Can You Haggle?

Can You Haggle?

Carlos was a friend of mine and an illegal alien—but working on his  legality through a local church.  One of our foreign exchange kids was explaining to his teenage daughter that she had gotten a coveted American Drivers License.  Why coveted?  Because you can get it at 16 rather than 18 in the home country.  So our exchange student could go home and drive for 2 years while all her friends were envious. How much did it cost?  $26.  At that point, Carlos, who couldn’t understand directions to the supermarket but could understand dollars, exploded.  “Ten dollar!” he shouted in exasperation.  “Never more than 10 dollar!  Talk down to 3 or 4!”  So then after a good laugh, I had to explain to Carlos that in USA, you can’t haggle over the price of a driver’s license; DMV gets very irritated if you try, and the price is what they say, $26.

The liberal Georgie Ann Geyer writes under syndication in our paper. She exasperated about how she couldn’t believe that conservatives and libertarians didn’t like the Affordable Care Act.  Why that mandate is just like the state’s requirement to buy insurance and a driver’s license, she triumphantly explained, as if the reader had never heard of this explanation.  (Yeah, I know.  Such originality! But then these are the people who used to continually repeat the rumor about the 80 mpg carburetor that Big Oil and Big Auto had colluded to cover-up.) Yeah, except a DL is $26, car insurance about $260 and this “Affordable” Care Act is $2800 a year per household.  To improve the analogy, they are requiring not only that you buy insurance but  that you must buy a car as well, even if you don't drive.  Moreover, this fee/penalty/tax is not progressive.  Lower middle class folks pay $2800, just like the rich who hang around with Georgie at Martha's Vineyard.  That is, lower middle class guys, who have two jobs, one in construction and another as a janitor, like Carlos, pay the same.  You think we could haggle?