Putting us all on the dole

One in seven of all Americans is now on food stamps, but that’s not enough for the bureaucrats at the Department of Agriculture.

They’re determined to increase that number, and to do that they must eliminate the “mountain pride” of certain Americans, who value personal responsibility and independence above all else, and get them on the government dole.

It’s something like ethnic cleansing, or would be, if the feds mocked the pride and culture of any other ethnic group, whether in the mountains, valleys, flat lands or somewhere else.

By “mountain pride,” they’re talking about the descendants of the Scots-Irish settlers who pushed the frontier from the Atlantic coast into the hills and mountains of Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama and the Carolinas, and later into the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas. These are the Americans that Jim Webb, the Democratic senator from Virginia and author of the much-acclaimed book, “Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” calls “poor but proud – and stubborn as hell.”

States can’t control health insurance costs!

“The New York Daily News reports that one health insurance company is now charging $3,319 each month for an individual premium. Another insurer is charging $8,463 each month for a family plan. Meanwhile, of the 13 HMOs serving New York City in 2004, just seven remain, and the number of people purchasing their own insurance has dropped from roughly 100,000 ten years ago to 13,335. The state’s health insurance market, according to insurers and state officials, has fallen into an “adverse selection death spiral”, rising premiums push out younger and healthier customers at the margins, which leads to a smaller, more expensive insurance pool, which pushes out even more of the young and healthy customers and so on and so forth.
Why is health insurance in New York State so expensive? And why is the market collapsing?”