myk
webbed digits
Posts: 14316
Registered: 04-02 |
The way this tax was applied may be arbitrary, but I like pizza and don't exactly hate paying taxes if they seem to have a reasonable purpose. I mean, who doesn't use many public services in their daily lives? One should also be happy to pay for some one won't use personally, understanding that in the same way, others will pay for ones we use in particular. So, what I would do with this is promote (especially the healthier) pizza and sell it as something that is helping keep people healthy and make the country grow in a more equitable way (because of the tax, that is.)
Jello said:
And let's face it, quite a few people are poor in the country because they're lazy and don't feel like getting an education or working for a better job, the mentality carries over into their eating habits.
From your arguably cliched sentence (since they're about inherently lazy as Muslims are inherently terrorist) I got a more interesting and plausible insight: It sounds like an predictable way to oppose abuse in a society where work is an obstacle because what you really want is the result of work and not work itself. It's less radical that blowing shit up but may have its effect. Companies and owners want to grow as much as possible by working the least they can (that is, be cost effective.) Management, finance and government are all valued positions in such a system and apathy from a good portion of the population seems like an immediate response to the lack of incentives and possibilities.
Providing health care to them provides votes, but creates a greater burden on working society as a whole who actually pay for their healthcare, increasing costs for medical aid for people who don't pay for insurance, and the cost has to be made up for somewhere. Which means taxing everyone more.
"The only thing of value in this is the votes and it is otherwise costly to the people that really matter. The health care provided is meaningless and the losers it goes to deserve no such services."
If you at least pay their health care, these people will have certain incentive to work because they won't have to work without health assistance or won't have to pay fees beyond their means to avoid major health issues. If these people get as much or more from the government as they do from employers or business opportunities, they will support the public sector more or as much as the health care industry lobby or the particular interest of Pizza Shack or even the Joe Pizza down the block.
In your apparent analysis, you're forgetting one key thing. Your country has a titanic health care industry which provides products (especially pharmaceuticals) worldwide. It also provides services internally, and using its international leverage, can manage to influence and coerce public services to include its business without needing to worry about the national health care situation and can charge the populace rates largely based on their international status.
The only people who benefit are the Senators and the Representatives who get paid regardless, and keep their jobs by promising more to get votes.
You can only sell that line to people that tend to share your middle to upper class interests, or those among the lower classes that would like to weed their way among them at the potential expense of others in their unfortunate situation (short of a radical and unlikely change in the economic conditions of modern society.) As I pointed out earlier with the on-topic health care industry example, international globalized industry can be something that can get bargaining advantages over large populations, hence people require systems and ways to protect themselves that rival them. Few forms of organization can do that to any degree better than organized government, which as we all know stands for itself as some kind of bully-arbiter but is willing to play off the interests of different parties that can influence it and make demands.
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03-17-10 08:52 
