I do not pretend to speak for the other voters.  I was fortunate to be traveling during much of October so I missed most of the trash and noise masquerading as campaign information.  I truly do not care about college pranks, high school indiscretions, or even disagreements on some interpretations of constitutional intentions. I don’t care if you have made a bad loan or business decision in your life, if you were divorced, if you served in Viet Nam, what you read or what you don’t read.  I don’t care if someone in your family cured cancer, won the Nobel Prize or was convicted of rape.

I don’t care what position you played on the high school or college football team. I don’t believe any candidate hates children, the elderly, baseball, women, or poor people.  I don’t care what your religion is or isn’t, how often you go to church, or whether you teach Sunday school.

I don’t care if you smoked pot in college or got a DUI 20 years ago.

What I do care is that:

You will vote against the Union Card Check Bill.

You will vote against Cap and Trade.

You will vote to repeal the Health Care Bill.

You will vote for sane regulation rather than government micromanagement of industry and the economy.

You recognize that no group of elites understands the economy as much as all of the American consumers and producers do.

You respect the citizens who know better how to run their lives and their families than anybody in Washington.

You will think long and hard before your send Americans to die on foreign soil, or interfere in the affairs of other nations.

You recognize that we are a nation of laws; not a nation of ideologies.

I spent the afternoon reviewing my company’s health insurance policy with some very capable administrators and the presentation was mostly about how the new health insurance law would impact our coverage and what we were allowed to offer, how it was offered, and the various penalties we would face if we decided not to cover, change coverage, or did not pay enough of the share of the coverage based on a percentage of the employee’s gross income.  (Am I now to supposed to know my employee’s gross family income in order to avoid onerous penalties?)

I will spare you the technical details and get straight to the main point.  This bill will kill employment, especially for the low wage employees and especially for mid size growing entrepreneurs (50 or more workers).   All of the economists, trying to figure out why employment is lagging in spite of low interest rates and record government stimulus, should put the charts away and just read this bill. And I am not even addressing the various tax increases, cuts in Medicaid, and the bureaucratic increase in 1099 reporting.  I am only addressing how this bill will affect employment.

It is also very clear that nothing in the bill will lower medical costs, but many requirements will increase costs. Access has taken a clear priority over cost and quality. We will provide more care for more people who will be ever less likely to be able to afford it without government help.

Employers with a large base of low wage employees will be hit the hardest, but their employees will suffer the most as many employers will find no other choice but to cut their hours to under 30 hours a week to avoid the burden on ‘full time’ workers.  Any business start-up requiring low wage employees will be thoroughly discouraged by their accounting and legal advisers.

Investment firms, accounting and legal offices, and firms with mostly higher wage employees will suffer very little and will avoid most of the burdens of this bill.

This bill is an abomination. It will hurt the lowest income the most and will delay any serious recovery in employment until it is repealed.

Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has won the right to have his state challenge the health care bill.  He insists that the federal government has no right to require the purchase of health insurance, or any product. It is unprecedented to penalize a non action.

What makes this case so pivotal is that this requirement is not severable from the bill.  Often these bills includes language that keeps the challenge of any particular section from invalidating the entire law, but this is not the case for this section.  In fact without this requirement the entire financial basis for the bill becomes undone.

We now stand a real chance for the health care bill to suffer constitutional scrutiny.  When several of FDR’s initiatives suffered constitutional setbacks he simply packed the court with more agreeable justices.

The legacy of a president is often imprinted by his Supreme Court appointees. A departing president can leave us with a case of “constitutional herpes.”

Remember this carefully in 2012.

A neighbor and friend across the street was diagnosed years ago with pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic is one of the more difficult to cure and usually requires very aggressive chemotherapy for any chance of survival.

But this patient sought a second opinion at a major cancer treatment center in Texas.  He found out the diagnosis was incorrect. He had an infection that was cured with simple antibiotics.

The first lesson is to always get a second opinion, best if from a completely different medical community. This is especially true for serious illnesses and treatment.

But this case is an analogy for much more.  Without a proper diagnosis the best treatment is worthless; it can even severely damage the host.

We are seeking a form of political chemotherapy without  a proper diagnosis.  We are seeking a radical change without understanding the problem.  We seek demons  to destroy rather than flaws to correct

A major driver of our health care system is the separation of the consumer from the provider. First dollar coverage and third party payers have removed the consumer from the decision making process.  If there is one thing most economists can agree in it is that incentives matter and we have created an incentive to over consume, increase administrative overhead, and avoid responsibility.

The problem with Obama care is that is does worse than ignore the perverse incentives we now have, it increases them. By  seeking a comprehensive solution the plan changes too much and throws out much of our  successes along with a few poorly understood problems.

The problem is not insurance company’s profits or doctor’s pay: the top ten companies’ profits are only a fraction of the Medicare fraud and abuse. The reality is that high quality health care is expensive, and that our system encourages over consumption and discourages responsibility.

We don’t agree on the treatment because we don’t agree on the diagnosis.

Buried in the 2000+ pages of the health care bill is provision that a phrase will be added into another law. The meaning of that phrase would escape any reviewer of the health care bill unless they researched the bill referred to. In the rush to pass a 2000 page bill that nobody read this probably escaped any attention.

From CNNMoney.com:

Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document — mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year.

The stealth change radically alters the nature of 1099s and means businesses will have to issue millions of new tax documents each year.

Right now, the IRS Form 1099 is used to document income for individual workers other than wages and salaries. Freelancers receive them each year from their clients, and businesses issue them to the independent contractors they hire.

But under the new rules, if a freelance designer buys a new iMac from the Apple Store, they’ll have to send Apple a 1099. A laundromat that buys soap each week from a local distributor will have to send the supplier a 1099 at the end of the year tallying up their purchases.

The bill makes two key changes to how 1099s are used. First, it expands their scope by using them to track payments not only for services but also for tangible goods. Plus, it requires that 1099s be issued not just to individuals, but also to corporations.

But now we have passed the bill so we can see what is in it. This innocuous change in the wording of another bill will have a major impact on business. Companies were required to report all payments for SERVICES in the form of a 1099. This change in the health care bill now requires the reporting of all payment for any sort of property.  1099s must now be distributed for product purchases.

This will increase the number of 1099s required by multiples. It will dramatically raise accounting and reporting costs.  If you buy aspirin from Walmart for your safety kits you must now have Walmart’s tax ID number and distribute  them a 1099 (subject to the minimum).

This may be the result of an administration will little real world experience, but it could also be a step towards collecting information to implement a value added tax.

It may also be an effort to get at the the underground economy, but it may only drive more businesses underground

Regardless of its intent or motivation this tiny provision in the ludicrous health insurance bill will increase the administrative burden on small businesses enormously.