Hey, the Midwest had to be represented somehow. And while the Colts girls hold their own, they can’t compare to the hottest cheerleaders that aren’t regularly featured on national television every week. Quack! Quack! Advantage: NCAA

The thinking is that, in America, we reward people for being successful, we don’t tax them for it. But that’s coming at the question from the wrong end. Taxation needs to be thought of as a hardship necessarily imposed on the people by its government. That hardship is what needs to be equal, and it’s not measured be percentage of gross income. Think for example, if we had a neutral tax system, neither progressive or regressive, at 25% for all income levels. That’s actually much better than the regressive system we have now, but let’s just use it because the numbers are easy to talk about. That means that the school teacher making $30,000 a year will have his or her income reduced to $22,500 and John McCain would see his income reduced from $3,900,000 to $2,925,000. Of those two situations, who do you think is going to have to modify their lifestyle more because of taxation? Maybe it would be so hard on McCain that he would have to sell one of his houses, but he can’t even keep track of how many he has. I doubt he would even notice. The fancy, economic way to say this is that the utility gained from additional income exhibits diminishing marginal returns, so for taxation to increase linearly with utility, it must increase non-linearly with income.

So then, what percentages actually match up with hardship (utility)? I’d say somewhere around two percent for the school teacher and 30 to 40 percent for the multi-millionaire. Maybe even more extreme than that. But that will never happen, and that’s okay. It’s probably good to reward the successful by taxing them less. But taxing them less utility could still be a very progressive tax. Certainly the school teacher will still be taxed “more” than McCain by Obama’s plan, even if the percentages go up as your income does.

When you are faking a pose for a camera photo opportunity, at least you can get the phone turned in the right direction! And he wants to be President??? ???

It’s a pretty bad Photoshop. You can tell someone just looked through about 1,000 Obama stock photos until they found something where what they would have to move or remove was entirely in front of a (nearly) uniform background. Then they solved all the rest of their problems with massive blurring and called it a day. It’s a pretty bad job, but I would say it’s a masterpiece when you consider the design nightmare of the site that claims credit. Here’s the original photo:

The problem is that it describes how well a system cares for sick people. I know, I know, that’s what health care is about, right? Well, no. That’s “sick care”, as some people aptly call it. It means that while you’re healthy you get nothing, and when you become sick enough to require emergency treatment you get it. If you have insurance, your story ends there. If not, and you survive, you’re bankrupt and likely in debt for the rest of your life.

That’s the difference between health care and sick care. In sick care I don’t doubt that we’re NUMBER ONE! But when you look at health care metrics, it’s not so rosy. I took the liberty of looking up some health care metrics from the World Health Organization and chose a subset of countries to avoid having to crunch too much data. I basically chose all the countries I could think of that you would expect to have a good health care system: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States. Let’s take a look at how the US fares:

• Life expectancy: Last
• Healthy life expectancy: Tied for last with Denmark
• Adult mortality rate: Last
• Infant mortality rate: Last
• Cancer mortality rate: 10th out of 20**

But here’s where we do have a very commanding lead. Nearly doubling the mean value for the countries selected:

• Per capita total expenditure on health: First at 6096 US dollars per year.

Now, I’m not saying that the US has the worst health care system out there, but it’s certainly not the best. And for the money we’re spending, it should be. Can a free market system work for health care? Maybe. But I have a hunch it only works on a blackboard with a 100%-informed population, all able and willing to purchase and hold insurance with no gaps in coverage over their entire lifetimes.

**Notice how this figure changes when you use the entire population (as the W.H.O does) rather than just start counting once a person is admitted into an ER? That’s because when you figure in the entire population, preventative measures will effect your statistics. So, despite the fact that we’re so good at keeping people from dying once they get to an ER, we’re so bad at keeping them out of the ER in the first place that you are actually just as likely to die from cancer in the US as you are in any of the other countries I’ve looked at.