My "What the Fuck" Morning

As relieved as I am that George W. Bush has been discharged from the White House, I'm starting to realize how there is always plenty of room for improvement. I suspect in the next few weeks we'll start too see Obama's approval ratings drop sharply if he follows through with this.

The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.

The proposal is politically problematic for President Obama, however, since it is similar to one he denounced in the presidential campaign as “the largest middle-class tax increase in history.” Most Americans with insurance get it from their employers, and taxing workers for the benefit is opposed by union leaders and some businesses.

What the fuck? Why not tax things which don't actually improve one's health, things which people can still choose to purchase? We already do that with cigarettes. For some reason lawmakers can't seem to take it another step, like taxing soft drinks. Raise taxes on distilled spirits. Slap a federal tax on fast food. Although it's not unhealthy, maybe we should tax bottled water. Tax any beverage sold in a plastic bottle. Tax plastic grocery bags. But leave our health benefits alone! Those of us lucky enough to have them don't need the government giving us an excuse to decline them.

Maybe we should stop bailing out corporations and use that money to overhaul the health care industry, instead of having it squandered. Seriously, this is making me livid!

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

What the fuck???

I was already not on board with the idea that any corporation is just too big or too important to allow it to fail. And this AIG situation is just driving me to not give a crap whether they live or die.

This reminds me of a game of solitaire in which I keep replaying in order to succeed and I keep getting the same frustrating result. Eventually it makes more sense to simply shut it down and deal a new hand.