Balancing Obamacare On The Backs Of Truckers

[trlrtrash13]

 

When the story broke about President Obama announcing stricter emission and efficiency standards for heavy duty trucks, I had to check it out. I found this story from CSMonitor which contained a rather interesting paragraph about how this will effect the trucking industry.

But cutting fuel use won't be cheap. Despite available "off the shelf" efficiency technologies, getting to the higher standard will cost nearly $8 billion, the EPA estimates. Even so, benefits – which include cutting health-care costs as a result of reduced pollution – are pegged at $49 billion, the EPA found.

This is the problem with Big Government. To President Obama, it's taking $8 billion from over here, and creating $49 billion over there. Sounds like a great deal, right? Yea, unless you are a trucker.

Without even getting into this number of $49 billion, which is impossible to genuinely establish, this exposes the major flaw in the logic of Big Government. Were this a corporate entity, one could take money from one slot to create savings in another without hurting either department or the business as a whole. In a corporation, all members benefit in some way or another from the success of the whole.

In a Government, this is not the case. When you take from one Industry to prop up another, you hurt a separate entity that cannot profit off of the improvement of the other. While it could be said that truckers will share in the better health represented in the overall savings, and thus will get a small sliver of the pie, it is important to remember that the entire pie was taken from their industry. Is it any wonder that President Obama backed out of his scheduled meeting with a member of the trucking industry?

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