Obama’s Economic Legacy: Highest Poverty Rate Increases In 50 Years

Conservatives need to keep asking one simple question: How’s Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s “hope” and “change” working out for you?

Not so good if you’re poor.

It’s not so good if you’re working age.  Or if you’re a child.  Or if you’re black or Latino.

Of course, Democrats have been swindling voters for a generation that they’re out to help such people.  The only problem is that their rhetoric is a load of crap, and their policies actually end up hurting the people they deceitfully claim they’re most trying to help.

You know what they say: teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime; give him crummy handouts and he’ll be poor and dependent on Democrats until the day he dies.  Or at least until he develops the sense to start voting for conservatives who want to empower businesses to create jobs.

Notice I said “conservative,” not “Republican.”  Because there’s a huge difference between a true conservative and an Arlen Specter (before he revealed he was a Democrat all along), an Olympia Snowe, or even a Scott Brown.

We need a real change.  We don’t need “moderate Republican” (= “warmed-over Democrat”) policies, and the last two years should serve to demonstrate we certainly don’t need Democrat (= warmed-over socialist) policies.  We need something we haven’t seen in a long time: committed conservative solutions.

Otherwise 1 in 7 is going to become 1 in 6.  And then 1 in 5.

An article from the liberal Huffington Post:

Poverty Rate In U.S. Saw Record Increase In 2009: 1 In 7 Americans Are Poor
HOPE YEN and LIZ SIDOTI | 09/11/10

WASHINGTON — The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.

Census figures for 2009 – the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat’s presidency – are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings.

It’s unfortunate timing for Obama and his party just seven weeks before important elections when control of Congress is at stake. The anticipated poverty rate increase – from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent – would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power.

“The most important anti-poverty effort is growing the economy and making sure there are enough jobs out there,” Obama said Friday at a White House news conference. He stressed his commitment to helping the poor achieve middle-class status and said, “If we can grow the economy faster and create more jobs, then everybody is swept up into that virtuous cycle.”

Interviews with six demographers who closely track poverty trends found wide consensus that 2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent.

Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis.

Among the 18-64 working-age population, the demographers expect a rise beyond 12.4 percent, up from 11.7 percent. That would make it the highest since at least 1965, when another Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the war on poverty that expanded the federal government’s role in social welfare programs from education to health care.

Demographers also are confident the report will show:

_Child poverty increased from 19 percent to more than 20 percent.

_Blacks and Latinos were disproportionately hit, based on their higher rates of unemployment.

_Metropolitan areas that posted the largest gains in poverty included Modesto, Calif.; Detroit; Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla.; Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

“My guess is that politically these figures will be greeted with alarm and dismay but they won’t constitute a clarion call to action,” said William Galston, a domestic policy aide for President Bill Clinton. “I hope the parties don’t blame each other for the desperate circumstances of desperate people. That would be wrong in my opinion. But that’s not to say it won’t happen.”

Lawrence M. Mead, a New York University political science professor who is a conservative and wrote “The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America,” argued that the figures will have a minimal impact in November.

“Poverty is not as big an issue right now as middle-class unemployment. That’s a lot more salient politically right now,” he said.

But if Thursday’s report is as troubling as expected, Republicans in the midst of an increasingly strong drive to win control of the House, if not the Senate, would get one more argument to make against Democrats in the campaign homestretch.

The GOP says voters should fire Democrats because Obama’s economic fixes are hindering the sluggish economic recovery. Rightly or wrongly, Republicans could cite a higher poverty rate as evidence.

[snip]

The projections partly rely on a methodology by Rebecca Blank, a former poverty expert who now oversees the census. She estimated last year that poverty would hit about 14.8 percent if unemployment reached 10 percent. “As long as unemployment is higher, poverty will be higher,” she said in an interview then.

A formula by Richard Bavier, a former analyst with the White House Office of Management and Budget who has had high rates of accuracy over the last decade, predicts poverty will reach 15 percent.

That would put the rate at the highest level since 1993. The all-time high was 22.4 percent in 1959, the first year the government began tracking poverty. It dropped to a low of 11.1 percent in 1973 after Johnson’s war on poverty but has since fluctuated in the 12-14 percent range.

In 2008, the poverty level stood at $22,025 for a family of four, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income before tax deductions. It excludes capital gains or accumulated wealth. It does not factor in noncash government aid such as tax credits or food stamps, which have surged to record levels in recent years under the federal stimulus program.

Beginning next year, the government plans to publish new, supplemental poverty figures that are expected to show even higher numbers of people in poverty than previously known. The figures will take into account rising costs of medical care, transportation and child care, a change analysts believe will add to the ranks of both seniors and working-age people in poverty.

The mainstream liberal media are calling Afghanistan America’s longest war.  But it’s not even close to being our longest war: the Democrats’ “war on poverty” is far and away our longest war.  And it has been worse than Vietnam in terms of being a poorly-led and stupidly fought quagmire.

I see “metropolitan areas” and “blacks and Latinos” and I can’t help but laugh at the irony of it.  Many metropolitan areas – most definitely including the ones  that posted the “largest gains” in poverty – have voted Democrat for a hundred years.  And every new election cycle it has been like Charlie Brown and Lucy and the football – with Charlie Brown being the minorities and the poor, and Lucy being the Democrats, and the football being useless promises that will never be there when poor Charlie Brown tries to finally fulfill his dream of kicking that ball down the field to a successful life.

And blacks and Latinos have voted Democrat since that “war on poverty” began, when the very same Democrats who literally put blacks in the abject bonds of slavery began to realize that there was an even better way to keep these people “in their place.”

And they end up living out the definition of insanity, where they keep voting the exact same way for fifty years, and a hundred years, expecting a different result each and every time.

And they wonder why they’re still in poverty, after 50 election cycles of voting for it.

And, sadly, even if conservatives DO take over the House and the Senate, most of these metropolitan areas and the residents who are trapped in them will remain in poverty.  Why?  Because they will continue to vote the same insane way, and they will end up with representatives and city councils that will block meaningful reform for their districts and cities, and keep them stuck in the same godawful snake oil policies they were selling a century ago.

Do metropolitan cities and minority areas really want jobs?  They’re not going to get them in another fifty, hundred, thousand years; not when they keep voting for the likes of Rep. Maxine Waters:

Waters responded by saying in part, “And guess what this liberal would be all about. This liberal will be about socializing … uh, um. …” Recognizing she just let the liberal agenda out of the bag she paused to collect her thoughts and continued, “Would be about…, basically…, taking over…, and the government running all of your companies.”

You’ve really got to laugh at that quote by that Clinton hack William Galston who says he hopes the parties don’t “blame each other.”  Whenever Democrats are one-hundred percent to blame for a problem, that’s when they start saying, “Let’s not blame each other.”  If this disastrous news had come out during the Bush presidency, you can bet Democrats would be screaming about it.  And calling Bush a “racist” for letting it happen.

Do you think businesses and companies are going to locate their businesses where they’ll be under the thrall of these anti-business socialists who despise them?  Keep dreaming.  And keep demanding that businesses and companies live up to conditions that are impossible for them to meet in the real world and be profitable.  And keep remaining in poverty for the next five generations.

A couple of great quotations from a couple of great minds better explains the situation today than most modern minds could ever hope to equal:

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?” — Alexis de Tocqueville

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.” — C.S. Lewis

If Glenn Beck Hijacked Martin Luther King, Then Martin Luther King Hijacked Abraham Lincoln

A pretty good (certainly not completely objective, but by today’s horrendous standards of objectivity pretty good) article by Mary C. Curtis sets up the dilemma of Glenn Beck’s “8/28” rally at the Lincoln Memorial:

Glenn Beck Rally in D.C. Saturday: Honoring MLK’s Legacy — or Hijacking It?

Forty-seven years ago today, hundreds of thousands of Americans joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and witnessed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech, which summed up the hopes of generations.

Today, crowds are repeating that trek – by bus, train, car and plane — to the nation’s capital, with their own hopes and dreams about what America should stand for.

Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin — two conservative stars known more for their divisive political views than for their King-like stands for social justice — will lead Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally to pay tribute “to America’s service personnel and other upstanding citizens who embody our nation’s founding principles of integrity, truth and honor.”

At the same time, the National Action Network plans a “Reclaim the Dream” rally in Washington to honor King and the civil rights movement in its own way. Its leader, the Rev. Al Sharpton, acknowledges Beck’s right to rally, but not his claim to a part of King’s legacy.

One thing all sides and Glenn Beck himself can agree on: Beck is not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Nevertheless, when Beck and Palin speak to a crowd gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, just like that day in 1963, the symbolism will be unmistakable.

Cindy Spyker, who is driving a group of 10 from Charlotte, N.C, has been to Washington before, for the 9/12 taxpayer rally last year and the protest of the health care reform bill. A member of CAUTION (Common Americans United to Inspire Our Nation), she said Beck is “one of the very few people willing to say what needs to be said, whether people like it or not. America was created on Christian-Judeo values.” The country has “turned away from faith,” she said, and “has to get back to principles like honor.” Spyker, 51, said of today’s rally: “Of course, it’s not so much the civil rights thing. What he’s trying to get across — content of character — is not about what we look like. It’s about who we are and how do we conduct ourselves, especially when people aren’t watching.”

Marette Parker will be taking a bus from Charlotte to a different Washington destination. Parker, 42, who is organizing a North Carolina chapter of National Action Network, is attending the group’s rally, starting at Dunbar High School and followed by a march to the site of the proposed King Memorial, which she said is “long overdue.”

Parker said that if King were alive today, he would “be proud that times have changed,” but would be saddened by problems that still exist. “We all have to come together as a community,” she said, “to mentor and motivate our young people.” She thinks Beck’s rally is “trying to hijack this particular day and steal media coverage,” she said. “We can’t let this happen.”

On his radio show Wednesday, Beck said: “I know that people are going to hammer me because they’re going to say, ‘It’s no Martin Luther King speech.’ Of course it’s not Martin Luther King. You think I’m Martin Luther King?” He said he has prepared only a few talking points so he doesn’t get in the way of “the spirit.” Though he has said the date wasn’t chosen with the anniversary in mind, when he found out he called the coincidence “divine providence.”

Whites “do not own” the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, and “blacks don’t own Martin Luther King,” Beck said on his show in June. “Not only is the event non-political, we have continuously encouraged those attending to avoid bringing political signs, political flyers, ‘I heart the RNC’ T-shirts and other similar partisan paraphernalia. There are plenty of opportunities to talk about politics. This isn’t one of them.”

Like I said, Mary Curtis did fine.  Her only display of bias is her describing Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as harboring “divisive political views” without characterizing Al Sharpton the same way.  Because I can guarantee you that conservatives find Sharpton’s views every iota as divisive as liberals find Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s.  But I can live with that.

What I can’t live with is the notion that Glenn Beck has “hijacked” Martin Luther King, whether he intended to make the great civil rights leader a major part of his event or not.

So-called black “civil rights leaders” are arguing that Glenn Beck has no right to hold his August 28 event in front of the Lincoln Memorial because that hearkens us to Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech.  And that hijacks the legacy of Martin Luther King – who was black.

But if that’s the case, then Martin Luther King himself was hijacking the legacy of Abraham Lincoln – who was white.  Glenn Beck hit that one out of the park.

For those lefties who argue that Glenn Beck should be banned from “hijacking” King not because of race, but because of ideas, then conservatives can argue that King STILL hijacked Lincoln.  Because Abraham Lincoln didn’t stand for the radical race-based crap that the left argues that Martin Luther King epitomized.

The greatness of both Lincoln and King was that they transcended their race and became moral heroes of every people of every color and even every creed.

And like it or not, Glenn Beck has as much right to appeal to Martin Luther King as any black person does.  And it’s frankly racist to argue otherwise.

And speaking of racism, how would blacks have reacted had whites staged a counter-event to compete with, say, Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March?  You don’t think there would have been cries of outrage?  Yet that’s basically what Al Sharpton did today.

One of the interesting issues underlying this debate about “hijacking” comes from the most famous lines in King’s speech:

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

For the most part, that last line almost seems to be an embarrassment of the pseudo civil rights movement of today.  Maybe Martin Luther King said it, but he didn’t really mean it.  And conservatives are determined to hold the civil rights movement accountable to that standard.

As the pro-liberal and pro-Democrat so-called “civil rights leaders” denounce Glenn Beck and conservatives, which side is guilty of refusing to make “the color of their skin” the primary issue?

Allow me to quote myself:

I am beyond sick of this crap.  Where’s the CONGRESSIONAL WHITE CAUCUS that dedicates itself to securing political benefits for white people, and blacks be damned???  Where’s the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF WHITE PEOPLE that is operating with prestige and acclaim???  Where are the HISTORICALLY WHITE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES that exist to educate white students rather than black students???  Where’s the UNITED CAUCASIAN COLLEGE FUND that exists to give scholarships to white students for the sake of being white???  Where’s the NATIONAL WHITE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE to secure business opportunities for white people against black people???

Hey, let me ask a more compelling question, given the occupant of the White House: where’s the national major white Republican politician who spent 20-odd years in a “church” that espoused a commitment to the white value system, which entails a commitment to the white community, a commitment to white self-determination, a commitment to the white family, a commitment to white education, a commitment to the white workforce, a commitment to the white ethic, a commitment to white progress, a commitment to support white institutions, and a commitment to pledge allegiance to all white leadership?

It’s not simply that liberals aren’t advancing a color-blind society; it’s that all they see is color, and they rabidly fixate on color and use color as an ideological weapon in every single imaginable way they can.

And, yeah, for the record, I’m just as sick of this crap now as I was back then.

One of the things that made Martin Luther King a transcendent figure was the fact that he straddled more than just a far left ideology.  He reached out and touched ALL people of ALL races.  Frankly, if he didn’t do so, he really isn’t all that great of a figure.

Some of what King said touched white people.  That was why his movement was ultimately so successful.  And why shouldn’t the white Americans who changed their views because of that movement be banned from it now?

The so-called “civil rights leaders” of today don’t want America to know how profoundly racist the Democrat Party has been throughout its history.  And they certainly don’t want you to know how rabidly racist and even rabidly anti-Martin Luther King the “spiritual mentor” of Barack Obama was.

But here’s a quote from Jeremiah Wright:

The civil-rights movement, Wright said, was never about racial equality: “It was always about becoming white . . . to master what [they] do.” Martin Luther King, he said, was misguided for advocating nonviolence among his people, “born in the oven of America.”

And why does Jeremiah Wright – Barack Obama’s pastor and spiritual mentor for more than twenty years – so despise Martin Luther King?  Because Martin Luther King wanted racial equality, and an emphasis on individual character.  Whereas so-called “civil rights leaders” like Jeremiah Wright want the emphasis to be on race-based preferential treatment apart from personal character.

But at least Jeremiah Wright – bigot that he is – had the integrity to honestly represent Martin Luther King’s primary message.  In that, he is far more honest than men like Al Sharpton, who dance around it with racial rhetoric, but never land on the heart of King’s message.  Sharpton will give equality with one finger, and then immediately take it away with the other hand.

The fact of the matter is that Martin Luther King was a registered Republican, as was his father before him.  And the fact of the matter is that:

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman’s issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.

In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King’s leaving Memphis, Tenn., after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called Dr. King a “trouble-maker” who starts trouble, but runs like a coward after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Not many people today – black or white – know that we would have had a powerful Civil Rights Act in 1957, but that Lyndon Baines Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Al Gore, Sr., Robert Byrd, and other Democrats opposed it.  The mainstream media propagandists have really done their job well.

Nor do they know that the often-lauded 1964 Civil Rights Act was largely the result of Republicans’ efforts and support:

Mindful of how Democrat opposition had forced the Republicans to weaken their 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts, President Johnson warned Democrats in Congress that this time it was all or nothing. To ensure support from Republicans, he had to promise them that he would not accept any weakening of the bill and also that he would publicly credit our Party for its role in securing congressional approval. Johnson played no direct role in the legislative fight, so that it would not be perceived as a partisan struggle. There was no doubt that the House of Representatives would pass the bill.

In the Senate, Minority Leader Everett Dirksen had little trouble rounding up the votes of most Republicans, and former presidential candidate Richard Nixon also lobbied hard for the bill. Senate Majority Leader Michael Mansfield and Senator Hubert Humphrey led the Democrat drive for passage, while the chief opponents were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, of later Watergate fame, Albert Gore Sr., and Robert Byrd. Senator Byrd, a former Klansman whom Democrats still call “the conscience of the Senate”, filibustered against the civil rights bill for fourteen straight hours before the final vote. The House of Representatives passed the bill by 289 to 126, a vote in which 79% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats voted yes. The Senate vote was 73 to 27, with 21 Democrats and only 6 Republicans voting no. President Johnson signed the new Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964.

Liberals have fought long and hard for racial quotas and preferential treatment for blacks.  But the greatest civil rights leader of all was fundamentally opposed to them.

Let’s listen to Frederick Douglass, escaped slave and greatest of all champions of civil rights, has to say:

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.”  On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

So, as a Republican, exactly why is it that I should be banned for life from honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King, and why can’t I explain what aspect of his message won my support?

Al Sharpton and those who decry Glenn Beck as “hijacking” Martin Luther King are profoundly wrong for insinuating that nothing Martin Luther King preached supported the Republicans’ message.  Especially when King himself was a Republican when he was teaching those things; and especially when it was Republicans who were hearing his message and responding to the changes he urged on America.

And for the record, given the fact that Glenn Beck specifically focused on honoring our heroic troops and the tremendous Special Operations Warrior Foundation (go here to donate), it’s all the more despicable that demagogic ideologues such as Al Sharpton would demonize it.

I’ll guarantee you whose side our SEALs Delta Force, and other Special Operations warriors are on, whose children will be provided for if they fall fighting for this nation because of Glenn Beck’s event today.  Beck raised more than $5 million today.

Update, August 30: Al Sharpton said this about Glenn Beck:

“They want to disgrace this day and we’re not giving them this day. This is our day and we ain’t giving it away,” said Revered Al Sharpton. He and other civil rights leaders staged a separate rally nearby to mark the dream speech anniversary.

A day for “us.”  Black people.  And specifically, only black people who think like Al Sharpton.

The only racist bigot who “disgraced this day” was Al Sharpton and those who think like him.

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.