It really puts into perspective what kinds of people are being affected by guns and in what ways. For example:

• Children 17 & under are the least likely to die from guns. Black & white boys are killed at the same rate, about 1 / day. Girls die, either accidentally or via homicide, police intervention, at 1/2 that rate.
• Age 18-24, more black men are murdered every day than men of all other races and women combined.
• Age 18-24, four times as many white men commit suicide as any other race and all women.
• As white men get older, their rate of suicide seems to double, and then triple after 40. The vast majority of suicides are white men.
• Black men who make it to 40 years of age have their chances of being murdered dramatically reduced, by 60%. In fact, after 40, more white men are murdered than black men.

All in all, by far children and women are the least likely to die due to gun related injuries. Black men are the most likely to be killed. White men are the most likely to kill themselves.

President Clinton strongly hinted for the first time Thursday that he might raise tobacco taxes to finance medical benefits for all Americans.

So reported the Baltimore Sun in 1993¹. Back then, Clinton estimated that by 1997 it would cost between $30-$90billion to “guarantee universal access” to health care. The tax has come, and increased, and increased again, and in April the largest cigarette tax increase in history was passed, raising taxes $0.62 in one go, and another hike is scheduled to go through any day now³.

So the taxes have gone through, but where is the “guaranteed universal access”. Of course, all dreams of a Clinton-era public health care program went out the window when he was lame-ducked a good year or so early by the Lewinsky scandal. Leave it up to Republicans to convince Americans that it’s worse for their President to have oral sex than it is for them to have free, easy health care.

Cigarette taxes raise $99billion in revenue every year. Universal health care in the US would cost $1trillion.

Today, an estimated $45.3 million Americans smoke cigarettes. Since cigarettes cost $1.10 in 1994 and cost about $7.00 a pack today, it would seem that those Americans are now paying roughly $6 / pack in taxes. Do the math and that results in $99.2billion in revenue from cigarette taxation. So how does that compare to the cost of universal health care?

Well, Obama stated during the campaign that his plan involved $50-$65 billion / year to fund. Fox News claims it would cost $1.5trillion / year. The Guardian (a UK paper and in my opinion therefore neither as biased as Obama or Fox), puts the number at approximately $1trillion, right in the middle².

So cigarette tax alone would nearly cover the cost of universal health care if it weren’t being diverted to whatever it’s been diverted to over the past 15 years. Not to mention the taxes we should be similarly imposing on alcohol, guns, driving, and marijuana, the other big causes of hospitalization and expensive deaths in this country. Well, not marijuana, I just think we should tax it because then it’ll be legal.

The bottom line is that Republicans successfully befuddled health care reform in the Clinton era by exploiting America’s love affair with a love affair, and Democrats are now successfully following in their dream party’s footsteps by bickering amongst themselves while they hold complete power. The money is there, it’s just being used for purposes it wasn’t originally designed to be used for, as confusing as it might be to discover exactly where those funds have been diverted. While this seems like statistics and numbers for the most part, what it means is that 700,000 Americans go bankrupt every year, while Congress bickered and guffawed¹. Bankruptcy sucks, sure, but realize that when they’ve gone bankrupt, they have no money to continue to pay for their medical treatment. For many, that simply means they die.

Supporting Links

1. 700,000 Americans go bankrupt every year due to lack of health insurance. PBS Frontline.
2. Universal health care in the US would cost $1trillion. The Guardian, UK.
3. April 2009, $0.62 tax raise on cigarettes, largest in history. USA Today.
4. Tobacco taxes to be spent on health insurance. The Baltimore Sun.

So the government socialized roads and we still have a world class highway system, so much so actually that America has become such a bunch of fat asses that going to the beach, once a feast of curves and tanned lady skins, is now the leading cause of blindness in young males between the ages of 14 and 37.

Of course, the roads aren’t actually free. Every time you fill your tank up you pay a gas tax which goes toward highway maintenance, as do various other fees associated with having a car such as registration, title, etc. It’s actually a pretty solid system because the more gas you use, and therefore the more you travel/use the roads, the more you pay for them. Perfect.

So why couldn’t health care be the same? We currently trust the government to run a completely socialized version of health care for our veterans, and these are our greatest heroes, right? And to pay for this would be simple, just tax the hell out of everything that is fiercely known to make you sick. The more expensive things are that are “bad” for your body, the less people will be able to participate in their use, thereby lowering the amount of sick people considerably, and for those who wish to continue in their harmful actions (I will smoke, for example, until cigarettes are $25 / pack), they are able to do so and help to pay for the care they’ll one day require.

Examples of items that should be taxed:

1. Alcohol in any amount greater than 1 regular bottle of wine, 3 beers or 3 shots at a time. All alcohol served in bars.
2. Cigarettes, which are already ridiculously taxed and when Clinton first put that taxation in place we were told this would go to pay for health care, which it doesn’t. I should know, because I smoke like a fiend and I don’t have health care.
3. Fast Food. $1 for a bacon double cheeseburger? Not in my new health care plan, any food that was served up in a fashion that was meant to allow you to consume 500 – 2500 calories in less than 15 minutes would come with such a hefty tax on it that people would only eat it because they needed to consume that many calories, not because it was cheap and easy.
4. All fake food, in fact. Partially hydrogenated whats, modified soy this and high fructose that would all come with way too high a tax to make these ingredients the primary staples of our diets. If the label can’t be read by a child just learning to read, add another 20% tax to the product.
5. Driving your own automobile. What is more dangerous than trusting average people to drive around 2 ton death machines at 75 miles an hour only inches away from one another while traveling in the opposite direction? Driving is dangerous, to the people in the car and outside, and should be taxed big time.

The list goes on and on, basically anything that contributes to x% of health care costs which isn’t a natural factor (for example, rebuttals such as “Well then we should tax breasts because they cause breast cancer” are precisely as idiotic as the person who thought of it.)

Were I in charge, and I’m not, but were I, I would make a simple law stating that politicians only made the median income level of the people they represent. So do you represent Jupiter, Florida? You’ll be making $200,000. Nanty Glo, Pennsylvania? $25,500. The President would make $50,233.

Additionally, any assets an individual had, such as investments in big tobacco or oil, would be frozen for the duration of your stint as a politician and for another 10 years after you career as a statesman was over. That way, the bastards wouldn’t make decisions that would benefit themselves over the people they represent.

This would add a much greater diversity to Congress, allowing them to work harder for the people they represent because it would benefit them at the same time. It would also make their monetary lives a bit harder (though keep in mind, they’d still get about 3 months of vacation, which none of the rest of us get), and in all likelihood begin to shrink that ever increasing gap between the uber-rich and the ultra-poor.

If that plan doesn’t work, however, I think we should at least force them to wear those old white, curly wigs like the forefathers wore, and not just in Congress, but all day everyday.

For $80 / month the insurance will cover things like doctor visits, eye exams, trips to the dentist and give me discounts on prescriptions. In that regard, it’s a typical insurance plan and seems pretty decent.

For hospital stays, emergency room visits and the like, they’ll cover up to 40%. I was blessed recently with the opportunity to be hospitalized due to failure of the appendix to work (and be necessary). So I have a real life example we can all work from.

First off, a trip to the ER which results in surgery and a hospital stay can be quite confusing. The hospital bills you for the bed and drugs you use while in the hospital, and separately for the ER experience. Additionally, each “specialist” charges you individually as well: a radiologist sends you a bill, a pathologist sends you a bill, everyone who so much as looked at you during your experience will send you a separate bill. This is frustrating because if you have trouble paying, you know, because you don’t have insurance, then you can end up with four or five blemishes on your credit record, rather than just one big one. But I digress…

Another little known and baffling fact is that since I had no insurance, I received a 50% discount on my entire bill. I’m still not 100% sure what the total of that bill is — I’m still trying to sort out all of the different charges from the various suppliers — but it looks like it would have been around $40,000 total. That’s an immediate $20,000 they just knocked off of my bill. Now, before you go thinking “wow, that was nice of them” realize that if they’re actually charging the insurance companies the $40,000 instead of the discounted price, then that’s a big contributor to why health insurance is so damned expensive. I’m sure there are other factors, the likelihood of the insurance co.’s getting some discount too, but it all wreaks of a scam.

Okay, so what we’re left with is this simple fact: Were I to have had that $80 / month insurance, my bill would have actually been higher!

Here’s the math:

With Insurance: $40,000 (total bill) – 40% (insurance payout) = $24,000 (my responsibility)

Without Insurance: $40,000 (total bill) – 50% (hospital discount for people w/o insurance) = $20,000 (my responsibility)

Final equation: insurance = scam.

However, so many Americans don’t even have enough insurance to cover them when it really comes to crunch time: when the cancer shows up. So the $50, $100, $600 / month that they’ve been paying every month are all for naught. Consider how often you actually need to use your health insurance vs. how much it costs you to have it. And don’t be fooled into thinking that since your company pays for your health insurance you aren’t: if Company A has to pay $150 / month to keep your ass insured, that’s $150 / month they won’t be paying you directly.

When you purchase health insurance you are, in essence, betting that you will get sick one day. Horribly sick.

Now consider this other reality: the very fact that we need insurance. There is a product that apparently every American needs which is so expensive that we can’t even afford it without making monthly payments towards it our entire lives. Monthly payments which will increase over time as we have children, get married, and get older, in no particular order. Every year you don’t get sick, you’re actually lowering the big pay off that you hope to get.

You’re making a monthly installment on a bill you don’t even have yet, but are essentially hoping to have. You’re paying toward your own bad luck.

Wouldn’t it be better then to save that money, particularly for those paying $300, $400, etc., and earn interest on it. According to this quick interest calculator I just used, if you save $100 / month for 10 years at 3% interest, you’ll have almost $29,000 at the end of that 10 years. If you don’t get sick, now you’ve got $29k to blow on your midlife crisis!

If you feel the same, you may be interested in doing something about it, like signing this petition.

So housing’s the big one, understandably. The necessities, shelter, food and clothing, come in at only 42%. Pretty swell considering most animals spend their whole lives just trying to get food.

On the other hand, it’s a little shocking that we spend more on cars than on food. Our food is impressively cheap, and we spend much less on food than most other societies of our caliber (ie, Europe, Japan, etc.). I also find it strange that we spend twice as much insuring ourselves as we do on actually fixing ourselves when we’re sick (health care). The saddest part, in my mind, is that entertainment is such a low number. Sure, you can have fun for free by walking through the park, but I’d think that enjoying our lives might be a bit larger priority.

If you crunch some numbers (apparently the average annual household income is $50,233), we’re spending just under $1200 / month on housing. Seems like a lot to me, considering I owned a 3-bedroom house with a yard in a small city’s suburbs for less than $700 / month and rented a 2-bedroom, two story townhouse in Pittsburgh’s most expensive neighborhood for $850 / month. Too many stainless steel dish washers and landscaped bird feeders, perhaps?

$565 / month on your car is an impressive amount to dedicate to something that didn’t even exist until the last 0.008% of the history of human civilization. That works out to over 6 weeks per year of work just to own a car. Pittsburghers who use public transportation in lieu of a personal vehicle only have to work less than a single week every year to pay for their transportation costs. In cities with better public transit systems (closer to $20 / month), residents can spend just over a day working for their transportation needs.

One day vs. six weeks to get you from a to .

Resources

• eioba.com
• Forbes.com
• Bike-PGH.org
• USDA
• Wikipedia.org

So housing’s the big one, understandably. The necessities, shelter, food and clothing, come in at only 42%. Pretty swell considering most animals spend their whole lives just trying to get food.

On the other hand, it’s a little shocking that we spend more on cars than on food. Our food is impressively cheap, and we spend much less on food than most other societies of our caliber (ie, Europe, Japan, etc.). I also find it strange that we spend twice as much insuring ourselves as we do on actually fixing ourselves when we’re sick (health care). The saddest part, in my mind, is that entertainment is such a low number. Sure, you can have fun for free by walking through the park, but I’d think that enjoying our lives might be a bit larger priority.

If you crunch some numbers (apparently the average annual household income is $50,233), we’re spending just under $1200 / month on housing. Seems like a lot to me, considering I owned a 3-bedroom house with a yard in a small city’s suburbs for less than $700 / month and rented a 2-bedroom, two story townhouse in Pittsburgh’s most expensive neighborhood for $850 / month. Too many stainless steel dish washers and landscaped bird feeders, perhaps?

$565 / month on your car is an impressive amount to dedicate to something that didn’t even exist until the last 0.008% of the history of human civilization. That works out to 6.5 weeks per year of work just to own a car. Pittsburghers who use public transportation in lieu of a personal vehicle only have to work 4 days and 3 hours to pay for their transportation costs. In cities with better public transit systems (closer to $20 / month), residents can spend as little as one week working for their transportation needs.

Resources

• eioba.com
• Forbes.com
• Bike-PGH.org
• USDA
• Wikipedia.org

The Basics

1. Take people where they want to go. This is so obvious, and reports that the Port Authority have recently done reflect that a big bunch of their routes just don’t cut it. We need to be able to take a bus from the North Side to the South Side. From Lawrenceville to Squirrell Hill. Connect neighborhoods, don’t just try and get everyone downtown and into Oakland.
2. Simpler schedules. These need to be posted at every stop, or routes need to have easy to learn schedules. Like, the 500 comes every 30 minutes. Not at 5:15, 5:17, 5:38 and 5:92. An automated phone system and a much better website would greatly improve things as well.
3. Day passes. Every other city I’ve ever been to where riding transit was easy has them. They’re typically cheaper than buying 3 rides and more expensive than one. They also give you the feeling that you should ride the bus as much as possible to get your monies worth for the day. The more you ride, the more comfortable you are with riding.
4. Fix those electronic signs. The scariest thing about taking a new route into a neighborhood you’re unfamiliar with is trying to look out for street signs, which don’t always exist. The first time you end up at the airport when you were trying to go from Oakland to downtown you’ll probably never make the mistake of riding a bus again.
5. Fares. What’s the problem here? $2.00 for a trip is getting out of control. Whatever needs to happen: eliminate trips to the suburbs, revamp the whole route system, fire the 10-minute-hold-times call center and pay driver’s less, you can’t raise fares anymore.

But improving the system is just one step in a larger problem. City streets should not be a car-dominated environment. Think about the city you live in for a moment. It’s broken up into blocks. Most blocks consist of residences, which you aren’t allowed onto unless you live there, or businesses, which you typically can’t enter unless you have business there. Then there are the streets, which are primarily reserved for cars. That leaves you with two places you can go: public parks and the sidewalk. City residents really can only access about 2% of the land they live in. This makes sense for residences (you don’t want people just hanging out in your back yard) and businesses, but why do we have to have streets dominated by fast moving vehicles and their dormant, parked counterparts? If we want radical change to how people get around the city, stop dedicating so much space to personal vehicles.

Moving Away from Cars

1. No on-street parking in residential areas. Put up parking garages, maybe one per four blocks. If you want a car and don’t have a driveway, park it over there. This will keep every street from being lined on both sides by vehicles, and by forcing people to walk a block or two to their cars, you’ll decrease driving and step up America’s foot and lung capacity. Business areas like Liberty Ave in Bloomfield and East Carson could still have on-street parking, but there’s no reason every street needs to be bombarded with cars.
2. Speed bumps galore. If you want to drive from neighborhood to neighborhood, use Liberty, use Penn, use 5th and Forbes. There you can go 40 mph or whatever speeds you need to get from bar to bar during halftime. But if you’re driving around neighborhoods with schools and kids on bikes and people trying to live, keep it around 20mph, max. This will keep people from trying to dodge their own car-created traffic jams by speeding down Friendship Avenue every 6-9am and 3 – 6pm.

I have very little appetite, having recently had a useless piece of infected organ connecting my upper and (my personal favorite) lower intestines cut out of me. It’s two weeks later and I now have a pair of tubes draining a sweet mauve cocktail of blood and puss from my innards. So naturally, I order a croissant and chocolate milk.

The croissant is good, light, easy to eat (though for some reason cut in half and toasted). Chocolate milk ingredients? Milk, chocolate, corn syrup.

Later that night I attempt to eat again: an orange, pretzels and pudding. The pretzels have corn syrup…savory, salty pretzels now need to be sweetened?! I skipped over the unlabeled pudding.

A few stellar items from the hospital menu:

1. Chicken Fried Steak
2. Fried Chicken w/ creamy gravy
3. Fried Catfish w/ mac & cheese

It’s like fixing a flat tire with a staple gun.