Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!

"Tis the season to be jolly" and thankful for all of the blessings that we benefit from by living in the U.S. It's also time for sharing -- be it the Salvation Army kettles, your church, favorite charity or the Jaycees Christmas for the Elderly or Toybox.

One of the local coffee groups I frequent has donated to one of the charities for the elderly in memory of our good friend who we miss this holiday season, Wally Lage. We raise a cup in his memory.

My family and many of her friends are also missing Kim Kurka McDowell, who for many years represented the Southeast Missourian in working with the Jaycees on the Christmas for the Elderly and Toybox programs.

Some die too unexpectedly or too young, but we all eventually will die... to live again.

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One of the best area homecoming events is the Southeast Missourian-sponsored Christmas Basketball Tournament. This highly attended event (good to see a filled Show Me Center) brings young and old to witness some of the area's best high school basketball players. See you there.

The SemoEvents calendar on Page 2A of the Southeast Missourian dispels the comment that there's nothing to do in Cape Girardeau. The problem is which option do you select from the many choices.

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Supporters of the new health-care law love to talk about how it helps people get coverage for their adult children, and many Republicans have said they support that provision. It would be a fine idea, if polls trumped economics. What the law says is that if health plans offer dependent coverage, they must offer it up to age 26. Now the Service Employees International Union, which heartily advocated the law, is responding to this all-or-nothing choice by ending all of its dependent coverage. The union is not alone in experiencing a rude awakening. Readers of the New York Times were recently informed that the law is inspiring a lot of mergers of medical practices, something opponents of the law had been warning about all along. Congress, meanwhile, is taking up legislation to defer long-scheduled cuts in Medicare payment rates -- a move that reveals how unrealistic is the law's attempt to achieve savings through price controls. President Obama pledged to be the last president to take up health-care reform. Future presidents will keep busy dealing with the consequences of his success.

Taxes are scheduled to rise in January. The Democrats first proposed to let them rise for families earning $250,000 or more, which would wallop a lot of small businesses: Households with income exceeding $200,000 account for about half of all small-business income in the United States, meaning that they represent the sort of small businesses that actually employ people and generate significant profits. That plan petered out, and now Sen. Claire McCaskill (D.-Mo.) has proposed a tax increase on families earning $1 million or more. A "tax on millionaires" is heavyweight rhetoric but featherweight economics. The Democrat-led CBO found that raising taxes on families earning more than $250,000 would have negative effects on economic growth compared with keeping all of the current federal income-tax rates in place. A tax increase on $1 million households -- which represent a great number of the nation's business owners and business investors -- is likely to do even more damage to the economy for every new dollar in tax revenue raised. Class war isn't cheap.

-- National Review

Note: The final Senate bill had changes but only a two-year extension.

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Here's a simple solution for the controversy over the new full-body scanners they are installing at our nation's airports.

Develop an enclosed booth that passengers step into but, instead of x-raying them, when the door closes, it will detonate any explosive device they have hidden on or in their body.

The explosion will be contained within the sealed booth. This would be a win-win for everyone! There would be no more concern about racial profiling.

The booth would eliminate long, expensive trials.

You're in the airport and you hear a muffled explosion, followed by an announcement over the PA system, "Attention standby passengers, we now have a seat available on flight number... "

What's not to like?

-- E-mail humor