Bush unveils health plan tied to tax deduction

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By JULIE APPLEBY, USA TODAY

President's Bush's State of the Union health care proposal couples an old idea, capping tax-free benefits for health care, with a new one: a standard deduction for all who buy health insurance.

If approved, and the plan faces a chilly reception in the Democrat-controlled Congress, the administration says it would give people who buy their own health insurance equal tax breaks with those who get coverage through their jobs. The tax savings could help 3 million to 5 million of the nearly 47 million now-uninsured people buy coverage, the administration says.

For the rest, the president proposes moving some money that currently goes to hospitals and nursing homes into subsidies to help lower-income people buy health insurance through state-sponsored insurance programs.

Opponents, such as liberal advocacy group Families USA, says the proposal mainly benefits wealthier Americans. Others say it could lead some employers to drop insurance, forcing workers onto the individual market, where some may not be able to afford coverage.

A similar plan to cap tax-free health benefits offered by employers was proposed by President Reagan in 1986 but failed to pass Congress.

Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., chairman of a key health subcommittee in the House, said he would not even consider hearings on the proposal. He says it would give wealthier Americans with health insurance a far larger tax break than the lower-income uninsured that the plan purportedly aims to help.

The White House outlined some elements of the plan:

• Health insurance offered through jobs would become taxable income. But insured workers' taxable income would be reduced by a deduction of $15,000 for a family plan or $7,500 for an individual. Currently, the average family health plan offered by employers costs $11,500 for families and $4,300 for singles, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey says. Only people with insurance worth more than the deduction would pay more tax.

• People who buy their own insurance would get the same deductions: $15,000 for families, $7,500 for singles, lowering their taxable income by that amount - even if their health plans did not cost that much. Currently, only the self-employed who buy their own insurance get a tax deduction.

• The administration says more than 100 million workers - out of about 175 million - who now get their insurance through their jobs would see their tax bills go down.

"For a lot of people, it would be a bonanza," says Joe Antos of American Enterprise Institute. He and other supporters of the plan say it would encourage employers to offer less-generous insurance plans. They say generous plans drive up the cost of health care.

Paul Fronstin of the Employee Benefit Research Institute says the proposal might lead more employers to drop coverage. Some employers might also find that younger, healthier workers would opt out of company plans to buy their own insurance, leaving sicker, more expensive workers behind, he says.

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How Google Measures Link Popularity

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Link popularity is by far the most important factor for determining your search engine ranking. You need to know what link popularity is, why it is so important, and how Google measures your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top of Google, you will rise to the top of all the other search engines as well). But, before we talk about how Google measures linking, we need to cover some basics.

Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millions of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.

The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.

It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links. If I have a website that offers quotes for auto insurance, and I have 800 quality inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another mortgage site that has 3,000 links that stem from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.

If you try to acquire inbound by using link farms or FFA pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you might get permanently removed from the search engine listings. Links farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are pointless link directories. The search engines usually discount any links that come from either of these sources.

Now that we understand what link popularity is and how it works, we need to look specifically at how Google measures it. Google uses a number of variables in their algorithm to calculate your overall link score. The higher your score, the higher you will be ranked in the search listings.

One factor that Google uses in their algorithm, obviously, is the total number of sites linking to you. The more links you have, the higher your score will be. However, their algorithm is a little more complicated than that, and it is possible for a website with fewer links to be ranked higher than a website that has more links.

The reason for this is because Google also measures the quality of your links. If your website is about vitamins, and the site linking to you is a video game site, then that is not considered a quality link. The link still helps your score, but the link would help your score much more if it were from a website whose subject matter is the same as yours.

Also, Google gives a higher score to a link if it comes from a page that has actual content that relates to your keywords. For example, if your site is about jewelry, and another jewelry website has posted a link to your site on their links page, that link is not as valuable as a link to your site coming from a blog or a message board where a lot of information about jewelry is being written or discussed.

Also, Google gives an even higher score to a link if it contains anchor text that matches one of the keywords that describes your site. For example, if I have a site that sells lawnmowers, and a blog about lawnmowers has posted a link to my site, it helps my score even more if the link text (also known as anchor text) is LAWNMOWERS. To learn more about anchor text, go to a search engine and look up ANCHOR TEXT and you will be able to learn about it.

Another factor used by Google to score your link popularity is the diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For example, if you have a site that sells handbags, and all the links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but the keyword HANDBAGS, Google considers that to be abnormal. To get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites that contain a variety of keywords related to handbags, such as BUY HANDBAGS, LEATHER HANDBAGS, etc.

It is difficult to increase your link popularity, but now that you understand how your score is calculated, you can devise a plan to improve your score. You might want to consider posting to forums and blogs that contain information that is related to your site, and when you post, include a link to your site. As long as you are persistent and tailor your strategy towards Google, you will do fine.

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About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers create a free web form with the code to email the web form responses.

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Rounding up restless shopping carts

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Despite alert store personnel, sophisticated anti-theft systems and other precautions, shopping carts seem to have lives of their own, disappearing like magic from Valley retailers.

Enter Tom Martinet, whose company, Arizona Cart Retrieval, operates every day of the year except Christmas to locate and return the carts to area businesses.

"I knew there was a cart problem," Martinet said, "but I didn't realize the extent of it until we started this service."
When Martinet began working in grocery management in the 1970s, cart theft wasn't much of a problem, he recalls. "We'd send a bagger over to the nearby apartment complex to pick up a cart or two," he said. "That was about it."

Things have changed.

In an average week, one of Martinet's contractors will have dispatched crews to round up and return close to 15,000 carts to Arizona retailers.

The retrieval service employs 18 flatbed trucks that serve more than 30 retailers and about 460 stores in the state. Clients include Fry's, Safeway, Albertsons, Wal-Mart, Family Dollar and Lowe's Home Improvement.

Martinet is philosophical about some customers' need to roll home with a private set of wheels.

"Households in certain areas buy a lot of groceries," he said. "They need a way to get them home."

Sometimes, cart-napping can even have health benefits.

"We've seen older people leaving the lot with their cart; at least they're getting a little exercise," he said. "Some of them are even using the cart as a walker. You wonder if they could make it without the cart."

Often, a single cart attracts others, Martinet adds. Recently, the company got a call from a landlord in Avondale. "He had evicted his tenant from the house and found 17 shopping carts."

"They were all in good shape; we just returned them to Wal-Mart."

Jim Oliver of OT Cart Service, a contractor for Arizona Cart Retrieval, is unflappable after 35 years in the business. Oliver said most folks are unperturbed about returning the carts.

"You get a few who have a temper, but most people realize they're not supposed to be in possession of them in the first place."

Oliver has found the carts used as unique home storage and decor solutions, too.

"People turn them on their side, lay a plywood top on it and use it for a dining room table. We've picked up carts that have been used to wheel out trash, sort the laundry, and do other household chores. They're pretty handy," he said.

Once captured, the carts are steam-cleaned or refurbished on-site using equipment loaded onto the flatbeds. Most of the repair work is limited to replacing handles and seat straps and welding wheels. Carts that can't be fixed are parted out.

A percentage of carts is retrieved from desert washes, alleys and other areas that serve as temporary homes for transients, but that number has remained steady over the years, Oliver said. "We haven't really seen an increase in the number of carts used by the homeless, especially if you compare Arizona to states like California," he adds.

Even the carts with anti-theft locking systems built into the cart's wheels are not a deterrent to a determined cart bandit.

"One guy rigged up a block of wood underneath the wheels with wire and tape. He had it sliding across the parking lot, just like a sled, and he got his groceries home that way," Oliver said. "It's kind of amazing the solutions people come up with."

Business can only continue to increase for the cart service, especially as the Valley becomes more congested. "In areas that are built up with apartment complexes, office buildings and condos, you're going to see this continue," Oliver said.

Fast-growing sections like Arrowhead are exceptions because much of the residential growth is confined to single-family homes.

The average steel shopping cart costs about $100. Custom styles, such as the plastic race car kiddie carts, cost $400 to replace. The firm works on a contract basis with retailers to retrieve carts.
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