Pathological Liar Obama Now ‘Brazenly Lying’ About His Own Lies (Obama KNEW ObamaCare Would ‘Transition’ Millions And Lied)

Please read this:

November 18, 2013 12:00 AM
Obama’s ‘5 Percent’ Con Job
It’s a 100 percent lie, according to the White House’s own figures.
By  Andrew C. McCarthy

Last Thursday, President Obama purported to undo the “Affordable” Care Act (ACA) mandates that he and congressional Democrats quite intentionally designed to force Americans off their health-insurance policies . . . notwithstanding the president’s promise, repeated over and over again since 2009, that Americans would be able to keep their health-insurance policies. In my weekend column, I argued that Obama’s latest unilateral diktat is lawless and transparently political. With each passing day, however, what becomes more breathtaking is the depth of systematic, calculated lying that went into the extensive — the criminal — Obamacare fraud.

Let’s quickly recap the lawlessness and cynical politics behind Thursday’s pathetic press conference. Obama, who poses as a constitutional-law expert, knows full well that a president has no legal authority to waive statutory mandates. Even if he had such power, moreover, he knows that there is no practical possibility of undoing — within the next few weeks, as the ACA would require — the new arrangements that insurance companies and state regulators spent the last three years structuring to comply with Obamacare mandates. In sum, Obama is well aware that his proposed “fix” is frivolous. His hope is that the country overwhelmingly consists of dolts who are too uninformed to realize that this is the case, and who, with a little help from his media courtiers, can be convinced to blame the insurance companies, rather than the president, for the fact that millions of Americans are losing their coverage under his “reform.”

Now, having covered Thursday’s con job, let’s get back to the overarching Obamacare scheme perpetrated by the president for more than four years — a fraud that, I contend, the Justice Department would not hesitate to prosecute had it been committed by a private-sector executive. I’ve related the standards for criminal and civil enforcement that would militate in favor of prosecution in a case involving the dimension of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty we find here. In addition, NRO’s Andrew Stiles had a superb report on Friday showing the sundry ways the administration’s dysfunctional Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, runs afoul of various consumer-protection laws. Again, when such infractions are committed by private businesses, the government punishes them quite severely.

We now discover even more evidence of how brazen Obama’s lies have been.

The president claims he truly believed that people would be able to keep plans they liked because Obamacare provides for those plans to be “grandfathered” — exempted from termination. Thus, he insists, he was acting in good faith when he made the promises that people could keep those plans, though he concedes the promises “ended up being inaccurate.”

This is yet another calculated deception, a willful continuation of the fraudulent scheme. The president well knew that, in implementing the “grandfathering” provision, his administration wrote regulations so narrow that tens of millions of existing plans would be eliminated. Congressional Democrats knew this, too: When Republicans endeavored in 2010 to enact legislation that would have broadened the regulation into a meaningful safe harbor, Democrats closed ranks and voted down the proposal – including Democrats such as Senator Mary Landrieu, who now pretends to be a crusader in the cause of letting Americans keep their insurance.

Unable to deny that millions of Americans have lost the coverage he vowed they could keep, Obama and other Democrats are now peddling what we might call the “5 percent” con job. The president asserts that these victims, whom he feels so terribly about, nevertheless constitute a tiny, insignificant minority in the greater scheme of things (“scheme” is used advisedly). They are limited, he maintains, to consumers in the individual health-insurance market, as opposed to the vastly greater number of Americans who get insurance through their employers. According to Obama, these individual-market consumers whose policies are being canceled make up only 5 percent of all health-insurance consumers.

Even this 5 percent figure is a deception. As Avik Roy points out, the individual market actually accounts for 8 percent of health-insurance consumers. Obama can’t help himself: He even minimizes his minimizations. So, if Obama were telling the truth in rationalizing that his broken promises affect only consumers in the individual-insurance market, we’d still be talking about up to 25 million Americans. While the president shrugs these victims off, 25 million exceeds the number of Americans who do not have health insurance because of poverty or preexisting conditions (as opposed to those who could, but choose not to, purchase insurance). Of course, far from cavalierly shrugging off that smaller number of people, Obama and Democrats used them to justify nationalizing a sixth of the U.S. economy.

But that’s not the half of it. Obama’s claim that unwelcome cancellations are confined to the individual-insurance market is another brazen lie. In the weekend column, I link to the excellent work of Powerline’s John Hinderaker, who has demonstrated that, for over three years, the Obama administration’s internal estimates have shown that most Americans who are covered by “employer plans” will also lose their coverage under Obamacare. Mind you, 156 million Americans get health coverage through their jobs.

John cites the Federal Register, dated June 17, 2010, beginning at page 34,552 (Vol. 75, No. 116). It includes a chart that outlines the Obama administration’s projections. The chart indicates that somewhere between 39 and 69 percent of employer plans would lose their “grandfather” protection by 2013. In fact, for small-business employers, the high-end estimate is a staggering 80 percent (and even on the low end, it’s just a shade under half — 49 percent).

That is to say: During all these years, while Obama was repeatedly assuring Americans, “If you like your health-insurance plan, you can keep your health-insurance plan,” he actually expected as many as seven out of every ten Americans covered by employer plans to lose their coverage. For small business, he expected at least one out of every two Americans, or as many as four out of every five, to lose their coverage.

Avik’s eagle eye also catches that, even as Obama was spinning on Thursday about how his broken promise affects only the teeny-weeny individual-insurance market, his administration was telling a much different story to state insurance commissioners. In a letter about Obama’s proposed “fix,” the head of the relevant consumer-information office referred to “all individuals and small businesses that received a cancellation or termination notice with respect to coverage” (emphasis added). This, Avik observes, “contradicts assertions from the administration that only people in the individual market — people who shop for coverage on their own — are affected by the wave of Obamacare-related cancellations.”

It gets worse. My friends at the American Freedom Law Center (on whose advisory board I sit) are representing Priests for Life, a group aggrieved by Obamacare’s denial of religious liberty — specifically, the ACA’s mandate that believers, despite their faith-based objections, provide their employees with coverage for the use of abortifacients and contraceptives. On October 17, the Obama Department of Health and Human Services, represented by the Obama Justice Department, submitted a brief to the federal district court in Washington, opposing Priests for Life’s summary judgment motion. On page 27 of its brief, the Justice Department makes the following remarkable assertion:

The [ACA’s] grandfathering provision’s incremental transition does not undermine the government’s interests in a significant way. [Citing, among other sources, the Federal Register.] Even under the grandfathering provision, it is projected that more group health plans will transition to the requirements under the regulations as time goes on. Defendants have estimated that a majority of group health plans will have lost their grandfather status by the end of 2013.

HHS and the Justice Department cite the same section of the Federal Register referred to by John Hinderaker, as well as an annual survey on “Employer Health Benefits” compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2012.

So, while the president has been telling us that, under the vaunted grandfathering provision, all Americans who like their health-insurance plans will be able to keep them, “period,” his administration has been representing in federal court that most health plans would lose their “grandfather status” by the end of this year. Not just the “5 percent” of individual-market consumers, but close to all consumers — including well over 100 million American workers who get coverage through their jobs — have been expected by the president swiftly to “transition to the requirements under the [Obamacare] regulations.” That is, their health-insurance plans would be eliminated. They would be forced into Obamacare-compliant plans, with all the prohibitive price hikes and coercive mandates that “transition” portends.

Obamacare is a massive fraudulent scheme. A criminal investigation should be opened. Obviously, the Obama Justice Department will not do that, but the House of Representatives should commence hearings into the offenses that have been committed in the president’s deception of the American people.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

Last week I was riding my exercise bike when I almost fell off of it laughing.  Bill O’Reilly and liberal contributor Kirsten Powers were in agreement that Obama didn’t “lie” when he made his now-infamous “if you like your health plan you can keep it.  Period” promises.  And the conservative was sputtering mad, saying, “I can’t believe you are giving [Obama] a pass.”

Kirsten Powers is a liberal, but there are moments when she opens her eyes just a little bit.  She understood the horns of the dilemma she was embracing, and stated it for the record to O’Reilly viewers.  “Giving him a pass?  We’re saying he’s incompetent.  How is that giving him a pass?”

Those are your only two options here: either Obama has no business being president, is in so far over his head it is beyond unreal, and has no idea how to run a staff or accomplish anything relating to running a government.  Or he is a demon-possessed liar.

Actually, there is a third alternative: Obama is both incompetent AND a demon possessed liar.

In any event, O’Reilly and Powers – in giving Obama the benefit of the doubt regarding his honesty and integrity – now stand proven wrong.  Yes, I agree with them that Obama is very clearly incompetent.  But the man lied through his teeth, and there isn’t enough incompetence in the world to excuse him from what he clearly had to know as not only a lawyer, not only the onetime editor of the Harvard Law Review, but “a constitutional professor” as well.

This is what Obama’s Department of Justice was arguing:

The [ACA’s] grandfathering provision’s incremental transition does not undermine the government’s interests in a significant way.  Even under the grandfathering provision, it is projected that more group health plans will transition to the requirements under the regulations as time goes on. Defendants have estimated that a majority of group health plans will have lost their grandfather status by the end of 2013.

“Group health plans” include employer-based coverage plans.  This DOJ brief is a legal document; if it is false Eric Holder needs to go to prison for that CRIME.  And Obama’s DOJ was filing this brief IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO OBAMA GOING OUT AND MISREPRESENTING THE OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE ADMINISTRATION [LYING].

The Department of Justice, in a legal court case (with Kathleen Sabelius’ Department of Health and Human Services as the defendant), officially projected that “A MAJORITY” of employer-based health plans will be “transitioned,” i.e., will be cancelled or substantially altered such that TENS OF MILLIONS OF AMERICANS WILL BE FORCED INTO OBAMACARE.

We can go back to 2010 when Republican Senator Enzi pointed this fact out and tried to pass a bill through Harry Reid’s Democrat Senate protecting Americans from this health care holocaust.  AND EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT VOTED TO CANCEL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE’S HEALTH CARE PLANS TO FORCE THEM INTO OBAMACARE.  PERIOD.

Consider the quote the fourth paragraph up again.  This is what Andrew McCarthy said in a discussion with Megyn Kelly last night:

KELLY: And so the administration in this case goes in and tells the court. I mean, tell us, take the legalese out of it. And tell us, that full screen we had on the board up there, what does it actually say?

MCCARTHY: What they are basically saying  is that we have this grandfather provision — they don’t say in there, by the way, that’s what the president is relying on to say if you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan, period. We have this grandfather provision, but it’s fading away. In fact, by the end of 2013, we anticipate that most who were covered by the grandfather provision will lose their coverage.

KELLY: And they’re not just — the shocking thing about this is, they’re not just saying, and it’s only those on the individual market judge. I mean, this is in writing saying, it is most group health plans.

MCCARTHY: Megyn, that only is not true, they cite to a Kaiser study which is about employer health plans. I mean, the whole thing is about employer health plans. They cite to page in the federal register which also is about employer health plans and basically estimates that about seven of 10 people on the high end estimate who have employer health plans, these are the people who get their coverage at work are going to lose that coverage.

KELLY: Yes. We know about that piece in the federal register, we talked about that a while back. Because it was shocking when we first saw it about the estimates from the administration on how many people are going to lose their policies, or have them changed significantly under ObamaCare.  But what we have now is the Department of Justice running into court and touting it. Today, present day. Because that regulation was 2010 right after ObamaCare was passed. This is present day, them going into court and saying, trust this judge. The majority of people who have group health plans are going to be canceled.

MCCARTHY: That’s exactly right.

KELLY: What does that mean? What does canceled mean in the group health care context. It doesn’t necessarily mean the same for people who have employer-based insurance as it does for those in the individual market.

MCCARTHY: Yes, the word they used is transition. They don’t say cancel.  They do say, lose your coverage which means that you won’t have the same coverage that you have now.

KELLY: Like, we’re not breaking up. We are just transitioning into new relationships that have nothing else to do with one another.

So, yes, a good 100 million American families will lose their employer-based health coverage under ObamaCare.  And Obama knows it.  And his Department of Justice knows it.  And his Department of Health and Human Services knows it.  There are over 150 million Americans who get their coverage from their employers – and the Obama administrating was touting the fact that 70% of them would lose their plans and be forced to “transition” into ObamaCare.

The sheer, galling, rabid dishonesty of Barack Hussein Obama and all the thugs who work for him is beyond stunning.

Barack Obama has lied America into a state of complete economic collapse.  He has already lied America into the collapse of the American health care system that, in spite of liberals idiotic railings, provided the very best on planet earth such that when world leaders needed the best health care in the world, THEY CAME TO AMERICA.

As we speak, the five million Americans that Obama has written off and couldn’t give less of a damn about are in a true crisis: they have until December 15 to purchase health care plans because they were dumped due to ObamaCare regulations.  And the ObamaCare website doesn’t work, which means they can’t buy a plan even at the higher premiums and higher deductibles that ObamaCare is offering (in spite of another lie from Obama to make his plans more “affordable”).  There are people with life-threatening health issues who could literally die.  That is PRECISELY the case facing Edie Littlefield Sundby.

Thirty-six times Obama said something very similar to this on camera in front of millions of Americans:

“No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”

Barack Obama has refused to hold ANYBODY accountable for ANYTHING, dating back to the Fast and Furious scandal where a US Border Patrol officer was gunned down and murdered by a Mexican drug cartel with guns that Barack Obama and Eric Holder handed to them.  Obama hasn’t held ANYBODY accountable for the fact that the first US ambassador since the despicable Carter years (1979) was murdered after BEGGING Obama for more protection in Benghazi, Libya.  We now know that Obama himself, his Secretary to the United Nations and his Secretary of State all directly lied when they claimed that the preplanned and coordinated terrorist attack was merely the haphazard result of a Youtube video.  And we KNOW that video was never part of the reason for that attack, just as we know that the Obama regime knew that at the time.  Obama hasn’t held ANYBODY accountable for the fact that his very own IRS politically attacked Obama opponents for “anti-Obama rhetoric.”  We know that Obama has refused to hold ANYBODY accountable for the incredible police-state abuses of the National Security Agency as they’ve done whatever the hell they want to spy on whoever the hell they want whether the Constitution bans it or not.  And he hasn’t held ANYBODY accountable for the abject nightmare of his “signature legislative achievement.”

We need to hold OBAMA accountable.  Or don’t you DARE ever get upset when a president lies to the people again.  This is a man who is clearly guilty of committing felony fraud by inducement – and he committed against more human beings than any leader who ever lived in all of human history.

Now we know why Obama abrogated the ObamaCare law and gave employers until AFTER the election to be held accountable to ObamaCare regulations.  Because the same Obama who knew damn well that millions of Americans would have their individual health care plans forcibly cancelled, he also knew that 100 million employees would have their health care cancelled if his abomination of health care took effect before the 2014 election.

Update, 11/22/2013:

There is absolutely ZERO question that Barack Obama KNEW that millions of Americans were going to have their health care cancelled due to ObamaCare.  This from the “Health Care Summit” back in February 25, 2010:

REPRESENTATIVE CANTOR: Well, actually, Mr. President, this is the Senate bill along with the 11-page proposal that you put up online that really I think is the basis for the discussion here.

But I do want to go back to your suggestion as to why we’re here. And you suggested that maybe we are here to find some points of agreement to bridge the gap in our differences. And I do like to go back to basics. We’re here because we Republicans care about health care just as the Democrats in this room. And when the Speaker cites her letters from the folks in Michigan and the Leader talks about the letters he has received, Mr. Andrews, his — all of us share the concerns when people are allegedly wronged in our health care system. I mean, I think that is sort of a given.

We don’t care for this bill. I think you know that. The American people don’t care for the bill. I think that we’ve demonstrated in polling that they don’t. But there is a reason why we all voted no. And it does have to do with the philosophical difference that you point out. It does have to do with our fear that if you say that Washington can be the one to define essential health benefits, there may be a problem with that. And that’s the language that’s in the Section 1302 of this bill, that it says that the Secretary shall define for people what essential health benefits are.

But let’s — in the spirit of trying to come together, let’s try and say, maybe if — if we assume that Washington could do that, could really take the place of every American and decide what is most essential, what would be the consequences? And that’s also where we have a big difference in this bill and what would happen.

First of all, the cost, and Jon Kyl laid out the tremendous cost in the nearly trillion dollars of this bill. And I don’t quite know, because CBO said it couldn’t assess how much your additions would cost to it, but we do know that there are plenty of taxes on income. Now, you suggest investment income should be taxed. We have additional taxes on medical devices and the rest. What is a consequence of that? We know there are consequences that small businesses will feel because of the impact on job creation.

But also, Mr. President, when we were here abut a year ago across the street, you started the health care summit by saying one of the promises you want to make is that people ought to be able to keep the health insurance that they have. Because as we also know, most people in this country do have insurance and an overwhelming majority of people do like that coverage; it’s just too expensive.

Well, the CBO sent a letter — I think it was to Leader Reid — about the Senate bill. And in that letter, it suggested that between 8 million and 9 million people may very well lose the coverage that they have because of this, because of the construct of this bill. That’s our concern. And so, as we are in — as we are in the market — in the section of this discussion about health insurance reform, I note, Mr. President, that you have suggested strengthening oversight of insurance premium increases. Because we want to make sure that there aren’t excessive insurance premium increases that take place.

The problem is when you start to mandate all of the essential benefits, there are going to be some insurance premium increases. None of us really want to see them. But if you stop them, who is going to pay for it? Well, then we get back to the fact that businesses won’t be able to pay for it and people are going to lose their coverage.

So I guess my question to you is, in the construct of this bill, if we want to find agreement, we really do need to set this aside. And we really do need to say, okay, the fundamental structure is something we can’t agree on, but there are certainly plenty of areas of agreement. And because I don’t think that you can answer the question in the positive to say that people will be able to maintain their coverage, people will be able to see the doctors they want in the kind of bill that you’re proposing.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me — since you asked me a question, let me respond. The 8 to 9 million people that you refer to that might have to change their coverage — keep in mind out of the 300 million Americans that we’re talking about — would be folks who the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, estimates would find the deal in the exchange better. It would be a better deal. So, yes, they would change coverage, because they’ve got more choice and competition. So let’s just be clear about that, point number one.

When Obama came out and said he had no idea that 5 million people AND COUNTING would lose their health insurance because of the way his damn law was written, he is nothing but a stone cold LIAR without shame, without decency, without virtue and without integrity.

Here is the video [accessed here] of Barack Obama back in February 25, 2010 when he openly admitted what he denies right now:

Also back in 2010, Obama regime officials KNEW that nearly 100 million Americans (93 million was their number) would lose their health insurance due to ObamaCare and be forced to come crawling to Obama for their health insurance.  So he knew that his “8 to 9 million” “out of the 300 million Americans that we’re talking about” was a lie, too.

It is not enough to say that Barack Hussein Obama is a dishonest man.  He is a pathologically, rabidly dishonest man.

There is absolutely no question that Barack Obama knew that when he said, “if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.  Period,” he was lying through his teeth.  Period.

Mitt Romeny Racks Up 47,000 Donations Totalling Over $4.6 Million In 24 Hours After ObamaCare Decision Announced

Maxine Waters said to the Tea Party, “Let’s get it on!”

Well, game on, you corrupt, dishonest hack.

Admiral Yamamoto was said to have made a frightening prediction for Japan even as all of his fleet was celebrating their apparently wild success at Pearl Harbor:

“I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

Obama and Democrats most certainly have a moment of success that was handed to them by Bush-appointee John Roberts.  But history amply documents that many such apparent victories turn out to be slow-moving disasters for those who celebrate them.  Not only is the ObamaCare that can now only be overturned by Republicans still wildly unpopular – and most importantly, wildly unpopular with independents to the tune of a whopping 70 percent who wanted it repealed – but it is also now officially the largest tax on the middle class in American history.  And that torpedoes Obama’s primary campagin rhetoric to be the protector of the middle class.

Then there’s also this: ObamaCare just ignited the Romney base to white-hot anger and very terrible resolve:

Romney campaign donations hit $4.6 million following health care decision
In a brief televised statement following the decision, Romney vowed that his first priority upon entering the White House would be repealing the so-called Obamacare law.
By Kristen A. Lee / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, June 29, 2012, 1:17 PM

President Obama may have won the health care battle at the Supreme Court, but Mitt Romney is claiming a victory in the money wars.

Since the court released its stunning 5-4 decision upholding Obama’s health care law Thursday morning, the Romney campaign has taken in a flood of donations from Republican supporters angry about the ruling.

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul tweeted Friday that the campaign received more than 47,000 online donations totaling $4.6 million in the 24 hours since the ruling.

The surge in small donations indicates that the decision may be an effective weapon for Republicans to mobilize conservatives for the general election.

The Obama campaign is asserting that they took in even more.  The fact that they refused to produce any of their numbers to back those assertions up is evidence enough to refute their bogus claims.

In 2010 enraged Americans rose up in righteous outrage over the even-then wildly unpopular ObamaCare and gave Democrats a historic ass-kicking:

[Consider] the sheer extent of the disaster Obama led the Democrat Party into: this wasn’t the worst election drubbing since 1994; it was the worst election drubbing since 1938 (and since 1928 in the state legislatures).

We also took 11 governorships.

Here is the map of that 2010 ass-kicking (red = “Democrats SUCK!”):

Well, now ObamaCare is back on the table.  You are literally voting for your very lives, people.  Time to get really, really angry again.

And now Obama is a big-time major documented liar to go with being a narcissistic sociopath:

[ObamaCare is] the largest tax of the American middle class in the history of the Republic.

Obama is now a documented liar on his pledge to the middle class:

BARACK OBAMA: And I can make a firm pledge: under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase – not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

Obama promised it over and over:

But let me perfectly clear, because I know you’ll hear the same old claims that rolling back these tax breaks means a massive tax increase on the American people: if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.

And:

I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95% of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class.

And in interviews with former Democrat spin doctors turned mainstream media “journalsits” Obama responded to questions:

STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.

OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that. Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it’s a tax increase?

OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion.

Here’s more of the exchange with Stephanopoulos in which we can now saw with complete factual certainty that Barack Obama lied to the American people:

STEPHANOPOULOS: “Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?”

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “No. That’s not true, George. The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.

But Obama lied to you. It IS a tax increase. It is a supermassive tax increase, in fact. And now the middle class is burdened with the largest tax increase in American history and it won’t be single dimes, but lots and lots of dollars, that Americans will find themselves paying. Like everything this cynical, dishonest president does, it will be sneaky: it won’t be all that much in year one beginning AFTER the election in 2013, but it will be more in year two and quite a bit more in year three.

You just wait and see how much you are going to pay for this monstrosity as it increasingly starts to blow up as it gets implemented.

There is already a $17 TRILLION funding gap in this monstrosity. And you aint seen nothin’ yet. Not only the absolute number but even the rate of those without insurance has INCREASED since ObamaCare was passed. And ObamaCare has raised the cost of medicine; the average family is paying over $2,000 more in health insurance premiums in a number of states since ObamaCare was passed. And that was EXACTLY what was predicted as compared to what would have happened HAD OBAMACARE NOT EXISTED, according to the CBO. But now we’re finding that health premiums are increasing by as much as 1,112 percent. And the Supreme Court decision today will likely cause this escalating cost spike to shoot at an even higher trajectory into the stratosphere.

This is what you will be voting for in 2012: do you want the kind of government-controlled health care system in which hundreds of thousands of elderly patients are terminated every single year just to make bed-space available as the inefficient government system crashes into chaos?  To put it into parallel terms given the population differences, 130,000 British elderly citizens euthanized every year amounts to at least 687,000 elderly Americans terminated.

Do you want 160 death panels?

Vote for Romney.  Vote for your very own life and most certainly forn the lives of your parents and grandparents.

Pawlenty on Obama: ‘You can’t be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken.’

Tim Pawlenty just went way up on my list of candidates after that particular remark in my title.

Is Obama anti-business?  Well, how about this for a factoid: 77% of investors think he is.  He was anti-business in 2009.  He was anti-business in 2010.  And he is still anti-business in 2011.  How many eggs are you going to get when you’re out to get all the chickens and when the chickens know you’re out to get them?

Here’s an article that talks about this former governor who has been successful where Obama has failed, failed and failed some more.  What is interesting is how we hear Pawlenty talk about how to fix our broken economy, and Obama talking about wtf???

Republican presidential candidate Pawlenty: ‘We are in deep doo-doo’
By Abdon M. Pallasch Political

How badly has President Barack Obama managed the United States’ economy?

Pretty badly, says plain-talking former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a campaign stop in Chicago Tuesday.

“We are in deep doo-doo. We are in deep crap,” Pawlenty said Tuesday, in a locale meant to drive home the Republican presidential candidate’s differences with the president.

In a classroom at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies, located across the street from the law school where Obama used to teach, Pawlenty laid out his tax-slashing, budget-cutting proposal that he says will save the U.S. economy:

There would be only three tax rates: Zero, for low-income earners who currently pay no federal tax; 10 percent, for single people earning up to $50,000, or married couples who earn up to $100,000; and 25 percent, for people who earn more than that (down from a top rate of 35 percent now). He would cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent and end the estate tax.

Those tax cuts, plus a freeze on federal spending, would spur growth of 5 percent a year, he said.

Democrats immediately said Pawlenty’s proposed tax cuts would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

Obama senior advisor David Axelrod, who finished a speech on the North Side just before Pawlenty started his, credited Pawlenty with “good stagecraft” for holding the speech on Obama’s old stomping grounds. But he said Obama’s budget-fixing recipe is better.

Pawlenty “left his own state with a $5 billion deficit and now he’s counseling the rest of the country on how to handle finances,” Axelrod said. “He proposes massive new tax cuts for upper-income Americans … that would produce huge new deficits. He wants to replay the same formula that got us into the jam in the first place.”

But Pawlenty told the classroom full of students at the university that people should not focus on “whether this makes some group a little more wealthy or a little less wealthy. You can’t be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken.”

Flirting with the so-called “third rail” of American politics, Pawlenty said he would raise the retirement age for younger workers to start collecting Social Security in the future. People nearing retirement now would not be affected, he said.

“If you’re coming in new to the work force, gradually, over time, we are going to raise the retirement age,” Pawlenty said. “If you’re wealthy, you’re not going to get the cost-of-living adjustment.”

Proposals that can be short-handed as “cutting Social Security” can kill campaigns, but Pawlenty said, “It’s going to be the ‘Jack Nicholson election.’” Referring to the movie “A Few Good Men,” Pawlenty said, “There’s that famous line when he’s on the witness stand and he said, ‘You can’t handle the truth.’ The American people, I think, can handle the truth. It doesn’t mean we freak ’em out. It doesn’t mean we scare ’em. … I’m only doing this because I love the country. We’ll only get it to a better place if people are willing to tell the American people the truth. I am. President Obama isn’t. He’s ducking, bobbing, weaving.”

In a speech at the Misericordia, a home for children and adults with disabilities, Axelrod told the story of how, back in April, he and Obama were crafting a joke about Pawlenty for Obama to use at the White House Correspondents Association dinner. The two were interrupted by a National Security Council staffer who had to brief Obama on something, so Obama asked Axelrod to leave the room.

When Axelrod came back in, Obama rejected a suggestion for a joke about how Pawlenty “could really be a strong candidate but for his unfortunate middle name: bin Laden.”

“ ‘That’s so hackneyed, bin Laden, that’s so yesterday, Why don’t we take that out,’ ” Obama said, Axelrod recalled. “ ‘We’ll put in “Hosni.’’ ’ ” Axelrod didn’t think that was as funny, but he agreed to it.

“It was only the next day that we realized that he had not only eliminated Bin Laden from the joke. He had given the order to eliminate bin Laden from the face of the Earth,” Axelrod told the crowd.

Later, speaking to reporters, Axelrod laughed when asked if he agreed with potential Republican candidate Sarah Palin, who said over the weekend that Paul Revere’s famous ride was an attempt to “warn the British’’ — that the British were coming.

“I think that’s a good reflection of why we can’t abandon education,” he said. “We need good education so everybody knows their history lessons and gets them properly.”

Pawlenty just laughed when asked the same question. He proceeded to a fund-raiser.

Well, first of all,we are – to put it in Pawlenty’s accurate term – ” in deep crap” – and the best Axelrod can do is talk about a joke that Obama’s people are going to go after Sarah Palin for an impromptu remark about Paul Revere when their guy is on the record saying he’d visited 57 states with one more yet to go?

And Obama’s going to talk about Pawlenty’s $5 billion deficit?  Seriously?  And just how many TRILLIONS of deficit does he have just so far???  Obama’s budget just for this term would add THIRTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS to the national debt.  From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama proposed a $3.73 trillion budget Monday  for fiscal 2012 that he said will start reining in runaway budget deficits, but  his plan envisions the gross national debt swelling by almost $13 trillion over  a decade.

Obama’s budget sets up a clash with the  Republican-led House of Representatives over how to recover from the deep  recession of recent years and strengthen the economic foundation for the future,  with federal spending the pivotal battleground.

Obama added $3 trillion to the deficit in less than two years.  Another way to put it: In just nineteen months, Obama added more to the debt than every single US president from George Washington to Ronald Reagan – combined.

And this idiot is talking about $5 billion???  Like we’re not supposed to laugh our asses off and then impeach Obama as a clear and present danger to the United States?  Particularly when in fact Pawlenty in fact DID actually leave office with the budget balanced?  If you’re going to talk about devastating developments after the guy was gone – especially when that characterization is being made by the guy’s political enemies – at least have the courtesy to do the same sort of redacting with Bill Clinton’s legacy – who managed to take all the credit for balancing the budget but wasn’t in any way responsible for the disastrous Dotcom crisis that unfolded on his watch.

Which is to say, Democrats should either give Tim Pawlenty plenty of credit for balancing the budget or at least shut the hell up.

Tim Pawlenty as a man has a good, solid life.  And he’s got the background and the bona fides to get behind.  He is a candidate worthy of consideration.

On Cavuto’s Fox News program on Friday, Cavuto pointed out that the White House was questioning whether Tim Pawlenty was being realistic about whether he could create the kind of 5% GDP that he is talking about.  Pawlenty’s response was almost as good as his quip in my title.  I don’t have an exact quote, but basically he said “I’m an optimist, and I have an optimistic view of America’s future.  We’ve been great before, and I believe we can be great again.  And if Barack Obama could say that he was going to provide jobs for the all the jobless, slow the rising oceans, heal the planet, end all the wars and basically remake our nation, I think I can talk about doubling our GDP.”

Touché.

Tim Pawlenty wants to increase our GDP and grow our economy and create jobs by NOT being anti-chicken while claiming to be pro-egg.  In other words, the man actually makes sense.

Obama has spent three years demonizing and attacking businesses while demanding that they create more jobs.  That, by stark contrast, is 100% pure insane, no additives or preservatives.

Pawlenty wants profound tax cuts.  And while liberals want to ignore history and argue that the more you tax, the more you collect in tax revenue, Pawlenty cites the fact that every single time we have cut tax rates, we have dramatically increased our tax revenues.  See my article “Tax Cut’s INCREASE Revenues; They have ALWAYS Increased Tax Revenues” for that documented history.

Think of it in terms of gas (as I’ve argued before in more detail).  As the price of gas went up and up and up, did people buy the same amount of gas?  No way; they very quickly cut back on their driving.  If you increase the price of something, you sell less of it.  And in the same way, if you increase tax rates, you invariably end up encouraging counter-productive behavior, as the wealthy find it worthwhile to quit investing and instead pursue tax shelters and loopholes to protect their assets.

It is simply a repeatedly documented fact that every single time we have cut tax rates, we have ended up with increased revenues, as businesses and individuals were encouraged to invest because they were being rewarded with the ability to actually keep more of their own profits.  It comes down to this: if I give you a job, and you work hard, but at the end of the day the tax man comes and takes it all away, you’re not going to bother to take my job.  With total taxes exceeding 50% in a number of states, businesses and individuals are put in a position in which they take all the risks in hiring and investing – and if they lose they lose big – but even if they win they aren’t allowed to keep enough of their money to make the risks worth taking.

Democrats claim that the deficit has increased with lower tax rates.  And that is true.  But that isn’t the fault of the lower tax rates – WHICH AGAIN ACTUALLY INCREASED THE GOVERNMENT REVENUES DRAMATICALLY.  The bizarre argument that Democrats are making is analogous to the argument that the guy who lives in his parent’s basement and makes minimum wage and lives within his modest means actually makes more money than the multi-millionaire who buys multiple mansions, yachts and cars and then finds himself in debt.  It was the reckless spending that put us into the hole, not the tax policies that resulted in the politicians who spent that money having more money to spend.  Pawlenty is arguing that we need to profoundly cut tax rates and simultaneously have a balanced budget amendment and dramatically cut our spending.

That isn’t even mentioning the constant hypocrisy of the Democrats as they fail to live up to their own demagogic rhetoric.

Then there’s the issue of the Bush tax cuts.  Democrats say we’ve had the Bush tax cuts, and look what’s happened.  Two things.

First, consider this: Obama signed the compromise to extend the Bush tax cuts for two more years on December 17, 2010.  Many experts believed Obama would be forced to do this as a result of the Republican landslide victory that changed the political landscape in early November.  So let’s look at what has happened to the jobless rate since November:

November 2010: 9.8%
December 2010: 9.4%
January  2011: 9.0%
February 2011: 8.9%
March    2011: 8.8%
April    2011: 9.0%
May      2011: 9.1%

Interestingly, Obama initially appeared to be reaching out to the business leaders he had been attacking.  After getting his head handed to him in November 2010, Obama began to reach out to Republicans.  And then in mid December, he began to reach out to business – with his signing of the Bush tax cuts extension a major part of that reaching out.  In early January, he appointed as his new chief-of-staff a man who had a “business-friendly” persona.

And the market, the investors, the businesses, ordinary Americans, liked what they heard.  The public clearly, overwhelmingly wanted to see Obama reach out to the party that had just won massively.  Republicans are the party of business; reach out to business.  Let’s get to work growing this economy rather than attacking the people who grow the economy.

But even as people liked what they heard, there was always a question, as asked in this case by CNN Money:

“So is Obama really changing his tune on big business? Or is the president merely glad-handing big business while plowing ahead with his 2012 goal of making the rich pay more?”

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long before the business and investment community realized that Obama hadn’t changed his spots at all.  It’s either “same lies, different tune,” or “different lies, same tune” with this guy.

Before hardly any time had passed, “William Daley” became an afterthought and Obama was right back to attacking business with the same ferocity as before.

Obama’s senior economist Austan Goolsbee – now the FIFTH senior Obama economist to jump Obama’s HMO Titanic (with “HMO” standing for “His Majesty Obama” had this to say shortly before HE left.  And this according to an obvious liberal:

When Amanpour asked [Goolsbee] what the Administration could or should be doing to improve conditions, he ticked off items you’d expect to hear from a typical GOP Presidential adviser:  we’ve got to get the debt under control; we have a White House effort to identify and get rid of governmental regulations that are preventing the private sector from growing the economy; we should pass “free trade” agreements backed by the Chamber of Commerce; and we should leverage limited public dollars to release billions in private funding for investments.

Goolsbee’s bottom line:  “It’s now up to the private sector.”  That’s exactly what you’d expect from President Romney’s economic adviser.

And, of course, that brief flash of clarity was immediately followed by Goolsbee’s resignation.  We won’t be having any anti-Marxist heresies on Comrade Obama’s watch, no sir commissar.

Just in case you’re wondering why the economy seemed to be improving before going back into the toilet, there’s your answer.  The people who actually create jobs began to think that Obama finally had some level of actual awareness about how the economy and business and job-creation works, before Obama slammed the door on that idiotic thesis.  They believed Obama’s lies right after the election, then Obama demonstrated (“dictated” is more like it) that he hates business as much as he ever did, then he renewed his war on business, and it’s right back into the crapper with the U.S. economy.

So there’s the backstory behind the economy appearing to improve before diving headfirst back into the gave.  Obama is right back to being “pro-job” but “anti-chicken.”

Up above, I said there were “two things” about the Bush tax cuts and their impact on the economy.  The first point is that the extension of the Bush tax cuts DID work for five months of straight improvement – at least until Obama and the Democrats made sure that businesses and investors knew that they were as hated as ever.

The SECOND point about the Bush tax cuts – or ANY other tax cuts, for that matter – is that they have to be consistent and long-term before they will truly succeed.  This is because businesses need to know their operating environment before they will be willing to take risks such as hiring more workers.  They need to have a clear, long-term picture (most think at least five years) of what their tax liability will be.  And they need the same kind of knowledge about their health care liability and their regulatory liability.  If you start or expand a business, you’ve got one primary question: “Am I going to be able to make this work?”  And in order to answer that fundamental question, you need to know what your costs will be.

Obama signed the Bush tax cut extension for two years – and then very quickly went back on that signature by demagoguing the very thing he’d signed.  Will these tax rates be there for them in two years?  Certainly not, if Obama wins.  And there goes the window to make important investment/growth decisions.  Obama made sure that business owners wouldn’t have a long-term understanding of their taxes.  ObamaCare has thousands of pages being written as we speak; Obama’s regulations are being written as we speak; and nobody knows anything about how any of it will affect them.

Hence the paralysis.

Tim Pawlenty knows that no nation and no economy has ever had a recession that lasted forever – save when leftists have been allowed to run those nations/economies.  He also knows that economic growth and expansion are there just waiting for Obama to leave us the hell alone and get off our backs so that business owners can build better lives for themselves and their families – and create the jobs that result from those businesses growing – by allowing wealth creators to keep more of their own money.

He knows that if you really want to be pro-job, you had better be pro-business.  And that is something that Barack Obama has now proven he will never be, regardless of what he might say to the contrary.

[Update, 8/13]: Today, Michelle Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll, versus Pawlenty – who had spent a lot more time and money – coming in a very distant third.

I can’t explain why Iowans basically walked away from Pawlenty, but I can tell you why I’ve been annoyed with him.  It’s simple: his non-stop attack on Michelle Bachmann.

You want to go after people, Tim?  Go after Obama.  Heck, go after Mitt Romney like a lot of people said you should have done during the first debate.  But to go after Michelle Bachmann is just dumb.

To not go after Romney and then go after Bachmann makes you look like a guy who was afraid to fight the star quarterback and then started punching a cheerleader to show you were still “tough.”

You’re trying to present yourself as a true-blue conservative.  Everyone KNOWS Michelle Bachmann is a true conservative.  So why go after her when you could be going after a Mitt Romney who has held whatever position made him look good at the moment?

To continue, some of your attacks against her are just stupid.  Like the one that Michelle Bachmann didn’t stop things like cap and trade and ObamaCare being passed in the House.  As if she was somehow the Imperial Queen of the chamber rather than one minority Republican (at the time) in a chamber with 434 other representatives.  That was just a plain dumb attack.

You finished a distant third, Tim.  Which apparently will allow you to survive.  But if you keep tee-ing off on Bachmann, you won’t be around much longer.

CBO Totally Off Projecting Social Security Meltdown

The Congressional Budget Office has a 100% track record: they always underestimate how much government programs cost; and they always fail to project how soon they will go to hell.

It is ironically fitting that we have the news that Social Security is going into the red way ahead of schedule the same week that we pass a law based on a massively erroneous CBO projection.

From the New York Times:

This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Okay.  The CBO was off by a whopping six years.

And we’re supposed to trust the accuracy of their bogus politicized “score” of ObamaCare why?

The New York Times goes on to say:

Mr. Goss said Social Security’s annual report last year projected revenue would more than cover payouts until at least 2016 because economists expected a quicker, stronger recovery from the crisis. Officials foresaw an average unemployment rate of 8.2 percent in 2009 and 8.8 percent this year, though unemployment is hovering at nearly 10 percent.

The trustees did foresee, in late 2008, that the recession would be severe enough to deplete Social Security’s funds more quickly than previously projected. They moved the year of reckoning forward, to 2037 from 2041. Mr. Goss declined to reveal the contents of the forthcoming annual report, but said people should not expect the date to lurch forward again.

Do you get that?  The report that said everything would be just peachy dandy until 2016 was just written LAST YEAR.

These people don’t have a freaking clue.  And that is simply a fact.

You were sold a bill of lies packaged under the rhetoric, “Ten years from now, ObamaCare will only cost X, Y, and Z.”

These people don’t know what the hell will happen next week, let alone next decade.

The math necessary to justify the proposition that ObamaCare would cover 30 million more people and run in a deficit neutral fashion rather reminds me of a Sidney Harris cartoon:

All I can tell you is the Democrats’ math wasn’t even explicit in step one.

There were so many gimmicks, shenanigans, and outright lies in the legislation they sent to the CBO for scoring that it isn’t even funny.

This bill will boomerang back at us in the coming years and it will bankrupt the country.  We’ve had wildly wrong budget projections in the form of analysis justifying Social Security and Medicare.  And now we’ve got $100 trillion debt in unfunded liabilities to show for those totally bogus projections.  We’ve managed to weather the massive red ink deficits in those programs until now, but there’s a fundamental difference with ObamaCare.  That difference is A) that we’re stacking ObamaCare on top of those massive liabilities and compounding trillions on top of trillions; and B) that the economy is in FAR worse shape than it was than when these massive programs went off the rails.

79% of Americans see a complete economic collapse coming.  They’re right.  Get ready for it.  Because the beast is coming.

Update, March 26: Today we have this news as reported in the Washington Times:

CBO report: Debt will rise to 90% of GDP
Friday, March 26, 2010
By David M. Dickson

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

Only a total fool would trust the government’s ability to do anything other than massively underestimate its debts.

The problem is that fools from the party of fools are in power.

Democrats ‘Fix’ ObamaCare Numbers By Leaving Out TRILLIONS In Additional Spending

This is Bernie Madoff Accounting. And the same fate that befell Madoff’s investors will one day befall the American people. The Democrats only count the costs they want to count, and simply pretend the rest don’t exist, or assure us that they somehow shouldn’t be counted.  Positive numbers from unrealistic expectations show up on one side of the ledger, while negative numbers representing massive government and personal spending are ignored.

This article will demonstrate the REAL cost of ObamaCare.  And what we will find is that the monster it creates will sneeze chunks bigger than the $940 billion that the CBO score pitches.

It’s not like the CBO isn’t aware that it is being played like a fiddle.  They can only analyze legislation as it is presented – and this legislation is being presented by partisan Democrat ideologues.  The CBO has pointed out that the Democrats have a pattern of double-counting the same dollars.  But they can’t do anything about it: if the Democrats tell them to double-count, they dutifully double-count.  Paul Ryan points out that Medicare cuts are double counted, Social Security taxes get double counted, increased CLASS Act premiums get double counted, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.  Other sources of revenue – such as the not-to-be-implemented “Cadillac Tax” which would itself count for 25% of deficit reduction in the CBO score – will likely NEVER see the light of day. The CBO numbers become a shell game.

You can understand why the Democrats would want to run away from details of the CBO score. If the facts get in the way of their theory, so much the worse for the facts.

Then there’s the likelihood that ObamaCare will destroy as many as 700,000 jobs.  What’s THAT going to cost America?  Would THAT be “deficit neutral”?  And how much will it cost Americans as increased government taxes on private health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device and supply companies, pass the burden of those taxes onto us? Will THAT be “deficit neutral” for American families?

But let’s stay out of the budgetary weeds, and remain on what is clear and straightforward.

Let us first begin with the “Doctor fix,” which is a $208 billion spending measure to restore the reimbursement rates for doctors who treat Medicare patients.  If it isn’t passed, the current rate – which already leaves hospitals and many doctors losing money to treat Medicare patients – would be slashed by an additional 21 percent.  It simply has to be fixed, or doctors and hospitals will quit treating Medicare patients.

But if the Democrats strip that part out of their health care bill, they can claim that 21 percent reduction in doctors’ reimbursements as “savings.”  Even if they intend to fix the reimbursement rate, such that those “saving” never materialize.  And that little bit of fiscal circular reasoning allows them to claim that their bill is “deficit neutral.”

Medicare fix would push health care into the red
Rollback of Medicare cuts to doctors, if added to health care bill, push it into the red
On Friday March 19, 2010, 6:33 pm EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional budget scorekeepers say a Medicare fix that Democrats included in earlier versions of their health care bill would push it into the red.

The Congressional Budget Office said Friday that rolling back a programmed cut in Medicare fees to doctors would cost $208 billion over 10 years. If added back to the health care overhaul bill, it would wipe out all the deficit reduction, leaving the legislation $59 billion in the red.

The so-called doc fix was part of the original House bill. Because of its high cost, Democrats decided to pursue it separately. Republicans say the cost should not be ignored. Congress has usually waived the cuts to doctors year by year.

What this basically means is that $940 billion number in the CBO report that the Democrats are cheering over is entirely subjective.  It would have been a lot higher if they had included the stuff they should have included.  And they didn’t include these things simply because it would have made their number look bad.  It’s Alice in Wonderland accounting.

So let’s look at the truth: Democrats are claiming that their “$940 billion bill” would reduce the ten-year deficit by $138 billion.  But in reality, the doctor fix which SHOULD be in the bill would INCREASE THE DEFICIT by $59 billion.  That’s a swing of 197 billion dollars, which is one hell of a swing indeed.

But that certainly isn’t the only budget shenanigan that Democrats have used to monkey the numbers to appear to look like what they want:

For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs.  First, it includes 2010 as the initial year.  As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time.  Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009.  But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare.  If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.

This $260 billion ($1.2 trillion minus $940 billion) deficit created by backdating the bill to 2010 instead of starting in 2011 when they should (until Democrats instructed them to do differently) has nothing to do with the deficit created by the doctor fix.  So they compound: $260 billion plus $197 billion equals $457 billion.

So we’re talking about a real and obvious deficit of nearly half a trillion dollars.  But that’s nowhere near as bad as it will really be.

You see, even starting the CBO ten-year cycle in 2011 is nothing more than a gimmick.  That’s because the plan begins taxing in 2011, but benefits (actual spending outlays) don’t begin to be funded until 2014.  The Democrats tax for ten years, but only spend for six.  Why did they do that?  Because that is the only way they can get the illusion of a “deficit neutral” figure.  As Heritage points out:

[S]ome scrupulous tactics were used to calculate the 10-year cost projections. The key provisions in the health care bill don’t go into effect until 2014. Meanwhile Medicare cuts and tax increases would go into effect immediately. So the money raised through taxes and spending cuts in the first four years of the 10-year projection would offset the expenditures in the subsequent six years. Consequently, when the true ten year window (2014-2023) is examined, and the costs of the “Doc Fix” are taken into account, the cost rises to $2.3 trillion.

This – and the shenanigans Democrats employ with the CLASS Act – is why Heritage rightly calculates the REAL cost of ObamaCare as likely far higher than $2.5 TRILLION.

These are obvious and transparent gimmicks.  But the mainstream media is largely simply ignoring it.  They are liberal in their ideology and “gatekeepers” in their philosophy of journalism.  The result is that they don’t tell you anything that they don’t want you to know.

But even that – as utterly terrible as it is – is STILL not anywhere close to the REAL cost of this disastrous health care bill.  Consider the most sobering Democrat omission of all.  From Cato:

Another gimmick pushes much of the legislation’s costs off the federal budget and onto the private sector by requiring individuals and employers to purchase health insurance.  When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax.  When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending.  But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending.  That’s a sharp departure from how the CBO treated similar mandates in the Clinton health plan.  And it hides maybe 60 percent of the legislation’s total costs.  When I correct for that gimmick, it brings total costs to roughly $2.5 trillion (i.e., $1 trillion/0.4).

Here’s where things get really ugly.  TPMDC’s Brian Beutler calls “the” $2.5-trillion cost estimate a “doozy” of a “hysterical Republican whopper.”  Not only is he incorrect, he doesn’t seem to realize that Gregg and I are correcting for different budget gimmicks; it’s just a coincidence that we happened to reach the same number.

When we correct for both gimmicks, counting both on- and off-budget costs over the first 10 years of implementation, the total cost of ObamaCare reaches — I’m so sorry about this — $6.25 trillion.  That’s not a precise estimate.  It’s just far closer to the truth than President Obama and congressional Democrats want the debate to be.

For the record, it was this subsidizing of the private health insurance companies that Dennis Kucinich was talking about before he backstabbed his own principles and voted for the bill anyway.

In 1994, the universal health care plan proposed by President Clinton included a mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office studied the issue and concluded that the United States had never in all its history mandated that individuals purchase any good or service.  The CBO stated:

“A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.”

But it is going to start doing so now, under Obama and the Democrats in Congress.  They could care less about the Constitution, or about the consequences of radically expanding already massive government bureaucracies.

Obama is going to force you to purchase insurance, but the CBO won’t count the cost of one penny of that spending, now or ever.  If you send money to the government that the government requires you to send them, that’s a tax.  If the government spends money, that counts as spending.  But if the government forces you to send money to a private health insurance company, that isn’t counted.  It amounts to a tax that isn’t “deemed” (there’s a good word these days) a tax.

Thus the REAL ten-year cost of ObamaCare won’t be $940 billion.  It won’t even be $2.5 trillion.  It will be SIX TRILLION DOLLARS.  And counting, and counting, and counting, and counting.

Obama’s Stunning Arrogance: ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’

Barack Obama reminds me of the toy poodle we had when I was a child.  It kept attacking our stronger dog.  No matter how many times it had its butt kicked, it still believed itself to be innately superior.

If Barry Hussein was about one-thousandth as capable as he thought he was, we’d be out of the recession now instead of a lot deeper into it (as measured by the unemployment rate – which is currently 20% higher than Obama said it would be if we passed his porkulus plan).

Alas, he’s like our poodle: arrogant and psychologically unable to practice common sense.  And he isn’t 1/1000th as capable as he thinks he is.

“The Big Difference” Between 2010 and 1994 “Is Me,” President Obama Says, Per Congressman
January 25, 2010 2:48 PM
Jake Tapper and Yunji de Nies report:

Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., fears that these midterm elections are going to go the way of the 1994 midterms, when Democrats lost control of the House after a failed health care reform effort.

But, Berry told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the White House does not share his concerns.

“They just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

Asked today by ABC News’ Yunji de Nies if the president said that, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs pleaded ignorance.

“I have not talked to the president about that,” Gibbs said, employing one of his favorite dodges.

Gibbs seemed to suggest that he shared that view, whether or not President Obama said it.

“I hope it’s not newsworthy to think that the president hopes and expects to be an effective campaigner in the midterm elections,” Gibbs said.

Berry told the newspaper that he “began to preach last January that we had already seen this movie and we didn’t want to see it again because we know how it comes out…I just began to have flashbacks to 1993 and ’94. No one that was here in ’94, or at the day after the election felt like. It certainly wasn’t a good feeling.”

I wonder how many Secret Service agents it takes to pry Obama away from his mirror every morning.

From Missourah.

But more and more liberals are finally starting to recognize something that “dumb as a box of rocks” Sarah Palin figured out a year and a half ago: that you are a failure and a disgrace, just like conservatives predicted you would be.

Here’s a smattering of very recently-authored “Hey, you suck!” articles from liberals:

“He’s Done Everything Wrong” – by Mortimer Zuckerman

He’s improved America’s image in the world. He absolutely did. But you have to translate that into something. Let me tell you what a major leader said to me recently. “We are convinced,” he said, “that he is not strong enough to confront his enemy. We are concerned,” he said “that he is not strong to support his friends.”

The political leadership of the world is very, very dismayed. He better turn it around. The Democrats are going to get killed in this election. Jesus, looks what’s happening in Massachusetts.

It’s really interesting because he had brilliant, brilliant political instincts during the campaign. I don’t know what has happened to them. His appointments present somebody who has a lot to learn about how government works. He better get some very talented businesspeople who know how to implement things. It’s unbelievable. Everybody says so. You can’t believe how dismayed people are. That’s why he’s plunging in the polls.

“Why I Regret Voting For President Obama” – by Jill Dorson

All that changed when the Obama campaign became the Obama administration. I was a small business owner during 2008 election and my business ultimately failed under the weight of a horrendous economy. I am not ashamed. I worked hard. But I believed that Obama would try to level the playing field between big business and small, between thieves and honest business people, between greed and moderation. Instead, he bailed out the most wicked and left the rest of us fail.

I watched with horror as Obama followed Bush’s lead in bailing out banks, auto makers, insurance companies, all of those companies deemed “too big to fail.” What does that mean? My small company got thrown under the bus and my savings were ravaged – perhaps Wall Street is using them for bonuses this year.

Not to mention President Obama is recklessly spending our country’s future into oblivion.

It was clear after just 90 days what a mistake I’d made. My taxes have gone up and my quality of life has gone down. Hope has given way to disgust and I see now that change is simply a euphemism for “big government.”

“How to Squander the Presidency in One Year” – by David Michael Green

Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime.  Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what’s more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis.  It’s astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year.

It was hilarious, of course, when Michelle Bachmann invoked the Charge of the Light Brigade at a rally against “Obama’s” (has he ever really owned it?) health care “initiative” (isn’t that too strong a word to use?), quite oblivious to the fact that the actual historical event was one of history’s greatest debacles.  Obama, on the other hand, seems to be actually reliving the famous cock-up in the flesh.  Except, of course, that he doesn’t really “charge” at anything.  He just talks about things, thinks about things a real long time, defers to others on things, and waits around for things to maybe happen.

[Green proceeds to offer more than a dozen bullet points’ worth of specific examples of Obama ineptness]

“Obama’s Credibility Gap” – by Bob Herbert

Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.

Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.

The last paragraph above is probably as close an admission as any New York Times writer will ever come to saying, “You LIE!“ to Obama (i.e., ala Joe Wilson).

I’m guessing that all of these liberals aren’t comforted by the fact that “they’ve got Obama.”

It is amazing that this incredibly failed president is actually still saying, “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.” There is something profoundly psychologically wrong with this guy.  His comment amounts to an insult against former president Bill Clinton, who had the misfortune of not being as great and wonderful as Barack Obama.  I despised Bill Clinton, but Slick Willie had more political instincts and legitimate personal charisma than Barry Hussein will ever have in his life.

Obama and everything he promised are empty, hollow, and meaningless. He is an empty suit that recites the script off a pair of teleprompter screens well.  Nothing more.

Does Even Obama Know He’s Destroying Himself And His Party? Maybe So.

The trend is strikingly visible in a single image from Rasmussen:

The green line is the people who like Obama.  And it’s dropping like an asteroid.  The red line is the people who don’t like Obama.  And it’s going higher and higher.  And the “-14” is the difference between the people who really like Obama from the people who really don’t like him.  As you can see, the “really don’t like hims” have it.

At traffic lights, I’m a big fan of encountering green.  Here, I really love the red.

Obama is already speaking about the possibility that he might be so politically gangrenous by 2012 that he won’t even bother to run.

“You know, if – if I feel like I’ve made the very best decisions for the American people and three years from now I look at it and, you know, my poll numbers are in the tank and because we’ve gone through these wrenching changes, you know, politically, I’m in a tough spot, I’ll – I’ll feel all right about myself,” Obama told CNN’s Ed Henry.

Obama went on to say:

“I’d feel a lot worse, if at a time of such urgency for the American people I was spending a lot of time thinking about how I could position myself to ensure reelection.

“Because if I were doing that right now, I wouldn’t have taken on health care, I wouldn’t be taking on things that are unpopular,” the president said. “I wouldn’t be closing Guantanamo. There are a whole series of choices that I’m making that I know are going to create some political turbulence. But I think they’re the right thing to do, and history will bear out my theories or not.”

All I can say is, “or not.”  You’re “theories” are bogus, Barry.

Health care was bad enough, in terms of a blatant display of either ignorance or disavowal of the clear will of the American people.  But when you look at the determination to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other terrorists on civilian trial in New York City in the face of overwhelming rejection of the electorate, you can see that Obama frankly doesn’t give a damn what the nation thinks.

As Rasmussen puts it:

Just 29% agree with the decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and five other terrorists suspects in a New York city courtroom. Only 14% believe terrorist suspects should receive the same legal rights in court as U.S. citizens.

We can add the fact that Obama hasn’t bothered to try to keep our citizens safe at home or our soldiers safe abroad (or at home for that matter).  Between Afghanistan, Fort Hood, and the H1N1 debacle, you’ve seriously got to wonder.

Only 47% of Americans at least somewhat approve of Obama.  And only 47% of Democrats strongly approve of him.

But he’s not listening to you.  He’s listening to George Soros and Andy Stern.

And there are portents of a total disaster for Democrats in 2010 if they continue on their suicidal path into the hard-core ideological liberal agenda they have been pursuing.

The Huffington Post (hardly even remotely CLOSE to being pro-conservative) has this:

NEW YORK — Despite sweeping Democratic successes in the past two national elections, continuing job losses and President Barack Obama’s slipping support could lead to double-digit losses for the party in next year’s congressional races and may even threaten their House control.

Fifty-four new Democrats were swept into the House in 2006 and 2008, helping the party claim a decisive majority as voters soured on a Republican president and embraced Obama’s message of hope and change. Many of the new Democrats are in districts carried by Republican John McCain in last year’s presidential contest; others are in traditional swing districts that have proved tough for either party to hold.

From New Hampshire to Nevada, House Democrats also will be forced to defend votes on Obama’s $787 billion economic recovery package and on energy legislation viewed by many as a job killer in an already weak economy.

Add to that the absence of Obama from the top of the ticket, which could reduce turnout among blacks, liberals and young people, and the likelihood of a highly motivated GOP base confused by the president’s proposed health care plan and angry at what they consider reckless spending and high debt.

Taken together, it could be the most toxic environment for Democrats since 1994, when the party lost 34 House incumbents and 54 seats altogether. Democrats currently have a 256-178 edge in the House, with one vacancy. Republicans would have to pick up 40 seats to regain control.

Republicans hold a six point lead over Democrats in generic balloting – and have held a lead for four months.  That hasn’t happened since the dinosaurs walked the earth.  That’s actually even bigger than it sounds, given the fact that those identifying themselves as “Republican” are considerably more likely to vote than those identifying themselves as “Democrat.”

On my own view, the Democrats aren’t in 1994 trouble; they’re actually more along the lines of being in 1997 trouble.

1997 was the year of the Heaven’s Gate cult mass suicide, as members – all wearing the same kind of Nike sneakers – committed suicide in order to beam themselves onto the spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

As the Democrats pursue radical leftist policy after radical leftist policy, they are essentially saying, “Beam me up, Scotty!” just like their Heaven’s Gate intellectual forebears did before them.  As the American people clearly are turning against the Democrats’ radicalism, the Democrats are calling for still more radicalism.  It’s almost as if they’re saying, “If we guzzle more of our Kool-aid faster, we’ll be SURE to win.”

I was never a Bill Clinton fan.  But one thing you could count on Slick Willie to do was whatever was politically best for Slick Willie.  He was a liberal; but if the people demanded he be a moderate, he would suddenly discover that he was a moderate.

That isn’t Barry Hussein.  He is a hard-core ideologue.  People like me tried to warn you that the man who spent 23 years in a racist, anti-American, Marxist church would be such an ideologue.

Barry will destroy his presidency, and destroy the Democrat Party, in order to advance an agenda that is far more radical than the American people understood when they elected him.

Say hello to Obama’s little friend, the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Update, November 24:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 27% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -15. This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama (see trends).

Fifty-two percent (52%) of Democrats Strongly Approve while 68% of Republicans Strongly Disapprove. Among those not affiliated with either major political party, just 16% Strongly Approve and 51% Strongly Disapprove (see other recent demographic highlights from the tracking poll).

Oh, oh, Democrats.  It looks like independents utterly despise your Messiah.

Democrats Sinking Down To Crazy Town In Polls

From Real Clear Politics:

November 11, 2009

Why Things Don’t Look Good For Dems In The Midterms

Independent political observers and Democrats themselves have been saying for months that 2010 is shaping up as a bad year for Democratic candidates, and the latest Gallup generic congressional ballot test only reinforces the point. Not only do Republicans lead 48 percent to 44 percent, but independents now favor the GOP by 52 percent to 30 percent.

Although generic Republican candidates hold just a 4-point lead, the GOP’s perpetual turnout advantage means their lead would likely be higher if the midterm elections were today. Even a single-digit lead for Democrats in Gallup’s testing often only means the two parties will be competitive, as more registered voters identify with the Democratic Party but more Republicans go to the polls on Election Day.

In the final Gallup survey before the 1998 midterms, Republicans trailed by 9 points but still went on to win a small majority of House seats. In the 2002 midterms, Republicans were down 5 points just before the election but again kept a slim majority in the House.

A year before the 2006 midterm elections –when Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress — generic congressional ballot testing forecast the shifting mood of the country. An August 2005 Gallup survey found Democrats leading by 12 points — one of the widest margins between the parties Gallup had found since the GOP took back Congress in 1994.

That survey was far from the only one to show a shifting mood. This is the first Gallup survey to show Republicans leading this cycle, and while a year is a long time in politics, the poll falls in line with other signs pointing in the GOP’s direction.

“It’s better to look at a series of these polls than one of them, but the fact is Republicans haven’t led the generic ballot since the stone ages,” said David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the Cook Political Report. “Any sort of deficit is dangerous for Democrats because their support is more heavily concentrated within a few base districts.”

The last time Republicans led was September 2008, just after the Republican National Convention. The poll was an outlier, as no other generic ballot test by any other polling firm had shown Republicans leading in at least four years. None did soon after, either, and Democrats went on expand their majority to more than 75 seats in the House.

Further significance in the poll is the shift among independent voters. The 22-point advantage for Republicans is a far cry from July, when the two parties were statistically tied. The migration of independents toward the GOP mirrors what occurred in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections last week, when a Republican knocked off the incumbent governor in the Garden State and the GOP nominee won by nearly 20 points in the Old Dominion.

The independent swing shows in the new Pew Research survey also released today. It found incumbents — most of which are Democrats these days — in a perilous place, with just 52 percent saying they want their representative re-elected and only 34 percent say most representatives should be re-elected.

“Both measures are among the most negative in two decades of Pew Research surveys,” Pew reports. “Other low points were during the 1994 and 2006 election cycles, when the party in power suffered large losses in midterm elections.”

The latest Gallup survey was conducted Nov. 5-8 of 894 registered voters with a margin of error of +/- 4 percent. The Pew poll was taken Oct. 28-Nov. 8 of 1,644 registered voters.

First of all, let’s look at how the Democrats have “progressed” in a single picture from Gallup:

You’ve got a 10 point swing in the four months that Democrats have fixated on Obamacare, with Democrats losing 6 points, and Republicans gaining 4 points.

And when you see independents now trending Republican over Democrat by more than 20 points, all you can say is WOW.

Obama currently has an approval of -9 (meaning that 9% more voters strongly disapprove of him than strongly approve.  And only 47% of voters at least somewhat approve of him.  That according to the best pollster, Rasmussen, which nailed the results of the 2008 election.

Humorist Dennis Miller, commenting following the disastrous-for-Democrats 2009 off year-election, said that Obama has “smaller coattails than a naked midget.”  If Democrats are counting on Obama to win them re-election, they’d better think some more.

Just keep drinking that Kool-aid, Democrats.  And if it tastes like it has cyanide in it, don’t trouble yourselves.

The current Democrat fairy tale is that the reason Democrats took such a historic pounding in 1994 was because Democrats had failed to pass their massive government takeover of health care.  But the fact is that they got driven out of office because they’d TRIED to pass such an evil monstrosity, and the public didn’t want any more of their poison.

And now here we are again.  And the 2009 off-year elections actually shows Republicans having even greater success than they did at the 1993 off-year elections, which preceded and anticipated the massive rejection of Democrats in 1994.

The funny thing is that during the last two elections from 2006 and 2008, it was Republicans ignoring or explaining away the polls.  Now it’s Democrats.

Go ahead and be the proverbial ostrich, Democrats – or worse yet be this guy

– but the way things are going, you won’t like the “change” you’ll be confronted with when you finally pull your heads out.

 

Democrats In Process Of Checkmating Themselves

Great article from Forbes:

Democrats Checkmate Themselves

November 10th, 2009

Liberals are fond of calling Republicans “the stupid party.” That might need revision. It appears to me that Democrats have checkmated themselves. Here is the logic:

If Obamacare makes it through the Senate, American small businesses will continue to shrink their payrolls to avoid the awful choice of paying higher health care insurance premiums or the 8% added payroll tax. Unemployment is sure to rise. The Dems will face the November 2010 elections with 12% unemployment … closer to Depression levels of 20% by the so-called broader measures.

If Obamacare fails to pass, the left-wing base will be so demoralized as to not show up at the polls in 2010. Or they will be so angry that they might start a 1968-like interparty war.

My Checkmate Theory is based on small-business fear of Obama’s signature issues–health care, cap-and-trade and union card check. Health care is at the plate now. The fate of health care in the U.S. Senate will set the passage odds for cap-and-trade and union card check next year. All three of Obama’s signature issues are opposed by most small businesses, including the American Chamber of Commerce.

Here are two revealing stories reporting the economic struggles and political fears of small businesses:

USA Today

Small businesses often lead the nation out of recession. Not this time.

The unemployment rate jumped to 10.2% in October from 9.8% in September, and economists say a big reason is small businesses. With sales weak, they’re still slashing jobs and faring worse than their larger rivals.

“Small business tends to lead the way out, and that’s just not happening here,” says Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com.

The Wall Street Journal

W. Michael Brown has scaled back hiring plans in his Virginia auto-parts stores. Carl Redman halted an expansion project at his Oregon contracting business. Bill Hammack is preparing layoffs at his road-construction company in Georgia.

The economy remains unsteady 22 months after the recession began, with banks restricting credit and consumers hunkering down. For these small businesses, and many others across the country, there’s an additional dark cloud: uncertainty created by Washington’s bid to reorganize a wide swath of the U.S. economy.

If American small businesses stay hunkered down, unemployment will stay up. That’s because small businesses historically have created the majority of net jobs in any economy. They’ve created almost all net jobs in the first two years of a recovery. But not this time. Not yet.

The liberal writer Michael Lind is happy to see government put the screws to small businesses. In Lind’s opinion, small businesses are nothing more than a collection of Scrooges and Marleys. No doubt his opinion of small business is shared by many in the Democratic Party’s activist wing:

The solution may be corporatism or corporate paternalism–by which I mean the mandatory universalization of private employer benefits. If the politics of ethnic diversity makes movement in a universalist, social democratic direction impossible in the U.S., then the alternative might be to mandate that all employers provide certain benefits to all employees, with no exceptions. The costs of such unfunded mandates might drive some small businesses out of existence. But small-business owners are the most vocal opponents of wage and benefit reform in the U.S. The replacement of Scrooge & Marley by a smaller number of bigger private and public employers who treat Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim better would not necessarily be a tragedy.

Not a tragedy? Don’t be so quick, Democrats. You can’t have it both ways. Stick it to small businesses (through higher payroll taxes, cap-and-trade and union card check) and the assaulted will trim their payrolls until conditions clear, if ever. But if you don’t stick it to small businesses, your party’s activist base will go nuts.

You have checkmated yourselves, Democrats.

I know Democrats thought that pure arrogance and power hunger would be attractive ingredients, but it doesn’t seem to be working out for them.

If ObamaCare passes, small businesses know that they will be forced to pay high costs for every employee on their payroll.  Ergo sum, they aren’t too eager to hire new workers until the coast is clear and Obamacare has finally gone away.

If it doesn’t pass, the Kool-aid liberal base will go even more nuts than they already are and start a war within the Democrat Party.

The horns of a giant dilemma begin to take shape.

House Democrats Pass Worst Bill Ever To Destroy U.S. Health Care, Economy

Congratulations, America.  This is what you’ve “won”:

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

The Worst Bill Ever
Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she’s prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that’s what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder. The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a “critical milestone,” may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.

In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.

Yet at this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan “reform” and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be “universal coverage.” The result will be destructive on every level—for the health-care system, for the country’s fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity.

•The spending surge. The Congressional Budget Office figures the House program will cost $1.055 trillion over a decade, which while far above the $829 billion net cost that Mrs. Pelosi fed to credulous reporters is still a low-ball estimate.  Most of the money goes into government-run “exchanges” where people earning between 150% and 400% of the poverty level—that is, up to about $96,000 for a family of four in 2016—could buy coverage at heavily subsidized rates, tied to income. The government would pay for 93% of insurance costs for a family making $42,000, 72% for another making $78,000, and so forth.

At least at first, these benefits would be offered only to those whose employers don’t provide insurance or work for small businesses with 100 or fewer workers. The taxpayer costs would be far higher if not for this “firewall”—which is sure to cave in when people see the deal their neighbors are getting on “free” health care. Mrs. Pelosi knows this, like everyone else in Washington.

Even so, the House disguises hundreds of billions of dollars in additional costs with budget gimmicks. It “pays for” about six years of program with a decade of revenue, with the heaviest costs concentrated in the second five years. The House also pretends Medicare payments to doctors will be cut by 21.5% next year and deeper after that, “saving” about $250 billion. ObamaCare will be lucky to cost under $2 trillion over 10 years; it will grow more after that.

• Expanding Medicaid, gutting private Medicare. All this is particularly reckless given the unfunded liabilities of Medicare—now north of $37 trillion over 75 years. Mrs. Pelosi wants to steal $426 billion from future Medicare spending to “pay for” universal coverage. While Medicare’s price controls on doctors and hospitals are certain to be tightened, the only cut that is a sure thing in practice is gutting Medicare Advantage to the tune of $170 billion. Democrats loathe this program because it gives one of out five seniors private insurance options.

As for Medicaid, the House will expand eligibility to everyone below 150% of the poverty level, meaning that some 15 million new people will be added to the rolls as private insurance gets crowded out at a cost of $425 billion. A decade from now more than a quarter of the population will be on a program originally intended for poor women, children and the disabled.

Even though the House will assume 91% of the “matching rate” for this joint state-federal program—up from today’s 57%—governors would still be forced to take on $34 billion in new burdens when budgets from Albany to Sacramento are in fiscal collapse. Washington’s budget will collapse too, if anything like the House bill passes.

• European levels of taxation. All told, the House favors $572 billion in new taxes, mostly by imposing a 5.4-percentage-point “surcharge” on joint filers earning over $1 million, $500,000 for singles. This tax will raise the top marginal rate to 45% in 2011 from 39.6% when the Bush tax cuts expire—not counting state income taxes and the phase-out of certain deductions and exemptions. The burden will mostly fall on the small businesses that have organized as Subchapter S or limited liability corporations, since the truly wealthy won’t have any difficulty sheltering their incomes.

This surtax could hit ever more earners because, like the alternative minimum tax, it isn’t indexed for inflation. Yet it still won’t be nearly enough. Even if Congress had confiscated 100% of the taxable income of people earning over $500,000 in the boom year of 2006, it would have only raised $1.3 trillion. When Democrats end up soaking the middle class, perhaps via the European-style value-added tax that Mrs. Pelosi has endorsed, they’ll claim the deficits that they created made them do it.

Under another new tax, businesses would have to surrender 8% of their payroll to government if they don’t offer insurance or pay at least 72.5% of their workers’ premiums, which eat into wages. Such “play or pay” taxes always become “pay or pay” and will rise over time, with severe consequences for hiring, job creation and ultimately growth. While the U.S. already has one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world, Democrats are on the way to creating a high structural unemployment rate, much as Europe has done by expanding its welfare states.

Meanwhile, a tax equal to 2.5% of adjusted gross income will also be imposed on some 18 million people who CBO expects still won’t buy insurance in 2019. Democrats could make this penalty even higher, but that is politically unacceptable, or they could make the subsidies even higher, but that would expose the (already ludicrous) illusion that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit.

• The insurance takeover. A new “health choices commissioner” will decide what counts as “essential benefits,” which all insurers will have to offer as first-dollar coverage. Private insurers will also be told how much they are allowed to charge even as they will have to offer coverage at virtually the same price to anyone who applies, regardless of health status or medical history.

The cost of insurance, naturally, will skyrocket. The insurer WellPoint estimates based on its own market data that some premiums in the individual market will triple under these new burdens. The same is likely to prove true for the employer-sponsored plans that provide private coverage to about 177 million people today. Over time, the new mandates will apply to all contracts, including for the large businesses currently given a safe harbor from bureaucratic tampering under a 1974 law called Erisa.

The political incentive will always be for government to expand benefits and reduce cost-sharing, trampling any chance of giving individuals financial incentives to economize on care. Essentially, all insurers will become government contractors, in the business of fulfilling political demands: There will be no such thing as “private” health insurance.
***

All of this is intentional, even if it isn’t explicitly acknowledged. The overriding liberal ambition is to finish the work began decades ago as the Great Society of converting health care into a government responsibility. Mr. Obama’s own Medicare actuaries estimate that the federal share of U.S. health dollars will quickly climb beyond 60% from 46% today. One reason Mrs. Pelosi has fought so ferociously against her own Blue Dog colleagues to include at least a scaled-back “public option” entitlement program is so that the architecture is in place for future Congresses to expand this share even further.

As Congress’s balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can’t regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of “change,” but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi’s handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated.

In 2008, America voted for national suicide, whether they understood it or not.  While it is increasingly obvious that Americans are rethinking their suicide pact with the Democrat Party, and beginning to change their minds, Democrats are nevertheless racing ahead to finish the job of destroying the country while they still can.

Think Cloward-Piven.  The Democrats believe that they are creating a “win we win, lose we win” stratagem.  If by some increasingly unlikely miracle our massive unprecedented debt-financed spending doesn’t cause the entire economic structure to implode, Democrats will be in a position to claim credit for their “success.”  If, far more likely, the economy self-destructs under the weight of the mind-boggling debts and economic hamstringing foisted upon us by the liberal agenda, Democrats are counting upon the fact that hungry, desperate, panicking people will turn to massive government structures to feed them and help them from the very problems that massive government structures caused in the first place.