Tony Gagne
Kissimmee resident

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kissimmee resident Tony Gagne has an impromtu “conversation” with Mr. Florida Rep.

Tony Gagne: “There are many angles that the leaders of Florida and some other Southern states looking to secede apparently haven’t thought through. In part, this concerns the things that we must pay for as individuals who live in the U.S.A., like them or not, vs things that we don’t have to pay for. Let’s check these out before they bite us on the backside. First off, now we have to pay federal income tax when due, or go to jail. This helps pay for Medicare and Social Security, which most old folks in our state depend on. You’ll be in big trouble if you don’t take of care them. On the other hand, the founding fathers in the Continental Congress who wrote our Constitution didn’t have these two costs. They could handle the new country’s needs with surcharges, like impost duties.

Mr. Florida Rep replied, “OK, we probably could work that out. Anything else different that we Southerners have to pay Washington now?”

TG: “For starters, the costs of running our government and paying the salaries of Congress, the Administration and the agencies that protect us have gone way up as the country has grown. Building maintenance, lighting and so on in Washington, plus federal offices in each major city or state capitol add to an inescapable total.”

FR: “Yes, I do realize we’re no longer just 13 tiny colonies on the Eastern Seaboard. You’ve brought up the operational costs of the DBA, FBI, CIA and the rest of the agencies labeled with cryptic letters. Indirectly you’re asking if we want to escape the protection of the FBI, or the food agency that protects us all against diseases like salmonella? The country’s founders managed without such protections, and we in some Southern states demand our right to break away because we want to escape mandatory inclusion in the health-care law, now a forced responsibility for all of us, like it or not, because you Dems pushed it through. But why should the wealthy among us have to pay the health costs of rabble? True, many good people were taken in by hucksters who stole their homes from them. Tough; them’s the breaks. We could always set up our own FBI.

TG: “Have you forgotten so soon that your grandfather lost everything in the 1929 crash and could have starved to death without that president the rich called a meddler, a traitor to his class, Franklin Roosevelt? And if your Grandpa had died young, you might not be here today. Sure, they had churches and private agencies helping in the Great Depression, but they ran out of money early on. Our state is supposed to balance our budget every year and even though we have unmet needs, we are loath to raise taxes. So important protections get postponed. The feds can raise taxes, borrow from prosperous nations like China or even issue bonds. Do you want to cut yourself off from that?

FR: “Well ... we could create a Southern Confederation and let them do the borrowing if needed.”

TG: “That puts us back in the same kind of situation we’re in now, only with far less muscle. If we broke away from the U.S., we’d probably have to give up or restrict Medicare or Medicaid because of the cost. I’d hate to leave Florida, but at my age, I couldn’t survive without Medicare and I might lose Social Security. I’d have to sell out and go North, but many couldn’t escape like that. Is that fair?”

FR: “I hadn’t thought about that. That’s scary! Well, anyhow, we’re presenting our suit to the U.S. Supreme Court because individual state courts wouldn’t have jurisdiction and for now we must follow the Constitution.”

TG: “If we broke away, the North would probably pay the Court’s expenses and afterwards, they’d have no jurisdiction over us. But I’m worried about our armed forces. Suppose a rogue nation like Iran decided the appendix-like shape of Florida made it easy pickings? Would we be strong enough to fight back? Would any other states of our Confederation or our Northern states assist us? Would Cuba want to seize us, with our large Latino population? When we were one great nation, we could afford the research that made us the strongest fighting force in the world and kept us free, out of the clutches of the Japanese and the rest of the Axis in 1942. Al Qaeda terrorists hurt the U.S. badly in 9/11 and are still out there, trying to blow up more airplanes or working with North-African pirates to capture more ships for ransom. Looks to me like we’d need our own navy, and that wouldn’t be cheap.”

FR: “That reminds me of the beginnings of our navy. Our founding fathers didn’t want to fight another war against Britain after 1783, but many believed that this was inevitable and that we had all better pitch in and build a real navy or we might go back to being a British colony. That almost happened, didn’t it, when the Brits started impressing our sailors, dragging them off our merchant ships at sea to use in their war against Napoleon. Hey! we showed them with “Old Ironsides.” But building a navy from scratch, that would be formidable. At least we’d have the bases at Pensacola and the East coast.”

TG: “Let’s go back to today’s big question and see what we’re stuck with, like it or not. The income tax wasn’t in the original Constitution, and maybe we could continue without it if imposts and duties sufficed. We’d still have to create a mint and provide government oversight for banks. Now, if we own land, we pay a property tax to the county or they take our land from us. That goes for homes, and we still pay part of our landlord’s taxes if we rent, or we’re thrown out by the county. Now we pay for firemen, even if we don’t smoke, bum stuff in a fireplace or use gas or electricity. Actually, not paying would be foolish because there are fire risks all around, like lightning, the carelessly tossed cigarette or the wildfire that sets houses on fire with airborne cinders. About the only way to avoid paying for firemen today is to live on a desert island. In Colonial times they had privately-run fire companies, and you didn’t have to join up. But then your house would be passed by during a conflagration, and this led sometimes to wholesale destruction.

TG: “Here’s another option. Maybe you live in a deserted area and don’t want to pay for police. You install periphery intruder detectors, hire guards and would shoot any creep that got over the fence. But whoa, now you’ve made yourself an inviting target, and it would still be a good idea to pay for regular police protection even if it wasn’t part of your tax bill. One never knows, and you want to protect your family. Another item on your tax bill is education. You have to pay to school somebody else’s kids. Maybe you say that isn’t fair; you don’t have kids, never had any. But if most of the general populace was illiterate as a result, as in Medieval times, they couldn’t read the Web or warning signs and would have to get all their information from TV or rumor. I also see that you and I help pay for the library. If they had just scrolls, tapes and disks, it would be like the ancient library at Alexandria. So if I wanted to find out something new or unusual, I could go to Google, but would certainly have to pay for the privilege.”

FR: “It could get worse: if I fight paying for garbage pick-up, then probably no one else would bother either, and we’d be back to throwing garbage on each other’s property. Ooh! But aren’t there some things I don’t have to pay for like telephone service, or water, if I can dig an artesian well or live by a mountain stream. I can put up a windmill for electricity or go back to kerosene lamps. Seems like a lot of bother.

TG: “Let’s talk about health care as things were before the law was passed. We could go to practically any doctor we wanted and to most hospitals. But since we might not have Medicare or Medicaid, we’d have to pay through the nose or produce a card from a private insurer. I personally hate the way hospital and insurance costs are escalating. Seems to me, we need a Public option, whether tied to the new law or not. What say? Another botheration: since hospitals are now required by law to treat anybody for free in the ER, they add those costs onto my Medicare bill, like $5 for just one folic-acid pill that a pharmacy sells over the counter for $2.50 for a bottle of 250 pills. That’s a 25,000 percent markup for the hospital, though somebody has to go get the pill and the glass of water. I’ve also caught them adding on the cost of procedures that were discussed but never happened. Medicare is soon billed, but you and I eventually pay via our taxes. That clearly is a big reason Medicare costs so much, so I want to fix it, not drop it.

“But let’s look at what could happen if the South gets its way: Medicare is cancelled by your Congress and nobody goes to the ER unless they are wealthy or have private insurance. That puts us back in the 19th century and earlier, when my angina attack this year could be ignored and I might drop dead any time. Or let’s say that a troubled person is a poor kid with cholera just latching on to him and he goes to school. He drops dead the next day, but so do half of his classmates, the way things are going in Haiti. He drank infected water, but so did your kid. Or an elderly person comes to the ER with walking pneumonia that isn’t spotted, sits coughing in a crowded waiting room for hours because the hospital is in financial difficulties and is understaffed and... I’ll leave the rest to your imagination… This sort of thing could cause easily communicable diseases like small pox to run rampant through the under-classes and eventually be caught by me and my family. That’s a very scary possibility.”

FR: “I agree. Also, I’ve read that the private insurers are overcharging like crazy and before the new law, were adding all sorts of escape clauses in fine print for themselves, so if maybe I had warts as a kid and they found out, they’d shut me out in the cold despite the fees I had paid over the years. Or when I get old, after a year of treatment, I’m out in the cold unless I’m very rich. That just isn’t fair; I helped make these guys rich!

Now a real problem occurs to me: how can a devout Christian turn their eyes from the 40 or 50 million of God’s children in this country who now cannot afford any care, so they may wait till they collapse in the street at death’s door and maybe infect others.”

TG: “That bothers me also. However, let’s digress and compare to my car. The law says everybody has to have some sort of insurance on their car to protect others in a bim-bam, regardless of their past history. But I have to over-insure myself because there are scofflaws out there getting away with no insurance, driving like madmen and putting me at risk. Florida law says every car owner must have insurance or else, and if the Supreme Court says this isn’t covered in the Constitution, which obviously it wouldn’t be, I gotta ask, how much chaos do you want to create out on the streets? Things and needs change with the years, and it isn’t 1790 anymore.”

FR: “OK... I guess I agree with Obama; hope I’m around in 2014 to see the health-care law put fully into action. And for everybody’s sake, I see that Congress must provide the Public Option so greedy insurers will have some real competition to make them keep their costs and rates reasonable and not out of reach for all but the well-off. Hey, good we had this chat!”