MORE FROM MY EMAIL

Another email gone viral:

I guess I must be on the wrong page …

A vehicle at 15 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 800 gallons a year of gasoline. A vehicle at 25 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 480 gallons a year. So, the average clunker transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons/year.

They claim 700,000 vehicles – so that's 224 million gallons/year. That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil. Five million barrels of oil is about 1/4 of one day's US consumption. And 5 million barrels of oil costs about $350 million dollars at $70/bbl.

So we all contributed to spending $3 billion to save $350 million.

How good a deal was that?

They'll probably do a better job with healthcare, though!

Cash for Clunkers is just another example of government failure to think through all the possible ramifications of a policy. My Three Laws of Systems Engineering apply, at least indirectly, in that the intended consequence was to demonstrate environmental sensitivity without regard to cost.

I will submit that the intended consequence of ObamaCare is substantially the same.

LEFT RIOTS; RIGHT PROTESTS

“Police fired canisters of pepper spray and smoke and rubber bullets at marchers protesting the Group of 20 summit Thursday after anarchists responded to calls to disperse by rolling trash bins, throwing rocks and breaking windows.”

The demonstrators numbered less than 1,000; there were 17-19 arrests. Contrast that to the 9/12 DC anti-tax protest: upwards of 500,000 demonstrators; no police in riot gear; no violence; no arrests.

And no garbage to be cleaned up afterward.

WHY PAY FOR THE CARELESS?

From a letter to the editor in the August 23 (Jackson, MS) Clarion-Ledger.

During my last shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ringtone.

Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid.

She smokes a costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer.

And our president expects me to pay for this woman's health care?

Our nation's health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture - culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one's self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance.

Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow.

Starner Jones, MD
Jackson, MS

This came to me as an email gone viral, but it is real - the author is on the emergency room staff at the Anderson Regional Medical Center in Meridian, Mississippi, and an 8th-generation Mississippian.

It's easy to sympathize with Dr. Jones, but the question remains: what is society's responsibility, if any, to those unwilling or unable to care for themselves?

JUST LIKE THE POST OFFICE

Democrats moved Thursday to give special relief to the financially strapped Postal Service, which would be allowed to defer $4 billion in payments due at the end of this month to cover retirement benefits for its employees.

Since Obama himself offered the USPS as the model of the public option, we can point to this as the inevitable result of a government program in a private market. When it fails or runs over its revenue, the government will inevitably act to subsidize it. The public option will be no different at all in this regard.

Surprise, surprise.