Socialized Medicine on the Installment Plan
Socialized Medicine on the Installment Plan
by Michael D. Tanner
The withdrawal of Tom Daschle as President Obama's nominee for secretary of health and human services is generally viewed as a setback for the president's health care reform plans. Even so, the Obama Administration is already well on its way toward putting the government in charge of our health care system.
Less than two weeks into his administration, President Obama has already signed a massive expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The bill is ostensibly designed to provide health insurance to children from poor families. The language of the bill, however, will allow states to increase SCHIP income eligibility to 400 percent of the poverty level – amounting $83,000 for a family of four. Furthermore, the bill allows states to disregard some household expenses, like mortgages, in determining eligibility. Consequently, some families earning as much as $100,000 could receive government provided health insurance.
More than three quarters of these newly eligible children are from families that already have health insurance – 77 per cent according to the Congressional Budget Office. As a result, the SCHIP expansion will not so much increase the number of insured children as it will shift children from private health insurance plans to the taxpayer-funded system. A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation survey of 22 studies of the relationship between government insurance programs and private coverage concluded that substitution of government for private coverage "seems inevitable." But, then, that may well be the idea. In pushing for the SCHIP expansion, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) said he supported the bill, in part, because he didn't want to "trap people into private health insurance."
And if that wasn't enough, the SCHIP expansion will also continue and even expand states to use the clearly misnamed State Children's Health Insurance Program to cover adults. Already, eleven states use S-CHIP funds to provide taxpayer-funded insurance for adults. Indeed, in Minnesota more than half of S-CHIP recipients are actually adults. In New Jersey, 48 percent of program participants are adults, not children, while in Illinois, 45 percent of the SCHIP recipients are adults. According to the state's own projections, Illinois will soon spend more SCHIP money on adults than on children. Under the new bill, even more states will be able to take advantage of this loophole.
Equally significant are several provisions in the proposed economic stimulus bill now making its way through Congress. For example, the bill would allow states to extend Medicaid coverage to unemployed workers and their families, with the federal government pay 100 per cent of the costs. And there would be no income or asset limits whatsoever on eligibility. As a result, still more of the middle-class would be shifted into government health care.
Nor is the extension of eligibility limited to just the middle-class. A Republican amendment to bar millionaires from the program was stripped out before final passage in the House.
For the unemployed who don't go directly into government-run health care, the stimulus bill would extend COBRA coverage, and have taxpayers pick up 65 percent of premium costs.
[T]he Obama Administration is already well on its way toward putting the government in charge of our health care system.
It is not just a question of extending government programs either. Another provision of the stimulus bill would spend $400 million to create a Comparative Effectiveness Council, so that the federal government can decide on whether medical treatments are worth the money. This idea was a favorite of the now-departed Sen. Daschle, who saw it as a method of controlling health care costs by denying reimbursement for treatments that the government deems as not being cost-effective.
The stimulus would also spend some $20 billion for the federal government to muscle its way into the growing market for electronic medical records.
Government already pays for 48 percent of health care spending in this country. According to the CBO, the combined changes under SCHIP and the stimulus would shift some 10 million more Americans into government-run or taxpayer-funded health care. All this would take place under the radar, without committee hearings, or even any real debate.
There is no doubt that health care in this country needs reform. It is too costly, too many people lack insurance, and quality is too uneven. But before we turn one-seventh of the U.S. economy and some of our most important and personal decisions over to the tender mercies of the government, shouldn't we at least talk about it?
Adam Smith gets the last laugh
Adam Smith gets the last laugh
By P.J. O’Rourke
The free market is dead. It was killed by the Bolshevik Revolution, fascist dirigisme, Keynesianism, the Great Depression, the second world war economic controls, the Labour party victory of 1945, Keynesianism again, the Arab oil embargo, Anthony Giddens’s “third way” and the current financial crisis. The free market has died at least 10 times in the past century. And whenever the market expires people want to know what Adam Smith would say. It is a moment of, “Hello, God, how’s my atheism going?”
Adam Smith would be laughing too hard to say anything. Smith spotted the precise cause of our economic calamity not just before it happened but 232 years before – probably a record for going short.
“A dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitant,” Smith said in The Wealth of Nations. “If it is lett [sic] to a tenant for rent, as the house itself can produce nothing, the tenant must always pay the rent out of some other revenue.” Therefore Smith concluded that, although a house can make money for its owner if it is rented, “the revenue of the whole body of the people can never be in the smallest degree increased by it”. [281]*
Smith was familiar with rampant speculation, or “overtrading” as he politely called it.
The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea Bubble had both collapsed in 1720, three years before his birth. In 1772, while Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations, a bank run occurred in Scotland. Only three of Edinburgh’s 30 private banks survived. The reaction to the ensuing credit freeze from the Scottish overtraders sounds familiar, “The banks, they seem to have thought,” Smith said, “were in honour bound to supply the deficiency, and to provide them with all the capital which they wanted to trade with.” [308]
The phenomenon of speculative excess has less to do with free markets than with high profits. “When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary,” Smith said, “overtrading becomes a general error.” [438] And rate of profit, Smith claimed, “is always highest in the countries that are going fastest to ruin”. [266]
The South Sea Bubble was the result of ruinous machinations by Britain’s lord treasurer, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, who was looking to fund the national debt. The Mississippi Scheme was started by the French regent Philippe duc d’Orléans when he gave control of the royal bank to the Scottish financier John Law, the Bernard Madoff of his day.
Law’s fellow Scots – who were more inclined to market freedoms than the English, let alone the French – had already heard Law’s plan for “establishing a bank ... which he seems to have imagined might issue paper to the amount of the whole value of all the lands in the country”. The parliament of Scotland, Smith noted, “did not think proper to adopt it”. [317]
One simple idea allows an over-trading folly to turn into a speculative disaster – whether it involves ocean commerce, land in Louisiana, stocks, bonds, tulip bulbs or home mortgages. The idea is that unlimited prosperity can be created by the unlimited expansion of credit.
Such wild flights of borrowing can be effected only with what Smith called “the Daedalian wings of paper money”. [321] To produce enough of this paper requires either a government or something the size of a government, which modern merchant banks have become. As Smith pointed out: “The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments.” [570]
The idea that The Wealth of Nations puts forth for creating prosperity is more complex. It involves all the baffling intricacies of human liberty. Smith proposed that everyone be free – free of bondage and of political, economic and regulatory oppression (Smith’s principle of “self-interest”), free in choice of employment (Smith’s principle of “division of labour”), and free to own and exchange the products of that labour (Smith’s principle of “free trade”). “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence,” Smith told a learned society in Edinburgh (with what degree of sarcasm we can imagine), “but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.”
How then would Adam Smith fix the present mess? Sorry, but it is fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done.
We could pump the banks full of our national treasure. But Smith said: “To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.” [440]
We could send in the experts to manage our bail-out. But Smith said: “I have never known much good done by those who affect to trade for the public good.” [456]
And we could nationalise our economies. But Smith said: “The state cannot be very great of which the sovereign has leisure to carry on the trade of a wine merchant or apothecary”. [818] Or chairman of General Motors.
* Bracketed numbers in the text refer to pages in ‘The Wealth of Nations’, Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith, Oxford University Press, 1976
The writer is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard and is the author, most recently, of On The Wealth of Nations, Books That Changed the World, published by Atlantic Books, 2007
How much is enough?
How much is enough?
Richard Rahn
Do you agree with President Obama, who has just limited the pay for executives in some, but not all, of the companies receiving government bailout money to $500,000 a year?
One could argue that $500,000 is too much, given that the president only makes $400,000 a year in a job with more responsibility and a larger budget than any other job in the world. Since there were plenty of would-be takers for that job, and some were arguably even qualified, why should we pay anyone more?
Many people who rely on the taxpayers, both in the United States and elsewhere, make far more than the president of the United States (see the accompanying table). The highest paid public employees in the United States for the most part are football coaches at universities. The argument made for these multimillion-dollar salaries is that a winning football team brings lots of revenue into the school and causes the alumni to give more.
But if it is proper for a football coach to be paid millions of dollars a year, why is it not proper for a corporate executive, who might bring in 100 or even a 1,000 times as much revenue and profit, to be paid millions? If the taxpayer-supported universities were not allowed to pay high salaries to their coaches, all the best coaches would undoubtedly flock to the private schools.
The president's executive order, setting a ceiling on salaries, was limited to only some companies, but not all, who will receive bailouts, but not ones that for the most part have already received bailouts. How is this fair? If the goal is to stop excess and increase fairness, should not lobbyists (both registered and unregistered) have their compensation limited? After all, their job is to convince politicians to spend more taxpayer dollars to benefit some particular company, union or nonprofit organization. Why should they be compensated with millions of indirect, but ultimately, taxpayer dollars, as was former Sen. Tom Daschle with his $5 million haul, because they know people who can dispense favors?
If companies that received bailouts in the form of government loans or ownership have to restrict pay for their executives, should not companies that are primarily government contractors also have pay restrictions? Why should an executive working for a private firm with a government contract receive more than an executive directly employed by the government doing the equivalent work? The answer is the private firm is usually much more efficient, with higher technical skills. But it is easy to see the slippery slope that government-mandated pay caps can lead to.
Take General Electric, one of the largest government contractors for decades. It also owns NBC, the news division of which (particularly its MSNBC channel) had been the most slavishly pro-Obama network. GE has also received more than a $100 billion bailout (guarantees for its financial services' division), and its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, has been named by President Obama to his Economic Recovery Advisory Board. I am willing to bet the rules on pay caps are so written they do not apply to Mr. Immelt and his MSNBC Obama cheerleaders, particularly Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann - who are paid many millions. Hmmm, anyone see conflict of interest in all of this?
Most of us believe some people are paid too much and others too little. In the accompanying table, the head of the European Central Bank, which has the responsibility for the euro, is paid a lot less than the head of the Bank of Italy (who would appear to have little to do since Italy stopped issuing its own currency and adopted the euro some time ago). Why is the prime minister of Singapore paid so much more than the prime ministers of large European countries and the U.S. president?
There are pay inequities in private business. But over the long run, companies that overpay or underpay make themselves less competitive, and the better-managed companies tend to win. Governments, being monopolies, are likelier to set compensation on the basis of political power rather than skill level or productivity. One might be outraged at the apparent excess compensation of some of those on Wall Street, but when government starts setting private sector salaries you can bet that, over time, the best and the brightest will leave for greener pastures in the United States or some other country.
Constitutional scholars like Judge Andrew Napolitano argue it is unconstitutional for the government to put caps on some private sector salaries. The problem is that once government stops being the referee of the economic game and decides to field players of its own or give some players advantages that others do not have, the whole system begins to break down. Those who are pushing for more government involvement with, and control over, the economy are ignoring two centuries of disastrous socialist experiments and 2,000 years of failed attempts to impose price and wage controls.
Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.
Geithner Can’t Find Gun, Let Alone Silver Bullet
Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) -- That’s it? That’s all Geithner had to offer?
It is amazing that this far into the financial crisis, we are still stumbling along, still so reluctant to tackle the problems facing the financial system and the economy.
Rather than offer the kind of comprehensive solution he had promised, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner yesterday served up a plan for banks and the financial system that was long on platitudes and short on specifics.
And that’s being kind. There were no specifics. There were only vague promises of programs and details to come.
Consider Geithner’s description of a rescue plan for the housing market. “We will announce the details of this plan in the next few weeks,” he said.
Then there is the question of how the government plans to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets and how it would value these holdings. Geithner proposed a public-private partnership for this purpose.
And the specifics? “We are not going to put out details until we have the right structure,” Geithner said.
If that’s the case, it’s not clear why Geithner bothered to speak yesterday. If his goal was to calm markets, it didn’t work, especially since investors were hoping that he would simply agree to take all the bad assets from banks and reflate the financial system in one fell swoop.
And what of the herd of ailing banks that pose systemic risks to the global financial system? Rather than euthanize those that can’t survive, Geithner plans to continue coddling them.
Budding Boondoggle
That’s not the worst of it. As Geithner said, his plan is running “alongside” the economic stimulus plan being hammered out in Congress. Tripping over each other would be a more apt description.
The bond markets have seen the stimulus plan for the boondoggle it is, anticipating that it will lead to inflation and non-stop government debt issuance. That fear has pushed the yield on the 10-year Treasury note toward 3 percent, compared with 2.37 percent the day Barack Obama was sworn in as president and 2.05 percent on Dec. 30.
This, in turn, put the brakes on the dramatic fall in mortgage rates that started late last year. The 30-year-mortgage rate, as measured by Fannie Mae, has now risen to 5.25 percent after falling to a low of 4.96 percent the week of Jan. 16.
Rising mortgage rates will slow refinancing, which had picked up in December and January. More importantly, rising rates might chill what many hoped would be a more robust spring selling season for existing homes.
Glimmer of Hope
Sales of existing homes had risen 6.5 percent in December. That offered a glimmer of hope that the housing market would start to clear out inventory and begin to see a slowing in the pace of home-price declines.
Enabling homeowners to sell or refinance is a better way to shore up borrowers and stem the rising tide of foreclosures. Sure, this represents a subsidy to the housing markets, but so does mortgage forgiveness and the purchase of bad assets from banks at below-market rates.
If the markets aren’t induced to refinance mortgage debt, the government will have to. And that brings us back to Geithner’s undefined plan for a private-public partnership to buy toxic bank assets.
This might have promise. Investors have balked at purchasing many hard-hit assets because they can’t get longer-term financing to boost returns. Lacking that, they demand lower prices, and banks refuse to sell.
Stealth Recapitalization
If Geithner’s plan provides such long-term financing to investors, trading may pick up in some markets.
Still, the lack of details means investors don’t know if that is the goal, or if this is simply an attempt to use private investors as a vehicle for government-subsidized purchases of bad assets from banks.
In other words, it could still turn out to be a taxpayer- funded stealth recapitalization reminiscent of the first Troubled Asset Relief Program proposed last fall by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
Another worry: Geithner said the government would undertake special examinations of banks to determine if they have sufficient capital to survive the crisis.
This is new? Investors thought that is what bank regulators do all the time. With this proposal, Geithner only served to confirm investor concerns that no one is minding the store.
No worries, though. Geithner isn’t proposing that the government seize banks that don’t measure up to these examinations. He plans to shovel more money their way, bailing out common stockholders, management and the directors.
Small wonder then that Geithner received such a hostile reaction. This is the sort of float-all-boats thinking that led to Congress’s misguided stimulus package. It represents a false hope that there is still a way for the country to muddle through this crisis without having to accept a new norm in terms of asset prices, lifestyles and expectations.
That’s not likely to happen. And it’s why the Obama administration’s first, grand effort to fix the nation’s economic ills probably won’t be its last.
Is Geithner Ready for Prime Time?
Is Geithner Ready for Prime Time?
By Lawrence KudlowThe day after President Obama's big news conference, and on the day Treasury-man Tim Geithner unveiled his Bank Bailout Nation TARP III Plan, stock markets plunged in a vote of no-confidence, with the Dow dropping nearly 400 points.
Obama got the ball rolling by painting a dismal picture of the U.S. economy, saying recovery won't arrive until 2010 at the earliest. He then said only big-government spending can jolt our economy back to life. He also bitterly attacked supply-siders and the Bush tax cuts, especially "tax cuts that are targeted to the wealthiest few Americans." He added that these strategies have "only helped lead us to the crisis we face right now."
You can say a lot of things about President George W. Bush's big-government mistakes. But blaming the Bush tax cuts for the credit-crunched downturn is utter nonsense. It's ideological politics at its worst. (It's worth noting that while Obama was trashing supply-siders on Monday night, Scott Rasmussen's latest poll showed 62 percent of U.S. voters wanting the stimulus plan to include more tax cuts and less government spending.)
Later in the news conference, Obama acknowledged how businesses that suddenly couldn't get credit pulled back on their investment and laid off workers -- workers who then cut back on their spending. That -- along with the Fed's stop-and-go monetary policy and a huge oil shock -- is much closer to the true cause of this recession.
This is all most strange. Obama's attack on supply-side economics would rule out the successful Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts that spurred growth in the 1960s and the Reagan tax cuts that ignited growth in the 1980s. Even Bill Clinton cut the capital-gains tax. And George W. Bush's tax cuts helped generate a six-year economic expansion before the oil shock and credit crunch took hold.
On Tuesday morning, stocks opened down about 75 points in the wake of Obama's pessimism. But stocks really started to tumble when Tim Geithner stepped to the microphone. He totally bombed in his debut.
Geithner had no real plan to deal with the problem of unmarketable toxic assets on bank balance sheets. He offered no new architectural structure, no good way to remove the toxic assets, no clear pricing or funding proposals, and no meat on the bones.
According to Merriam-Webster, a "plan" is "a detailed formulation of a program of action; a method for achieving an end." But Mr. Geithner had none of this. As a result, stocks plunged about 250 points. Prominent investment strategist Ed Yardeni described Geithner as an empty suit with an empty plan.
A week earlier, ace CNBC reporter Charlie Gasparino scooped the speech by chronicling how Wall Streeters advising the Obama administration talked Geithner out of a government-backed "bad bank" that would somehow buy toxic assets to be either worked out profitably or resold to private investors. These were the same "greedy" executives that Obama and Geithner had been trashing. So now Geithner talks vaguely about some sort of public/private investment fund that will use government capital and provide financing for private investors, who are then supposed to buy toxic assets.
Nobody on Wall Street is buying it right now. Geithner said the fund might cost $1 trillion, but there's no "there" there. No wonder bank stocks dropped 12 percent on Tuesday.
By the way, Geithner did not offer any regulatory accounting relief, such as putting an end to the disastrous mark-to-market rule that has wrecked bank capital and is one of the root causes of the whole financial problem.
Geithner did talk about an expansion of the Fed's Term Asset-Backed Lending Facility, or TALF, to help finance consumer-loan securitization packages that provide upwards of 40 percent of all consumer and small-business lending. This might work, but again there were no details. And the Fed has yet to start its TALF operation.
Finally, Geithner talked about a comprehensive $50 billion housing-and-mortgage modification plan. But once again, no details -- especially on the controversial issue of having bankruptcy judges determine home-loan interest rates and lending totals without bank recourse to contractual obligations.
One positive comes from a New York Times story claiming that Geithner beat back Obama's political advisers who want to nationalize big banks, fire senior bank executives, and establish heavy government controls over bank operations. But at the end of the day the absence of any clarity or pragmatic details from Mr. Geithner left stock markets sadder and poorer for the effort.
Geithner would have been better off not giving a speech until he could put real meat on the bones. What he pulled Tuesday was a classic rookie move that will further erode the public's trust in his capabilities. Following the controversy over his late payment of taxes, this bank-plan blunder could be another nail in his coffin. Apparently, Tim Geithner is not yet ready for prime time.
Obama's Empty Pragmatism
Obama's Empty Pragmatism
By Michael GersonWASHINGTON -- If Barack Obama's presidential campaign was smooth and deep like the rivers, his first few weeks in Washington have been turbulent and shallow like the rapids. It began with the quick end of the Richardson nomination, revealing a vetting process with the thoroughness of a subprime loan application. Then came an inaugural address so flat that both supporters and detractors wondered if the flatness was intentional -- a subtle game of strategic mediocrity. Then the broad violation of an overbroad lobbying ban, which made no distinction between lobbying for the Iranian regime and lobbying against teenage smoking. Then a spate of IRS troubles, leaving the impression of an administration more interested in raising taxes than paying them.
These stumbles have had an almost theological effect among Republicans: The doctrine of Obama's political infallibility has been challenged. But the administration's setbacks -- particularly those on personnel -- are temporary, and easily reversed by a series of legislative victories that have already begun.
The initial period of the Obama administration, however, has provided hints of a long-term problem -- not one of incompetence, but of emptiness.
Obama partisans would doubtlessly call this "pragmatism." His inaugural address included one of the most prominent defenses of that political philosophy in American history. "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them," he informed Americans of old-fashioned ideological belief, "that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works. ... "
This approach has earned Obama praise for his prudence, independent thinking, epistemological modesty, empiricism, curiosity, results orientation, lack of dogmatism, distaste for extremism, willingness to compromise and insistence on nuance. He has been compared to William James and John Dewey, the heroes of American pragmatism.
But that creed has now been tested in two areas. First, the new president deferred almost entirely to the Democratic congressional leadership on the initial shape of the stimulus package -- which, in turn, was shaped by pent-up Democratic spending appetites instead of an explainable economic theory. Senate modifications made the legislation marginally more responsible. But Obama's pragmatism, in this case, was a void of creativity, filled by the most aggressively ideological branch of government. And this managed to revive Republican ideological objections to federal overreach. In the new age of pragmatism, all the ideologues seem to be encouraged.
The second test of Obama's pragmatism has been education. During his campaign for president, Obama's post-partisan appeal was most credible -- to me and to others -- on education reform. He supported test-based accountability and merit pay for teachers -- significant departures from the education union agenda.
But education spending in the stimulus -- about $140 billion in the House and $80 billion in the Senate -- has little or no emphasis on teacher quality in high-minority schools, little or no emphasis on strengthening charter schools, little or no emphasis on improved assessment, little or no emphasis on teaching the basics of reading. With shrinking state and local education budgets, an increase in federal spending may be justified. But the administration's approach abandons the most basic principle of school improvement: Reform, and then resources.
The philosophic pragmatism of John Dewey involved, in his words, "variability, initiative, innovation, departure from routine, experimentation." On education, the Obama administration has displayed none these qualities. Instead, it has returned to an older kind of pragmatism -- the political pragmatism of paying off one's political supporters. The problem with this approach is not merely its cost to the Treasury but its cost to children. Schools have proved for decades that there is little correlation between their consumption of resources and their training of children in the basics of reading and math. When these outcomes are not required and measured, they should not be expected.
The educational betrayal of disadvantaged children is the tragedy that causes no scandal. Most Democrats in Congress seem content to represent education unions. Most Republicans oppose federal standards as a matter of ideology. Governors, both Democrat and Republican, are only too happy to take federal money without accountability. If a president does not speak for struggling children in failing schools, they will be ignored. As they are being ignored.
It is still early in the Obama era. But it is already evident that pragmatism without a guiding vision or a fighting faith can become little more than the service of insistent political interests.
Obama Stimulates Fear, Doom & Gloom
Obama Stimulates Fear, Doom & Gloom
By Mark DavisI can't speak for everyone, but the honeymoon ended for me the day President Barack Obama handed terrorists a victory with his reckless plan to close Guantánamo Bay and his foolish public promise of friendlier interrogations.
Not one month earlier, I sat in the Oval Office speaking to a president whose days began and ended with one question: Have I done all I can to keep America safe today?
God only knows what complex checklist fills the mind of our new president, but it certainly does not involve maintaining the policies that have fended off repeats of 9/11.
Nor does it involve letting our suffering economy recover the way it always has, by relying on the engine of free markets.
Obama, known for his unflappable cool on the campaign trail, now comes to us with doom saying that makes Jimmy Carter look like Richard Simmons.
Carter merely saddled us with the stigma of "malaise," acknowledging the wrecked economy beneath him by giving voice, not solutions, to a nation's discomfort. Even this worst of presidents during my lifetime (so far) did not try to pull off this kind of economic hijacking.
When Ronald Reagan inherited an economy far worse than today's, his first instinct was to prop up the American spirit by reminding us that American talents and ingenuity would get us out of that mess.
And they did. Reagan did not, in fact, "create" 20 million jobs, he merely tilled the economic landscape with policies designed to make job creation favorable.
Today, we hear shameful fear mongering from an administration that can no longer hide its lust to open the floodgates filled with our money, so they can buy off reliable Democrat constituencies
"Doing nothing is not an option," Obama is fond of saying. Actually, those of us who still believe in the American workforce and a robust private sector do indeed want to do something.
The running narrative that only a trillion-dollar-plus stimulus package can fend off near-term disaster apparently did not inject sufficient fear into the masses. The president, long used to crowds falling like plums at his feet, thus needed to ramp things up to prod skeptics who have failed to defer to his redistributionist instincts.
Invoking a "crisis" that "we may not be able to reverse," Obama last week sought to alarm the numbed millions whose attention span goes no broader than "economy's bad, government's gotta do something."
This stunningly craven scam continued in his Monday night news conference. "Ideological blockage" is the dismissive insult he reserved for Republicans who are trying to prevent the digging of a trillion-dollar hole our kids and grandkids will have to dig out of. Those would be the Republicans who reflect the skepticism seen in majorities of Americans polled on this pig in a poke.
So what's it going to be? Are we going to allow this suddenly rattled and jumpy president to bankrupt our children and our children's children so he and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank can say they did something?
They're doing something, all right. In an economic mess that featured mortgages at its root, they are mortgaging the fates of future generations of Americans so they can engage in the backslapping that always accompanies the moments when self-satisfied politicians know they have put one over on us.
Let the denizens who have brought us to this ledge smile widely now, because there will be little to smile about when the bill comes due, a prospect made even sadder by the fact that the economy would have come around anyway.
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