Some Waldman’s Blog – Finding Balance in the Flood of Information

While on my lunch time jog to/thru/from a nearby park, I came up with a “new” idea for the healthcare debate. I was thinking about how our society has become a bit of “us vs them.” The political environment is Republican vs Democrat, our economic world is rich vs poor…. how can we come up with a solution that meets everyone’s needs.

So, here it is. We need to change our tax approach. Clearly this would be harder and more expensive to implement than what we already have, but it would reduce the strain on those people who think we don’t need higher taxes while still supporting the services that other people do need. I will call it Vested Taxes. The new system would allow people to opt out of certain taxes. However, by doing so, they would be opting out of the services that those taxes support. At the local level, people could opt out of supporting the library, however if they went to use the library, they would pay a premium (more than $0) to utilize those resources… obviously, this would require more system integration to allow instant information to the services on every individual, but the Patriot Act already opened the door to this possibility.

At the national level is where we find health care, and social security high level examples. I really do not like the idea of having to do this. But I certainly like it better than where we are headed… talk of states succeeding and individuals saying, “if you don’t like it, why don’t you move?” We don’t want to divide our nation into classes, but look at us now.

The vesting comes in if individuals suddenly need help and change their minds. The government response can then justifiably be, “sorry, you haven’t been contributing, so we have to deny you.” Everyone gets what they want!