Healthcare bill is one of the largest tax increases in United States history smack dab in middle of the worst recession in decades
The Audacity of Food Stamps and the Coming Great Obama Depression
By Fred Dardick Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Democrats made history all right this weekend, but not the kind they think they voted for. While they may actually believe their healthcare bill will usher in some sort of new golden age in which Americans, immigrants and unicorns live together in perfect harmony, back in the real world the only things their monstrous healthcare bill will accomplish is the loss of millions more sorely needed jobs and transformation of what has been a terrible, but temporary recession, into the Great Obama Depression.
This catastrophe, coming strait at the nation like an out of control freight train, can be traced to a fundamental but important character flaw present in most Democrats and their communist loving overlords. Apparently none of them ever learned one of the most basic lessons in life: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
ObamaCare may sing the siren song of healthcare equality for all (communism), but it sure as heck doesn’t come up with a way to pay for it. Obama and Democrats point to CBO scores that say ObamaCare will reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over the first 10 years, but this is of course nonsense. It doesn’t include the $208 billion “doc fix” we all know is coming, it presumes Medicare will save $500 billion over the next decade by rooting out fraud (good luck with that), and it includes revenues from existing healthcare programs already being used to pay for services (double counting), in addition to other accounting shenanigans.
Closer to reality former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin estimated the bill will add $538 billion to the deficit over the first 10 years alone and cost $2.3 trillion. And the first decade includes only 6 years of healthcare benefits!
Few people understand what will happen next now that this perverse bill is law, which is probably the whole idea behind the 2,000+ pages of indecipherable government babble. In reality, there are only a handful of provisions that really matter. The creation of an all powerful government board that will determine who gets what coverage, massive tax hikes on the American people, and the ability for feds to set health insurance rates essentially turning them into government utilities, along with a few other communist like ideas designed to destroy the free market aspects of our world leading healthcare system.
The rest of the bill is just fluff designed to convince people who don’t pay attention that the government actually cares about them. It also provides Obama and Democrats with talking points (30 million more Americans will now be covered!) so they don’t have to explain to the nation what the bill is really designed to do.
Boiled down to brass tacks, the Democrat healthcare bill accomplishes 2 really big things:
1. The healthcare bill is one of the largest tax increases in United States history smack dab in middle of the worst recession in decades. Talk about a double whammy, and it’s not just the rich who will be forced to pay for it. Each and every man, woman and child, and future generations to come, will pay trillions of dollars in unnecessary taxes so Obama can have the privilege to refer to himself as an “historic” president. Many of the hidden tax increases will go into effect almost immediately.
Young, healthy people will be given the choice of purchasing health insurance they can’t afford or paying a fine to the federal government for not having coverage, a far more likely scenario especially given the abolition of preexisting conditions which means young people can sign up for health insurance whenever they happen to need it.
Large corporations will pay 20% or higher healthcare premiums in the first year alone. Caterpillar already announced last week that the bill will cost them at least $100 million a year in additional taxes. Add the rest of the Fortune 400 to the mix and the total business tax bill is HUGE.
Medical device companies, the ones that make things like artificial hips and pacemakers, will be slapped with a 10% surtax (what kind of jerk targets artificial hips for tax hikes???).
And the most sinister, dirtiest trick of them all…forcing state run Medicaid programs, already suicidally underfunded, to admit millions of new beneficiaries with absolutely, positively no way to pay for them – unless of course they stick it to the public with gigantic, economy killing tax increases at both the state and local levels.
The nation is already swimming in debt due to the trillions of dollars in underfunded Medicare and Social Security programs…add to that trillions of more dollars in additional taxes on working Americans during a time of 10% unemployment (more like 17% if you add those who have given up looking for work) and you have recipe for economic disaster and guaranteed job losses for years to come.
5% unemployment is a distant memory and 15% is just around the corner. At the worst of the Great Depression unemployment was 22%, and we’re almost already halfway there!
Newt Gingrich said it best: “Here’s the real cost of this bill…Your children will pay more in taxes to pay interest on the debt than they’ll pay for national security. We used to have a tradition that when you paid off the mortgage, you gave your children the farm. We’re now selling the farm and leaving our kids with the mortgage.”
A couple days ago Obama justified his healthcare bill by stating “it’s about every American who knows the shock of opening an envelope to see their premiums just shot up again when times are already tough enough.”
Well Mr. President, how about those millions of Americans who already know, and will know soon the shock of opening an envelope to see a pink slip? What do you think most Americans would prefer…free lousy healthcare for all or a good job that comes with affordable, quality health insurance?
2. This is a power grab by government bureaucrats. The bill doesn’t have anything to do with building more hospitals, or training more doctors, or educating more nurses, which is exactly what Democrats would be doing if they were sincere about improving healthcare in America. It is about one thing: CONTROL of the healthcare system by Washington bureaucrats…and that’s it.
For one thing, government workers are all union shills. I have never been able to understand why 50% of U.S. government employees are members of a union in the first place. I thought unions were formed to protect “workers” from the greedy corporate “fat cats”. Exactly what corporate “fat cats” do government workers need to be protected from? Themselves? The public? Who?
I see absolutely no justification for federal unions…unless of course their purpose is to extort higher salaries and benefits from the taxpayers and protect incompetents from losing their jobs (public schools). Already government salaries are 20-25% higher than the private sector and they are increasing over time. Apparently all it takes to get a pay raise in the public sector is to form a compensation committee that says you deserve it.
The rest of America does just fine without unions, only around 11% of the private workforce is unionized, so why can’t they do the same? It would seem government unions have nothing to do with protecting the public, but everything to do with stealing from them.
And these are the clowns we’re going to trust running our world leading healthcare system?
159 new bureaucracies will be created over the next few years to administer the plan - all staffed with government lackeys you will never know and will never meet. Their decisions, made outside the prying eyes of the public, will touch all of our lives. Basically some intern in a dusty office who knows where is going to decide whether or not you get that heart valve replacement surgery.
The Greatest Generation
Obama said this past weekend the “100 year-old American dream” is finally coming true with Democrat healthcare reform. You’re telling me that the brave American men and women who fought 2 world wars, a great depression, Korea, Vietnam, the communist peril and every single despot around the world for the past 100 years did so that Obama could socialize 1/6th of the American economy?
Because of the sacrifices of The Greatest Generation, those who lived through the Great Depression and defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japanese in World War II, freedom and democracy has spread throughout the world. There are few people left on Earth who know what it is like to charge a machine gun nest, or advance under heavy artillery fire, or fall on a grenade to save your brothers in arms.
And what repayment do Democrats offer these true American heroes responsible for establishing this great nation? $500 billion in Medicare cuts and free end of life counseling sessions (death panels) complements of Obama.
If that isn’t shameful treatment of our elders, I don’t know what is.
Obama’s depraved thinking towards our grandparent’s generation is reflected in the criticism he had for his grandmother, Madelyn Durham, who elected to undergo hip replacement surgery despite being terminally ill. He had this to say: “I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost… (I don’t feel) society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model.
“I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill.”
For Obama his own grandmother is the perfect example of how the no good elderly are wasting the nation’s collective healthcare resources for their own selfish purposes, like wanting to walk.
The Audacity of Food Stamps
During the Great Depression of the 1930s the country faced the sight of their fellow Americans waiting in lines for soup and bread. The soup lines became ingrained in the country’s consciousness as a failure on the part of the nation to provide jobs for an out of work populace, images that are still recognizable today. We now have a record 40 million Americans on food stamps, an amazing 25% more than the year before.
However, in the modern era we no longer see images of Americans unable to feed themselves. Thanks to technology food stamp cards are reloaded automatically and accepted at most grocery stores. The liberal elite are spared the horrifying sight of millions upon millions of people…in every neighborhood, in every community…waiting in line for food.
And yet watching Obama speak you’d never suspect he cared. When choosing a metric to measure the success of a President, I suggest food stamps. If a President can’t provide an economic environment in which people can feed themselves, then what good is he? By this account, Obama is the biggest presidential failure in the history of the United States.
As Far as I am Concerned, Democrat is just another Name for Communist
The healthcare legislative process exposed liberals for being the corrupt, easily bought crooks we conservatives knew them to be. Democrats in both houses of Congress, from the most progressive to the supposedly conservative, sold their votes for trinkets like cushy government jobs, brand new terminals at their favorite local airport, and free trips on Air Force One.
Even Bart Stupak, the “principled” Democrat who supposedly swore an oath that he would not, under any circumstances, put his signature on a bill that wasn’t didn’t protect human life. In the end he caved and signed the most pro-abortion spending bill in 30 years in return for an empty promise from Obama that isn’t even worth the paper it’s printed on. So much for principled Democrats.
When you add Cap and Trade and the other economy killing Democrat legislative priorities to the mix, it is clear that whatever their priorities are, they have nothing to do with making life better for you or I.
We must vote every single one of those lying, cheating liberals out of office. And I do mean them all. At every level of government, in every community, in every state. No exceptions, no excuses. We need to send a message to the world that we will not allow the usurpers take over and destroy our great nation. ALL DEMOCRATS MUST GO!!!
The future of America depends on it.
