Sunday, June 17, 2012

Mandatory Corporate Welfare

In the previous post, my colleague, Jeff Simpson, pointed out to yet another incident of a house being allowed to burn to the ground because the home owners didn't pay the $75 fire fighter fee. There was a similar incident in the same county just two years ago. Apparently, these teahadists are slow learners.

While Jeff shows righteous outrage at the fact that the moronic, selfish teahadists would let an entire community burn for a measly $75 bucks, I think he misses the more sinister, more troubling and more outrageous part of the story.  From his story, he cites this passage:
Bell told KFVS-TV she didn't pay the fee because she didn't have insurance, which she told the station is a requirement in order to subscribe to the firefighting service. "I'm not mad at the city, I understand," said Bell.

The station reported Bell told them most of her neighbors in the trailer park did not have insurance because they are not eligible.
Bell says she's more concerned about how she's going to put her life back together now that she and her boyfriend, Brian Gilbert have lost everything.
Did you catch that?

In order to receive public safety services, they have to buy insurance first.

In other words, to receive a service that most people receive just by paying their taxes, the residents of Obion County have to first give their money to an insurance company, and then if they have enough left, they can buy the public service.

This isn't about saving money. It's about forcing people to give their money to a private sector business before receiving something they should automatically be getting as a citizen and as a taxpayer. It's mandated corporate welfare.

I thought this was the sort of thing that the teahadists were against. Or is that only when an African-American president does that sort of thing?

How much do you want to bet that the politicians that came up with and passed this law got a little something something from the insurance industry?

And to show the absurdity of this kind of law, here is a video which I had posted three years ago, which really shows you how low the teahadists' learning curve really is:



What part of public safety don't the teahadists understand?

The other kicker is that these same people who will whine and gripe that they have to pay taxes so the firefighters can put out a fire in someone else's home are the same people that will call and bawl out their alderman if their street isn't plowed as soon as the last snowflake falls.

Another thought that occurs to me is what if there were fires at two different locations at the same time? Would the two homeowners have to get into a bidding war to see who would get the services they've already paid for twice, once to the insurance company and once to the fire department? Would the loser's insurance company refuse to cover their claim because they didn't take the steps to insure fire protection, such as outbidding the other homeowner?

See how absurd their stance is on all of this?

7 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Wait a second... You have to buy insurance to receive treatment or service through the fire department, a taxpayer supported service. A service that should be privatized. But at the for profit or nonprofit hospital you can get services without insurance through cost shifting to others. The mandate for insurance that could be decided by the Supreme court. When do you have to have insurance and when don't you? Wait until my physician hears "no insurance, no service" standard for public servants. Can anyone say "ETHICS"?

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  3. I havent seen any other story that implies insurance is required to be covered under fire protection.
    I do see our state requiring me to insure my vehicles. Corporate welfare? Mr Doyle? And quite honestly, I would think my mortgage company requires me to insure my home.
    Before you go and start feeling sorry for people in Georgia, they pay about $500 a year in property taxes on a $200,000 property. but I am sure Tom Barrett would see fit to add their fire fighters fee to Milwaukee taxpayers bill and send it down there. And if you dont pay it, the city will just take your home, as they would if you didnt pay the roughly $4500 tax we pay here. Plus water, snow removal, lighting, trash, fees on top. What are the chances any of our fees will become voluntary any time soon?
    When will we see the story about the 393 properties the city is going to foreclose on this year for failure to pay their oppressive taxes? Seems the dems in Milwaukee are no more forgiving than the South Fulton fire. department.

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    1. In WI, you are required to have insurance to drive, but not to own a car or to have a license.

      And it still cracks me up that you whine about taxes for services that benefit you, but don't say a peep about corporate welfare or the companies that get huge tax breaks and still gouge you.

      And where's your outrage at insurance companies that raise their rates by 40%? Or are you just too worried about taxes going up a whole dollar?

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  4. So in other words the fire department would stand by and let the entire trailer court burn down because nobody had insurance. Why did they even bother to show up?

    Private fire fighting companies were the norm in the larger U.S. cities in much of the 19th century. A citizen would contract with a company and place a large brass medallion on the front the property so that it could be identified by the contracted company when it caught fire.

    If a fire company arrived at the scene and realised it wasn't their insuree they would let it burn or attempt to negoatiate a fee on the spot with the frantic owner.

    In many cases more than one fire company arriving at the scene would brawl over the rights to the conflagration while the whole neighborhood gradually went up in flames. Gangsters were often employed by firms as enforcers to battle over neighborhood turf.

    Gradually it dawned on people that under the right conditions half the city could burn down as a result of these market inefficiencies. Thus the birth of the publicily operated fire departments. Although badly underfunded --back to future for us on that front?-- these companies at least made the attempt to put out every fire.

    But Gilded Age economics is making a comeback with Paul Ryan's "push Granny off the cliff and let her house burn" down philosophy.

    Will Eddie Munster ever live down the shame of having his education funded by the communistic Social Security program? You know, since he can afford to live in a mansion he might be in a position to pay the money back with interest. But that would violate rule #1 of Ryanomics: Greed is good for me but not for thee.

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  5. You are correct i did not pick up on that, i was to incensed that somewhere along the line someone taught Ms. Bell that losing all of her possessions for not paying $75 is perfectly ok!

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  6. The London Fire Brigades operated the same way after the Great Fire of London in 1666. When a building was on fire, several brigades would attend and if they did not see their specific firemark on the building, they would go away and leave it to burn.

    THIS IS EXACTLY WHY WE HAVE PUBLIC FUNDED FIRE DEPARTMENTS for cry aye.

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