Dear every asshole who supports the Max Baucus mandate-based health care plan on the justification that the government mandates that you must have car insurance, too:

The government only mandates that you have car insurance if you choose to drive. It’s not the same thing. If you can’t afford to keep up with car insurance, you can choose not to drive and keep your expenses low.

I really like John Aravosis over at AmericaBlog.com (if you find yourself here after following a trackback, dude, sorry) but that post linked up there, and its defense in the comments section, is flat-out wrong. The logic behind it is crappy. Saying, “you already spend money on optional things like CDs, and that’s not a tax” is totally beside the point. If there were a law in place that could see me fined for not buying enough CDs, then the two would be comparable. That law’s not in place, because it’d be fucking stupid. Just like the analogy. Which is why it’s not one I’ve ever heard before, probably.

But the thing about car insurance that keeps getting brought up is just infuriating. Because it’s from such a privileged position – from people who’ve apparently never had to consider whether or not they could afford to keep a car.

For many years, I didn’t have a car. Not because I couldn’t afford to buy one – I spent most of my late teens and early twenties chewing up and spitting out $300 junkers – but because the ancillary costs, like insurance and gas and fuzzy dice and spinning rims and stuff were too much of an investment.

And I was a privileged white kid with no dependents, and my poverty was a choice that I made because I wanted to pursue opportunities that I knew wouldn’t make me any money. There are people who are really, really poor, without the option of just throwing in the towel and getting a job that would pay their bills, like I had. And those people sometimes can’t afford to drive because they can’t afford car insurance, too.

And so telling them that they have to buy health insurance now or they’re going to be fined, but it’s cool, because it’s just like how they already have to buy car insurance for the car that they don’t have, is not particularly convincing. The stats people keep spouting about how it’s an insignificant amount of money – about how the Baucus plan only requires people who live at the federal poverty line to spend 3% of their total income, which is like $300 a year, on insurance, so who gives a shit because it’s only like an extra $25 a month, and all the poor people can just have two fewer glasses at the wine bar on Friday nights, is so fucking clueless that Marie Antoinette hears them say it and is like, “dudes, time to check your privilege before you say some really dumb shit.”