Mike Kelly Speech: The Cost Of Obama Is The Cost Of Red Tape Is The Cost Of A $1.75 Trillion Boot On The Throat Of American Businesses

Rep. Mike Kelly (Republican from Pennsylvania) got a standing ovation and cheers of USA! USA to this short speech:

You can see the video of this speech here.

What’s the cost of red tape?  Obama adds “layer after layer after layer of costs” to American businesses which get passed on to American consumers and kill jobs and economic growth.

Obama is a liar who claims he has cut the taxes of most Americans.  Excuse my language, but that is BULLSHIT and ObamaCare ALONE proves it’s bullshit.  But consider that even the enormous taxation on the middle class of ObamaCare is NOTHING compared to the taxes this failed president has imposed on the American people.  In fact the government regulation that Obama champions have created a $1.75 TRILLION cost to Americans – which is more than TWICE the amount of all the federal income taxes that the US government collects.

Youtube link:

Is regulation a hidden tax on all Americans?

The costs of regulation are inevitably passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and limited product choices. Basic items, such as toilets, showerheads, light bulbs, mattresses, washing machines, dryers, cars, ovens, refrigerators, television sets, and bicycles all cost significantly more because of government decrees on energy use, product labeling, and performance standards that go well beyond safety—as well as hundreds of millions of hours of testing and paperwork to document compliance.

The annual cost of regulation—$1.75 trillion by one frequently cited estimate—represents twice the amount of individual income taxes collected last year. Overall, from the beginning of the Obama Administration to mid-fiscal year (FY) 2011, regulators have imposed $38 billion in new costs on the American people, more than any comparable period on record. Consider Washington’s red tape to be a hidden tax.

Obama isn’t the first president who ever regulated anything, but his policies have created FAR more regulations and FAR more bureaucracies than any other American president in history.

59% of business owners understand that Barack Obama is a clear and present threat to them and to your job – if you even have one under this failed president and his failed policies.  And 200,000 businesses have folded since Obama got elected.  But Obama and Democrats just keep piling on and on and on ad nauseum.

Fools (Proverbs 26:11) and wicked people (Proverbs 11:5, 16:4) sow the seeds that create their own destruction.  That’s pretty much all your Democrats in those two categories.

Gov. Candidate ‘MoonBeam’ Brown Has A Plan Guaranteed To Save California; But You Have To Elect Him To Find Out What It Is

I have a secret plan to save the planet.  And if you give me all your money, I’ll tell you what it is.

That’s basically Jerry Brown’s current campaign platform, in a very nutty nutshell.

Are Californians crazy enough to buy that?  Judging from the fact that Obama won California by the biggest margin in history, yeah, they are.

We ARE the state that has all the moral-moron movie-star meatheads telling us how we should vote, after all.

Zen and art of political machine maintenance
Debra J. Saunders
San Francisco Chronicle September 12, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010

Jerry Brown has a secret plan to balance the state budget. When the state attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial nominee recently visited The Chronicle’s editorial board, he brought with him a large three-ring binder with his ideas on how to bring state spending back into the black. But he wouldn’t tell us what was in the book.

I asked him what he, as governor, would do that state employee labor unions, which are spending millions to get him elected, won’t like. He answered, “Well, I’m certainly not going to tell you now.”

And: “I’m not going to reveal my negotiating strategy now. I’m going to try to push everybody together.”

Also: “The next governor has to be an honest broker, somebody that people feel is being straight and is talking to them in a real way.  I think I can do that.”

This is talking in a real way? Trying to figure out what Brown means is like trying to decipher the Da Vinci Code.

When Editorial Page Editor John Diaz asked what tough calls Brown was willing to make, he answered, “There’s only a process that will lead us to where we’re going.”

When Diaz asked how Brown might want to change Proposition 13, Brown said he had no plans to change Prop. 13 in his notebook. But: “The way I would put it is, everything is on the table and everyone’s at the table.”

Brown is the first candidate for governor in memory who is running for office on no platform so that he can be elected with no mandate.

This has to remind you of the perennially-eyes-widened-in-surprise House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s breathless and braindead statement regarding ObamaCare:

You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

Well, we’ve got ObamaCare now, and we’re starting to find out what’s in it.

What do the American people think?  And what were they thinking the entire time Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the Democrats in Congress, and President Barry Hussein were ramming it down our throats?

From Rasmussen, September 6, 2010:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% of Likely U.S. voters favor repeal of the law, with 45% who Strongly Favor it. Thirty-eight percent (38%) oppose repeal, including 30% who are Strongly Opposed.

A majority has favored repeal of the legislation every single week since Congress passed the health care bill in March. Support for repeal has ranged from a low of 52% to a high of 63%.

We never liked it.  We never wanted it.  But SURPRISE!!!  And tag, you’re it.  Maybe Sarah Palin is wrong about the death panels, even though it looks like there are at least 160 of them contained in the 2400 page monstrosity.  But that would only be because ObamaCare will be more like the famously creepy short story The Lottery than a simple death panel.

We’re hearing more and more godawful details of ObamaCare now, you know, that thing that Democrats had to pass so we could find out what’s in it.  And now it’s so obvious that the thing is not only bad, but evil, that not one single Democrat in more than 230 national races is acknowledging that he or she voted for it.

Now, the people didn’t get to actually vote for ObamaCare.  If they’d had that choice, we’d be still be dancing around the embers of its burning ceremony now.  Instead, it was rammed down our throats by Democrats, who arrogantly predicted that those who voted against their vile takeover of the health care system would be hurt in November.

But now the people finally get the chance to say who’s going to be hurt in November.

I hope the citizens of California won’t be as dumb as they’ve been in the past.

This ad by Meg Whitman might well be the dagger through the undead heart of Jerry Brown’s hopes for further ruining the state of California:

Go away, Jerry.  Go away mad, but go away.  We don’t need more Democrat mystery meat.

Why ObamaCare Passage Marks A Day That Shall Live In Infamy

The pundits have rightly compared the gigantic ObamaCare bill with the Roosevelt administration – if nothing else than because we haven’t seen any government program so gigantic since then.

In a way that is very fitting.  Because we can bookend December 7, 1941 and March 21, 2010 with the same prediction: a day that shall live in infamy.

December 7th was a disaster because FDR utterly failed to see a clear and present danger building on opposite sides of both oceans.  We failed to take precautions.  We failed to arm ourselves.  We even failed to protect ourselves.  What made it so criminal was that we had years of ample warning, but simply chose to ignore it.

March 21 was hardly a surprise, either.  Just as with December 7, a lot of Americans saw it coming, but lacked the power to do anything but point and shout about the coming disaster.  The major difference is that on December 7, 1941, our government failed to protect our way of life, whereas on March 21, 2010, our government actively attacked our way of life.

And now it is here.  And now that it is here, it will grow like a cancer.  Slowly at first – it doesn’t fully kick in until 2014 – and then it will erupt like a big poisonous mushroom.

Charles Krauthammer described what the passage of ObamaCare means with his usual brilliance:

“Nonetheless, it will be the law of the land as of tonight and we’re going to be a different country.  We are on our way, there is absolutely no chance we are not going to end up with national health care.   This is nationalizing health care, the insurance companies are now utilities, they are contractors. the government makes all of these decisions, only a matter of time and will probably happen after the Obama administration.  But he will be remembered as the father of national health care as they have in Canada or Britain and it starts tonight.”

Krauthammer is in no way exaggerating or politicizing the regulatory takeover of private insurance companies by the government under ObamaCare.  That can be demonstrated merely by examine what Dennis Kucinich said about ObamaCare and about the role of private insurance companies before he went ahead and voted for it anyway:

• “I don’t know what there is for my constituents”
• It’s “a license to just steal money from people”
• ObamaCare is a “giveaway to the insurance industry”
• This bill is “not going to protect consumers from these rapid premium increases
• It provides “no guarantees of any control over premiums”
• It is “forcing people to buy private insurance”
• It’s going to result in “five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases”
• “I just don`t see that this bill is the solution”
• “The insurance companies are the problem and we`re giving them a version of a bailout”
• “This bill doesn`t change the fact that the insurance companies are going to keep socking it to the consumer”
• It results in a “giveaway to the insurance industry”
• “You`re building on sand. There`s no structure here”
• If we pass this bill, “all we`re going to have is more poverty in this country”
• If we pass this bill, “people aren`t going to get the care that they need”

This remaking of private insurance companies as utilities, as contractors for the government, is fascism, pure and simple.  The government didn’t nationalize them, as it would do under communism, but it created a massive new set of regulations, and bureaucracies, and mandates, and taxes that quintessentially takes them over as agents of the state.  And that is what fascism is all about:

The entry under “Fascism” in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics reads in part:

Where socialism [i.e., communism] sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”–that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities.

And that is exactly what is happening.  Liberals may not like my term, but it couldn’t be more applicable here.  Obama demonized the insurance companies, and he will now regulate and control and dominate them “in the national interest.”

ObamaCare amounts to a regulatory takeover of the private health insurance companies.  They will be told what to do, how to do it, and how much to charge (although you might see them massively raise rates in preparation to protect themselves for the onslaught that is coming their way).  The government under Obama already owns General Motors and Chrysler.  His administration already essentially owns many banking institutions.  The government under Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac controls more than 90 percent of the nation’s secondary mortgage market.  And Paul Volcker acknowledged that “the federal government was responsible for up to 95 percent of all new home mortgages in the fourth quarter of 2009.”

Even the student loan industry was effectively nationalized under ObamaCare.

It’s naked fascism.  And that fascism which was slowly trickling onto us during the Bush years has now become an massive avalanche under Obama.

Fascism is bad, of course.  But the economic consequences of this fascist takeover of our health care system may be even worse than the political ones.

As for that, consider what Weekly Standard journalist Steve Hayes said (link includes video of the following):

“I think that if you take a step back from this the real story here is is the deficit and that story.  Everybody’s familiar with the debt clock; we’ve all seen how fast it moves.  This is going to put it on double time or triple time because when you go back and you look at the history of entitlements in the country, that’s the pattern.  There are promises that this is going to cut deficits or debt, and it never does.  You look back at at what FDR said when he signed Social Security into law in July 1935. He said it would act as a protection for future administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. He also said this is a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States and economic structure of vastly greater soundness. Social Security today?  $43 Trillion dollar unfunded liability – that’s 400 thousand dollars per household in the United States today. And you go back to 1965.  LBJ did the same thing. You saw Nancy Pelosi carrying the gavel – it’s the same argument.  He said it would be $1.50 a month for the average worker.  $1.50 a month.  Three dollars per month after you’re 65.  Today, Medicare has a $57 trillion dollar unfunded liability.  $500,000 dollars per American household.  This will bankrupt the country.”

FDR said in 1935 when he signed Social Security into law:

It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.

$43 TRILLION dollars of unfunded liability.  That is $400,000 for every household in the country.  That is $184,000 for every single man, woman, and child in the country.  Please pay up now.

Does that sound like something that lessened the force of possible future ANYTHING? A protection to future administrations against the necessity of going deeply in debt???  Something that provides the United States with an economic structure of vastly greater soundness???  We’re doomed.

Maybe you don’t care that this giant boondoggle is going to crash and burn your country, and that your children or grandchildren will literally die as a result of your greed and selfishness.  But I do.

They promised us a bogus Utopia, and that Utopia is about to collapse into the fiery pit of hell.

What was it that Lyndon Johnson promised us when he sold his load of Medicare malarkey?

Now here is how the plan will affect you.

During your working years, the people of America–you–will contribute through the social security program a small amount each payday for hospital insurance protection. For example, the average worker in 1966 will contribute about $1.50 per month. The employer will contribute a similar amount. And this will provide the funds to pay up to 90 days of hospital care for each illness, plus diagnostic care, and up to 100 home health visits after you are 65. And beginning in 1967, you will also be covered for up to 100 days of care in a skilled nursing home after a period of hospital care.

And under a separate plan, when you are 65–that the Congress originated itself, in its own good judgment–you may be covered for medical and surgical fees whether you are in or out of the hospital. You will pay $3 per month after you are 65 and your Government will contribute an equal amount.

Let me tell you how Medicare affects me: It affects me with a $57 trillion unfunded liability.  It affects me with a bill of $500,000 for every single household in America.  It affects me with an individual bill (that every single man, woman, and child in this country owes) of $230,000.

The forerunner of the CBO underestimated the actual cost of Medicare by a whopping factor of 10.  If they repeat their little boo-boo, ObamaCare will cost $10 trillion dollars over ten years, and the United States will completely collapse as an independent nation-state.

And that’s $230,ooo on top of the $184,000 I owe for Medicare.  I owe $414,000.  And my household owns $900,000.  And great googly moogly, we don’t got it.  We’re on a speeding train that is going to keep hurtling along until it flies off a cliff and crashes.

Hey, I got an idea: let’s double that.  Hell, let’s triple it.

If you believe that the government is going to create a trillion dollar entitlement that ensures 47 million more people – (John Larson, chairman of the Democratic caucus, used the “47 million” figure on ABCs “This Week” just yesterday; he used it again on CNNs “State of the Union”) and spends less money than is spent now, you are an abject fool.

And that “47 million” clearly includes 17 million illegal immigrants.  The Democrats’ incredibly cynical plan is to take health resources from you and from your children and grandchildren and give those resources to illegal immigrants so they can capture the Hispanic vote.

The metaphor is a dozen people rushing into your house to eat your food and consume your resources while your own kids go hungry.  No one would do this.  But your government is doing it under Democrat Party tyranny.

The real cost of this bill is over $6 TRILLION.  The Democrats filled their legislation with gimmicks, such as assuming they would cut doctors’ Medicare reimbursements by 21% when they know they won’t, then putting that “Doctor fix” in another bill.  That will add $208 billion to the real cost of their plan.  Then they falsely start the bill’s ten-year score in 2010, when the benefits don’t start getting paid out until 2014.  That accounting deceit masks the fact that the REAL cost of the bill is $2.3 trillion.

The $6 trillion (PLUS!!!) figure comes from the biggest and most despicable shenanigan of all: all the money from American citizens who will be unconstitutionally forced to purchase health insurance isn’t counted in the CBO score.  At all.  Not one penny.

In other words, your ObamaCare – which really isn’t even deficit neutral at all – was sold as “deficit neutral” because it doesn’t count the trillions and trillions of dollars that American citizens will be compelled by their government to pay for health insurance.

ObamaCare amounted to the slitting of the national wrists.  And we’re going to start bleeding out until we either abandon it or die.

The Republicans have a few more tactics to fight this bill, but they amount to starting backfires to try to temporarily contain a massive hungry forest fire.  It won’t be enough, and it probably won’t ultimately succeed.

Thirty-eight states and counting are now working to preempt the ObamaCare disaster by protecting their citizens from this disgraceful and unconstitutional boondoggle.

Having this monster 2,700-page government takeover of health care may be the only chance this nation has of avoiding a very-near term financial implosion.

If this bill isn’t stopped, one day Americans will look back at the late great former United States of America and realize that that was the anvil that broke the camel’s back.

Who REALLY Exploded Your Economy, Liberals Or Conservatives?

From Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny, pages 67-71:

From where does the Statist acquire his clairvoyance in determining what is good for the public?  From his ideology.  The Statist is constantly manipulating public sentiment in a steady effort to disestablish the free market, as he pushes the nation down tyranny’s road.  He has built an enormous maze of government agencies and programs, which grow inexorably from year to year, and which intervene in and interfere with the free market.  And when the Statist’s central planners create economic perversions that are seriously detrimental to the public, he blames the free market and insists on seizing additional authority to correct the failures created at his own direction.

Consider the four basic events that led to the housing bust of 2008, which spread to the financial markets and beyond:

EVENT 1: In 1977, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to address alleged discrimination by banks in making loans to poor people and minorities in the inner cities (redlining).  The act provided that banks have “an affirmative obligation” to meet the credit needs of the communities in which they are chartered.¹ In 1989, Congress amended the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act requiring banks to collect racial data on mortgage applications.² University of Texas economics professor Stan Liebowitz has written that “minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications, but the overwhelming reason wasn’t racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.”³ Liebowitz also condemns a 1992 study conducted by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank that alleged systemic discrimination.  “That study was tremendously flawed.  A colleague and I … showed that the data it had used contained thousands of egregious typos, such as loans with negative interest rates.  Our study found no evidence of discrimination.”⁴ However, the study became the standard on which government policy was based.

In 1995, the Clinton administration’s Treasury Department issued regulations tracking loans by neighborhoods, income groups, and races to rate the performance of banks.  The ratings were used by regulators to determine whether the government would approve bank mergers, acquisitions, and new branches.⁵ The regulations also encouraged Statist-aligned groups, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, to file petitions with regulators, or threaten to, to slow or even prevent banks from conducting their business by challenging the extent to which banks were issuing these loans.  With such powerful leverage over banks, some groups were able, in effect, to legally extort banks to make huge pools of money available to the groups, money they in turn used to make loans.  The banks and community groups issued loans to low-income individuals who often had bad credit or insufficient income.  And these loans, which became known as “subprime” loans, made available 100 percent financing, did not always require the use of credit scores, and were even made without documenting income.⁶ Therefore, the government insisted that banks, particularly those that wanted to expand, abandon traditional underwriting standards.  One estimate puts the figure of CRA-eligible loans at $4.5 trillion.⁷

EVENT 2: In 1992, the Department of Housing and Urban Development pressured two government-chartered corporations – known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae – to purchase (or “securitize”) large bundles of these loans for the conflicting purposes of diversifying the risks and making even more money available to banks to make further risky loans.  Congress also passed the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act, eventually mandating that these companies buy 45% of all loans from people of low and moderate incomes.⁸ Consequently, a SECONDARY MARKET was created for these loans.  And in 1995, the Treasury Department established the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which provided banks with tax dollars to encourage even more risky loans.

For the Statist, however, this was still not enough.  Top congressional Democrats, including Representative Barney Frank (Massachusetts), Senator Christopher Dodd (Connecticut), and Senator Charles Schumer (New York), among others, repeatedly ignored warnings of pending disaster, insisting that they were overstated, and opposed efforts to force Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to comply with usual business and oversight practices.⁹ And the top executives of these corporations, most of whom had worked in or with Democratic administrations, resisted reform while they were actively cooking the books in order to award themselves tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.¹⁰

EVENT 3: A by-product of this government intervention and social engineering was a financial instrument called the “derivative,” which turned the subprime mortgage market into a ticking time bomb that could magnify the housing bust by orders of magnitude.  A derivative is a contract where one party sells the risk associated with the mortgage to another party in exchange for payments to that company based on the value of the mortgage.  In some cases, investors who did not even make the loans would bet on whether the loans would be subject to default.  Although imprecise, perhaps derivatives in this context can best be understood as a form of insurance.  Derivatives allowed commercial and investment banks, individual companies, and private investors to further spread – and ultimately multiply – the risk associated with their mortgages.  Certain financial and insurance institutions invested heavily in derivatives, such as American International Group (AIG).¹¹

EVENT 4:  The Federal Reserve Board’s role in the housing boom-and-bust cannot be overstated.  The Pacific Research Institute’s Robert P. Murphy explains that “[the Federal Reserve] slashed rates repeatedly starting in January 2001, from 6.5 percent until they reached a low in June 2003 of 1.0 percent.  (In nominal terms, this was the lowest the target rate had been in the entire data series maintained by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, going back to 1982)….  When the easy-money policy became too inflationary for comfort, the Fed (under [Alan] Greenspan and the then new Chairman Ben Bernanke at the end) began a steady process of raising interest rates back up, from 1.0 percent in June 2004 to 5.25 percent in June 2006….”¹² Therefore, when the Federal Reserve abandoned its role as steward of the monetary system and used interest rates to artificially and inappropriately manipulate the housing market, it interfered with normal market conditions and contributed to destabilizing the economy.

————————————————————————————————

¹ Howard Husock, “The Trillion-Dollar Shakedown that Bodes Ill for Cities,” City Journal, Winter 2000.

² Stan Liebowitz, “The Real Scandal,” New York Post, Feb. 5, 2008.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Howard Husock, “The Financial Crisis and the CRA,” City Journal, Oct. 30, 2008.

⁶ Liebowitz, “The Real Scandal.”

⁷ Husock, “The Financial Crisis and the CRA.”

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Editorial, “Fannie Mae’s Patron Saint,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2008; Joseph Goldstein, “Pro-Deregulation Schumer Scores Bush For Lack of Regulation,” New York Sun, Sept. 22, 2008; Robert Novack, “Crony Image Dogs Paulson’s Rescue Effort,” Chicago-Sun Times, July 17, 2008.

¹⁰ Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, “Report of the Special Examination of Freddie Mac,” Dec. 2003; Office of Federal Housing Oversight, “Report of the Special Examination of Fannie Mae,” May 2006.

¹¹ Lynnley Browning, “AIG’s House of Cards,” Portfolio.com, Sept. 28, 2008.

¹² Robert P. Murphy, “The Fed’s Role in the Housing Bubble,” Pacific Research Institute blog.

The government links from footnote 10 have been purged (and I COUNT on left-leaning “news” sources to purge stories that reveal the left for what it is), but there is plenty of evidence that a) Fannie and Freddie were firmly in the hands of Democrats; b) that Democrats and Fannie/Freddie at least twice resisted reforms by President Bush and Republicans; and c) that Fannie and Freddie executives – who were deeply involved with Democrat activism – actively cooked the books to obtain huge bonuses prior to the disastrous crash.  We can also demonstrate d) that Barack Obama and Chris Dodd were involved with corrupt Fannie and Freddie (and Obama and Dodd were also receiving large contributions from corrupt Lehman Bros. even as Obama was getting a sweetheart mortgage deal from corrupt Tony Rezko while Chris Dodd was getting sweetheart mortgage deasl from corrupt Countrywide) right up to the tops of their pointy little heads.

When one examines the actual factors that led to the housing mortgage meltdown (as Mark Levin documents), when one examines the Democrat’s patent refusal to even accept that there was even a problem with Fannie and Freddie – much less allow any regulation – prior to the ensuing disaster, and when one examines the record to see which politicians were receiving money from the parties most responsible for the disaster, there is clearly only one party to blame: the Democrat Party.

And they are right back to all their old tricks.  It was rampant and insane spending that got us into this financial black hole – and they want MORE on top of MORE spending.  Meanwhile, Democrats such as Barney Frank are hard at work trying to create the NEXT massively destructive housing bubble, ACORN is trying to seize houses from rightful owners in the name of the “poor,” liberals are making moral hazard that rewards recklessness and irresponsibility and punishes frugality and responsibility official government policy , even as the Obama administration is creating “solutions” to the foreclosure issue that have abjectly failed.

Swine Flu Pandemic And Why We DON’T Want Socialized Medicine

Let’s see. Obama unveils his socialized medicine plan just as the swine flu hits the headlines. The Teleprompter of the United States of America told Americans that the swine flu proved that $12.8 trillion of government spending isn’t enough. You’d almost think there was a hand on a switch somewhere.

The left – being the ideological partisan demagogues they are – immediately engaged in a “YES WE CAN . . . . blame the Republicans” campaign.

If they didn’t demonize, they wouldn’t be Democrats. And when I talk about “the Dems,” you know I’m referring to “the Demagogues.”

As a matter of practical reality, the administration may be right in not wanting to take the economy-harming step of closing the border with one of our top trading partners (although there are LEVELS of closing the border – and we NEED to do a MUCH better job of protecting our borders). But their argument for not closing the border is absolutely pathetic. They claim that since the flu is now here, closing the border would be tantamount to closing the barn after the horse has left. The problem with the logic of their argument is that there are clearly way too many infected horses in Mexico who are infecting still healthy American horses.

Mexico is a country of over one hundred million people – and it is a country in crisis. The first “American” causality of swine flu was a Mexican child who died in an American hospital. And infected Mexicans are continuing to flow across the border and infect Americans.

The difference in how the swine flue has hit Mexico versus the United States raises a very simple question:

Swine flu worse in Mexico than US, but why?
By MIKE STOBBE
AP Medical Writer

ATLANTA — Why has the swine flu engulfing Mexico been deadly there, but not in the United States?

Nearly all those who died in Mexico were between 20 and 40 years old, and they died of severe pneumonia from a flu-like illness believed caused by a unique swine flu virus.

The 11 U.S. victims cover a wider age range, as young as 9 to over 50. All those people either recovered or are recovering; at least two were hospitalized.

“So far we have been quite fortunate,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday, just hours before three new U.S. cases were confirmed.

Health experts worry about a flu that kills healthy young adults — a hallmark of the worst global flu epidemics. Deaths from most ordinary flu outbreaks occur among the very young and very old.

Why the two countries are experiencing the illness differently is puzzling public health experts, who say they frankly just don’t know.

Conservatives know.

But . . . but . . . Mexico has socialized medicine!

By JAMES TARANTO APRIL 27, 2009

This is a Bicentennial Minute. Eleven Americans, ranging in age from 9 to 50, have come down with swine flu, the Associated Press reports: “All those people either recovered or are recovering; at least two were hospitalized.”

In Mexico, however, the toll has been much worse. “About 70 deaths out of roughly 1,000 cases represents a fatality rate of about 7 percent,” the AP notes. This is far higher than the 2.5% fatality rate from the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, although the latter was many orders of magnitude more widespread, killing 40 million people world-wide.

“The Mexican rate sounds terrifying,” the AP writes. “But it’s possible that far more than 1,000 people have been infected with the virus and that many had few if any symptoms.” Which is somewhat, though not entirely, reassuring.

The AP dispatch is titled “Swine Flu Worse in Mexico Than US, but Why?” There’s no definitive answer, but here’s one of the possibilities:

Access to medical care has been an issue in Asia, where a rare bird flu–which does not spread easily from person-to-person–has killed more than 200 over the last several years. Maybe Mexican patients have also had trouble getting medical care or antiviral drugs, some have speculated–even though the government provides health care.

Wouldn’t this paragraph make more sense if it ended “. . . BECAUSE the government provides health care”?

You see, we have a successful health care system because we haven’t allowed the government to ruin it yet.

When Obama DOES ruin it by having the government take it over, we’ll be rationing our medical resources, too.

Obama inserted medical rationing into his porkulus package.

It was always such a no-brainer (so you’d think even our no-brain-no-pain liberals would understand): socialized medicine invariably leads to the rationing of health care resources. There were hard facts supporting this over a decade ago.

While Obama is saying, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” on socialized medicine, the very countries we are wanting to be like such as Canada have been saying, “This utopia isn’t working out so well.”

Do you recall the very recent death of actress Natasha Richardson on a Canadian ski resort? She very likely died as a result of socialized medicine, medical rationing, and poor diagnoses as a result of “the very finest care the government can provide.”

As long as there is private competition, you can always take your business elsewhere. That has always – up until Barack Obama and his fondness for nationalizing – led to be tendency of the free market to provide the best services at the lowest prices.

California – yes, liberal, Kool-Aid-drinking California – recently rejected socialized health care.

Allow me to quote myself as to Obama’s plan:

One thing is extremely important to understand: Obama’s health care plan is modeled on the Massachusetts plan. How are things going there? Well, in the three years of the program’s existence, the tiny state is now already facing cost overruns of over $400 million. Does that sound like a rousing success? Massachusetts is facing a projected 85% increase in its costs by 2009 – which should set up a serious red flag that such programs are MASSIVELY underfunded.

And Obama would take those massive cost overruns and multiply them like Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

Government run health care is based on a fool’s premise: that the government can save money by employing the economies of scale. The simple fact of the matter is that government bureaucracies, government boondoggles, government hyper-regulation, government susceptibility to massive systemic fraud, and government mismanagement will always kill the golden goose of scale. One hundred percent of the time.

Which was why the Senate couldn’t even run a damn cafeteria without going millions of dollars into the red.

The promise is that they will be able to cover millions more people for the same or less money by efficiency. But government is inherently inefficient. Which means they not only don’t SAVE money, they LOSE money. And then they’ve now got millions more people to cover.

Hence rationing. Hence more people die.