Ignore That Bullet Headed Straight For Your Face

"Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again, let us sing a song of cheer again, happy days are here again." While the Joad family packs up the old Ford truck and heads back to Oklahoma to escape the depression in Lotus Land, our President is telling us that the worst of our economic woes have gone with the wind.

I stopped believing in the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny a few months back, so I'm not likely to take the word of the Pied Piper of Progressive Pap either. The unemployment numbers leveled for the first time since the big crash, so President Obama says we should stop worrying and get on with Cap and Tax and nationalized health care. Somehow, by some mystical formula known only to Harvard Law grads, destroying free enterprise and hocking ourselves to the hilt for Cuban-style medical care will cause those unemployment numbers to drop even more.

Obama is attempting to take a single piece of semi-good news and turn it into full economic recovery justifying spending ourselves into oblivion. Well, even this news is not all that great, but we'll be grateful for small blessings. The unemployment rate settled at "only" 9.4 percent in July, so our peerless leader points to that as being very meaningful. Never mind that in June, he had predicted that the unemployment rate would level out at about 8% despite the fact that it was already pushing 9% when he made the prediction. As the Democrats are so fond of saying of us trogolodytes: "He just doesn't get it."

Despite all the Democratic predictions of doom before the November elections if Obama was not elected, we have not yet sunk into the Great Depression, Part II. Although it is clearly the worst recession since World War II, only massive action creating government programs to "solve" the economic misery can turn this into another Great Depression in the style of FDR and the New Deal. Well, that and the raising of protective tariffs to protect the jobs of non-competitive American businesses and labor. Oh, and raising taxes on everybody and everything to pay for these programs. You know, this may actually be more complicated than our economic genius in the White House imagines.

"Only" 247,000 jobs were lost in July as compared to the historical loss of 443,000 in June. So Obama declares: "We've begun to put the brakes on this recession and . . . the worst may be behind us." Who is this "we?" Mr. President. It's more likely that we simply are starting to run out of jobs to run out of, thank you very much.

Now that the cancer is in temporary remission, the President says "We must lay a new foundation for future growth and prosperity and a key pillar of a new foundation is health insurance reform." Yep, that'll do it. Eliminate competition and the profit-motive and put people into year-long lines to get a band-aid at the doctor's office. That's a sure remedy. It's always a good idea when you've run out of money to add 40 million people to the tax-sucking rolls to cover people who have chosen not to buy private insurance even though they could well afford to, illegal aliens, people who have temporarily lost their insurance because of the downturn in jobs and people who have just reached the age to become insured since they were too young previously to have their own insurance. And of course, force government health care on people who simply choose, however foolishly, not to have any medical insurance at all.

And someone also needs to tell the President that nationalized medical care is not insurance. It's a government program. His own stated goal (despite his ridiculous denials) is to get everyone under the national government umbrella, just like England and Cuba. And once private enterprise and profit are eliminated from the formula, the next step is to "cut costs" by reducing medical care and making decisions about who is or is not an appropriate candidate for government generosity. Government "ethical scientists" such as John Holdren, proponent of forced abortions, sterilization and withholding treatment from the terminally ill, will quickly rise to the top of the health care economic boom.

Obama's publicly-stated goal is to expand coverage to millions of "Americans," while reducing "exploding" costs. Sounds good. Who wouldn't want that? But how, exactly, do you propose to do that, Mr. President? The Pied Piper of Foggy Bottom couldn't even sell his own party on the 1000+ page "plan" that practically nobody in Congress had read. And for those few who did read it, the "plan" was both incoherent and incomprehensible. But at least everybody agreed on one thing, this "cost-saving" bill was going to cost Americans well over a trillion dollars.

So who is standing in the way of taxing-and-spending our way back into the bright sunlight of national wealth? Well, Obama says it's everybody who doesn't agree with the plan he doesn't understand himself, and can't explain. "We were close to finalizing real health insurance reform [read: insurance elimination and government expansion] but the best chance of reform we have ever had is slipping away" because obstructionists from Congress down to the grassroots don't believe a word this charlatan is saying.

Obama has at least one enthusiastic public supporter--Hillary Clinton, who almost singlehandedly brought down the Democrats' nearly seventy year lock on Congress back in 1994 with Hillarycare. Apparently, Hillary is like her boss in believing that the American people have gotten considerably stupider and more desperate in fifteen years. There are strong signs that both of them are wrong. Hillary's summation of the current situation was laid out on CNN today. In the interview, Hillary says: "I actually agree that at the end of the day, with all of this negotiation and back and forth, you know, we're going to come up with something and my hope is that it's going to be meaningful enough to make a a difference on the cost side." Like Obama, she is unable to explain quite how that's going to happen.

Senator Mitch McConnell has summed up the administration's claim that this is a bipartisan effort to create a national health care plan: "The only thing bipartisan, so far, is the opposition." It is clear that the American public is indeed fed up with rising medical care costs and access to decent insurance, and reform is truly in the air. But Obama and the Democrats have cynically taken a genuine concern, with genuine solutions available, and turned it into a recipe for federal government control of another major facet of our daily lives. Everyone knows the federal government is generous in spending money, zealous in collecting taxes, and notoriously incompetent at producing anything much worthwhile.

And to add cynicism to cynicism, Obama declares the slowdown in unemployment numbers to be the reason to impose more government, more pointless expenditures and now, by the admission of several of his own economic advisers, more taxes. Only a disciple of the failed socialist plans of the past could possibly believe anything that foolish.

I prefer to listen to cooler and more logical voices, such as Robert F. McDonnell who is running for Governor of Virginia. McDonnel's view is that "the new Labor Department report was yet another reminder that families and small businesses are struggling as unemployment remains high." When you're struggling to make ends meet, and the cash cow has gone dry, the last thing you do until things get better is to spend money for hugely expensive and completely untested products with no evidence of potential success.