So simple, even a housewife can understand

This feels strange. These days, I read the news, and I immediately spot the flaws in the Democrats' plans. I do not own a business. I have had no formal education in business. My bachelor's degree is in Computer Science, for heaven's sake. Yet still, I can read these proposals, and the flaws show as clear as day for me. Is there something unusual about me, or about them?

Today's beauty comes from a Reuters article that I picked up from Newsmax:

Democrats are looking at the possibility of a windfall profits tax on insurance companies as part of healthcare reform, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

Pelosi said she had asked House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Rangel to examine the possibility and report back to her.

"This is very preliminary," she told reporters.

But she added that insurance companies would get some 50 million new consumers, many subsidized by taxpayers, under reforms Democrats are planning and "we think they can put more on the table."

Okay, it doesn't take a genius to put this plan together. We're talking about switching out the public option (at least in part) for taxpayer-subsidized private options, kind of like what Congress has... but not quite as posh. It seems they want to keep from raising taxes on the middle class by doing it to the insurance companies instead.

This sets up a neat bit of circular logic.

Only a fool would consider it a victory to let someone else take his profits and use them to buy his product.

Remember that profit is what's left after you have paid for your supplies and paid your workers. It's the part that you get to keep for yourself. It's a percentage, sometimes a small percentage, of what your actual product costs. In this plan, you are only going to recover a small percentage of what was taken away.

Now we've had some discussions about profit. Where does it actually go? It pays the salary of the business owner. So technically, if you earn $25,000 per year as a business owner, you have a profit margin of $25,000. In this society, however, it is also paid out in percentages to stockholders. Who owns stock in the company? Why, anybody can own stock, including the workers, who often are given stock as part of their pay.

If your salary is being decreased by the government and you need more money, the only way to do it is to lower your costs or raise the price of your product.

So where will this "windfall tax" money be coming from? Part of it will come from the CEO's salary, and I am sure that's what the Democratic Party is claiming as the source of the entire tax. In truth, only part, probably a small part, will come from there. The rest of the money will come from the middle and lower class in the form of raised premiums, lower stock returns, and fewer workers employed.

Yet again, the Democrat plan basically involves taking from us to spend on us... retaining a percentage for their own purposes, of course. It's a scam, and as scams go it may look good on the surface, but it is fundamentally flawed.

I'm just bewildered that it seems so obvious to me. After all, I am not one of the elite ruling class that the Democrats deem capable of making my own financial decisions. How can I be clever enough to understand the problems with the way they want to spend my money?