Not Their Fault

This is quite the amusing piece of literature and has a number of quotables to include:

Legend has it that, when he was a young boy, Richard Mellon Scaife's father would take him for ice cream cones, but before he handed a cone to young Richard he would take a large bite out of it. "That," he would exclaim, "is what taxes are!" No wonder the young Scaife grew up hating taxes. His boyhood experiences with ice cream cones taught him that taxes were stealing something from him, without returning any benefits.

and this one is a hoot:

This may come as shocking news for those of you in the upper 5 percent, but many middle class families can no longer afford health insurance, nor can they afford to pay their medical bills out of their own pockets. And this is NOT THEIR FAULT.

The first passage is fairly true. Now a days, taxes are what the government takes out of my pay without returning equivalent benefits. The current level of government spending is out of control with no end in sight. Government programs are breeding like rabbits and their budgets are growing. You would be hard pressed to find any government programs that have been disbanded. It don't happen. They just continue to grow and spread.

The second passage is telling as well. I would wager that this glut of middle class families that can't afford health insurance have plenty of color TVs, cars, homes, pools, boats, vacations, X-Boxes, computers, cable boxes, etc. Hell, look at the published standard of living for the "official poor" in America. Most of them live better than I did when I was a kid and we were considered middle-class (lower but still in there). This is just more of the "no consequences" attitude that permeates much of society today. Give me what I want, now and I should not have to give up anything to get it.

They don't want to give anyone, no matter how needy, a bite of their ice cream cone.

There is a big difference between offering someone a bite and having someone take it at knife point which is what taxes are, generosity at the point of a gun. It is one thing to help support the basic functioning of society and quite another to in affect reward poor planing and poor life choices with handouts and bailouts. This all goes back to life choices. You generally get the life you earn. If you can not afford health insurance, what are you willing to personally give up to get it, fewer nights out at the movies, cable TV, delivered pizza, what? It seems that for a lot of people, the answer is nothing.