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The Courier-Journal reports that the Kentucky AFL-CIO is rallying for universal health care:

Saying that “in America, no one should go without health care,” the AFL-CIO today mounted a drive to bring about universal health coverage by 2009.

Kentucky AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan announced the campaign at a press conference in Louisville one day after the Census Bureau announced the number of uninsured Americans had risen to 47 million.

Everyone seems to be talking about”skyrocketing health costs,” but hardly no one addresses the skyrocketing government costs associated with health care entilements. How exactly is the United States going to pay for the health entitlement programs it already has, Medicare and Medicaid? The costs of these programs are staggering. Cato Institute scholar Jagadeesh Gokhale gives us the cold hard facts concerning entitlement spending in a letter he wrote in the Washington Times last month:

The present value over the next 75 years of future payrolls is estimated by the Medicare trustees to equal $335.3 trillion. That yields a “policy metric” for evaluating the size of the federal entitlement imbalance: Future payroll taxes would have to be hiked by another 12.1 percentage points ($40.6 trillion divided by $335.3 trillion equals 0.121 or 12.1 percent) immediately an permanently in order to avoid cutting entitlement and all other federal expenditures and to avoid additional debt creation. That’s almost a doubling of all payroll taxes to fix the problem through the next 75 years. It bears repeating, however, that more than one–half of total entitlement imbalances (of $90 trillion) are projected to arise after the next 75 years.

And is the so-called “problem of the uninsured” as bad as it seems? The Heritage Foundation points out that the new Census report that the Courier-Journal makes reference to is flawed.

The Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) is a misleading measure of those who lack health insurance in America and an imprecise tool for analyzing the dimensions of the problem. Analysis of data from earlier Census Bureau and other government reports shows that roughly 7 million are illegal immigrants; roughly 9 million are persons on Medicaid; 3.5 million are persons already eligible for government health programs; and approximately 20 million have, or live, in families with incomes greater than twice the federal poverty level, or $41,300 for a family of four.

Most of the uninsured are in and out of health coverage. The professional literature also shows that, overwhelmingly, the vast majority of the uninsured are persons who are in and out of coverage, largely as a result of job changes. Only a small number of the uninsured are chronically uninsured. For most of the uninsured, the problem is fixable if policymakers simply take steps to make health insurance portable, so the insurance policy sticks to the person, not the job

It should not up to the government to take care of us from cradle to grave. We should take personal responsibility for our own lives. People who live “in poverty” in the United States are living much better than ever before. So, universal health care might be a good idea if a perfect utopia on earth were possible, but, in reality, it is a costly, unpractical and unfeasible idea that needs to be abandoned. If government doesn’t put the brakes on entitlement spending, then we’ll all be in the poorhouse eventually.

You know something is incredibly wrong when a man is facing a six month jail sentence for building a fence on his own property.

A judge has sentenced a man to six months in jail for violating city zoning laws with a fence he built around his sprawling home in this exclusive Southern California enclave.

Francisco Linares was told in court months ago that he faced jail time if he didn’t either get permits for the 180-foot-long fence or tear it down. He did neither and was sentenced to jail Monday by Superior Court Judge Sandra Thompson.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Linares chose not to comply and his decision has forced the court to act accordingly,” zoning and code administrator Roy Beall said, reading from a prepared statement.

Kentuckians should watch West Virgnia’s experiment closely. Will West Virginia use gambling revenues to lower taxes and boost the economy … or will political leaders there simply waste the dollars on, say, a monorail?

My money’s on West Virginia building something akin to Wall Drug, a giant eyesore that fails to attract one wealthy tourist.

Even money says there’ll be a Cracker Barrel in there somewhere.