The Role of Incentives

Esa:    Today, I was checking out drudgereport.com when I saw this headline: ROB THY NEIGHBOR: HALF OF HOUSEHOLDS PAY NO FED INCOME TAX


So I clicked on it to see what it was about.


         "About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization."     --finance.yahoo.com


So what does this have to do with anything to do with the health care bill? (Because there is a connection.)


Incentives. Incentive is defined as "something that incites or tends to incite to action or greater effort, as a reward offered for increased productivity.


Taxes are a DIS-incentive. That means that they encourage you to NOT make money. That means you don't want to put as much effort into making money that the government will just take away from you. That means that if 47 percent of America decides it's not worth the time and effort to make money, THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE!!!


What is so great about money anyways? I mean, it's just a piece of green paper.


It is an INCENTIVE!!! It has value (even if I'm sort of foggy on the details of how it has value). It gives you a reason to do something, in other words. Do you think that Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple, would've started the company that created the iPod if there hadn't been some serious money involved? Do you think coal miners would mine coal, risking life, limb, and disease, if they didn't get paid to do it? Do you think that Big Oil would even be big if no one wanted to pay them money for their oil?


Do you understand? Money is a reason for doing something, whether it's creating a new way of farming that is able to sustain more people (which is part of the reason there's about 6 to 9 billion people in the world; I really don't know the exact number), or it's writing a book that is thought provoking and shapes millions of people's way of thinking and living everyday. (Take Atlas Shrugged by Ann Rynd, for example. I highly recommend you read it if you haven't read it already.)


So once you take away money, you take away the reason for innovation, creative, improvement, or even simple thinking. Once you tax a nation so much that they actually avoid making money for fear of being taxed beyond what they can afford, you cripple that nation. You have destroyed it in a way that's more permanent and profound than a simple bomb can because you have taken away an incentive for recovery, for making it better. (Unless, of course, the nation rebells, but then there's no guarantee that the government established will be better then the one before it.)


What does this have to do with the healthcare bill/law/unconstitutional abomination?


Simple. The healthcare "reform" is taking away the incentive to specialize in one specific area. (Along with saddling us with a lot more taxes. But that's sort of beside the point at this point.) 


Doctors: no matter what specialty you have, you'll all be paid the same. pg-241 (See earlier blog posts for a longer list of indignities that they'll force on us.)


Specializing takes several years longer and thousands of dollars more. I'm talking serious money here, not just lose change.

Student debt statistics

• $156,456 – According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the average educational debt of indebted graduates of the class of 2009.
• 79 percent of graduates have debt of at least $100,000.
• 58 percent of graduates have debt of at least $150,000.
• 87 percent of graduating medical students carry outstanding loans.

There's cancer specialists, eye doctors (thank goodness for these guys or else I would be totally blind), dentists (I'm equally thankful for these guys), feet doctors, plastic surgeons (in case you get horribly disfigured), back doctors, MS doctors (who are miracle workers), embryo specialists, etc. (Thanks to Kip for some of this information.)


So why do we have so many specialists going around? Because these doctors make so much more money.


Think about it. If you were a specialist in cancer, you'd be around people dying of cancer who probably don't want to die. They'd pay lots of money to not die and so therefore you'd make more money treating cancer patients than doing the general, everyday stuff that is everyday non-fatal.


So when you get rid of the reason someone becomes a specialist, you make it so people, who would've otherwise happily gone along and become a specialist, don't become specialists. And with them goes that valuable experience that comes when somebody knows their stuff, their highly specialized, practiced for a whole bunch of years before they're even allowed to do an operation on their own without supervision stuff.


And once that time has come, well, I really, really, REALLY hope I don't need surgery. And by really, I mean REALLY.


So now I hope you can see what taxes, doctors, the healthcare... "reform," and incentives have to do with each other.


And I also really hope you're not a communist.


Sources:


This is where I got the statistics for student debts.



ROB THY NEIGHBOR: NEARLY HALF OF HOUSEHOLDS PAY NO FED INCOME TAX



Here is the definition of incentive, if you don't believe me.