Walter Williams would also make a wonderful benevolent dictator...

...but, alas, he also is way too cool. (One more and we could be ruled by a triumvirate. I nominate Ann Coulter to represent the cool part of the distaff side of humanity and to really tick off the totalitarians.)


How many times have we heard advertisements from law firms that specialize in elder law urging, "If you anticipate that you may have to enter a nursing home down the road, an elder care attorney may be able to help you create a plan that will both protect much of your assets and make you eligible for government benefits"? Boiled down to basics, the lawyers are suggesting that they can arrange for you to live off others should you ever require long-term care instead of having to spend the assets you've accumulated during your lifetime.

The quest to allow senior citizens to live off others doesn't stop there. If you're a senior citizen, you might be eligible for property tax reductions, subsidized prescription drugs, reduced fare on public transportation, and all manner of merchandise discounts. Don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against older people. In fact, some of my best friends are over 70, including Mrs. Williams. Let's do a bit of analysis of efforts to assist the elderly, but let's use our brains instead of our hearts.

Elderly does not equal poor. See how simple actually thinking can be?

The bottom line is that seniors are far richer than their mid-life counterparts who are in the workforce paying income taxes. They're being taxed to care for those who are not only less likely to be in the labor force paying income taxes but are wealthier than they. That's a particularly perverse form of income redistribution -- until we give it a little more thought to find out who's really being subsidized.

Since older people are not in the labor force, they might be income-poor. But since they've been around a long time, many have accumulated significant assets in the relatively illiquid forms of housing and financial equity. If an older person needs long-term care, he might be able to finance it through the sale of his accumulated assets. Thus, if we subsidize his needs, we really subsidize his heirs. In other words, government programs that pay for various needs of many elderly people simply allow elderly people to preserve their wealth so as to be able to bequeath to heirs.

And that leaves more money for the feds and states to grab in death taxes.
(Thanks again to Townhall.com)