envy, really) those who are doing well, and want to confiscate and redistribute their earnings to people who didn’t earn them. That’s just politicians buying votes with somebody else’s money.

Realize that in any given year, the people who are earning the most are not necessarily “the rich.” They are the people who, through hard work, intelligence, education, and good fortune, are earning a lot that particular year so that they have something to put away for the future. Think of employees in high-tech companies cashing in stock options. These are the people we want to reward, not punish, for doing well.

The hereditary rich have their wealth locked up in trust funds and have expensive advisors showing them how to minimize their taxes. They are not the people who bear the brunt of increasing income tax rates, and they’re seldom the people who are producing the entrepreneurial companies and jobs that drive economic growth. If you want to get at the rich, don’t do it through annual income taxes, but through doing away with the tax-free status of trust funds.

The wealthy people I know (and I hope to become one of them) have no problem sharing their fortune with others. They do it by creating jobs, by granting employees stock options, and by making generous donations to college endowments, foundations, and charities. What they rightly object to is government confiscating their money and using it for purposes with which they don’t agree.

The money people earn is their property. We all pay a portion of earnings for the privilege of living in this society, and to support necessary (and only necessary) public services. How would you feel if Congress passed a law that it could take the houses of wealthy people and give them to other people? That’s exactly what a confiscatory and unequal tax system does, only with money instead of houses.

What’s so wrong with the rich paying taxes? Without this country and without all of the less affluent working for them, they would have no money. It’s the least they can do (and many try lots of chicanery not to do it) to give to those who they stand on to be rich. Profiting without giving in return is the primary characteristic of a parasite.

Take Obama’s “tax” program. Anybody who actually researches income tax issues (instead of buying quasi-religious political slogans like “tax cuts for the rich”) should know that under President Bush, the percentage of income taxes paid by high earners is higher than at any time in recent history. Half of Americans pay NO federal income taxes at all. The other 50% of us pay ALL of federal income taxes. The top 5% of earners pay over half of all federal income taxes; that’s right, 5% carry 50% of the burden.

Yet Obama’s tax program would further increase that inequity, by creating what he calls “refundable” tax credits for people who pay no federal income taxes. “Refundable” means that at tax time, the government would write checks to those people. That’s right. Government would take it from the most productive people–high earners–and give it to people who not only haven’t earned it, but haven’t paid ANY income taxes to begin with. That is not a tax credit, or rebate, or whatever propaganda slogan Obama wants to label it: that’s wealth transfer or, more honestly, welfare.

Confronting that reality, it’s no surprise that Boomers don’t support the most left-leaning candidate put forth by the Democrat Party since George McGovern. It’s amusing to me that Boomers–who argued for the enlargement of government and it’s role in our lives–are now finding those chickens coming home to roost.