Star Parker: Government Health Care Plantation Looms

I love reading Star Parker's columns. She seems to have a way of looking at things, not necessarily from an opposite direction, but just enough of a different direction that things tend to become clearer. Her latest column concerning socialized medicine does just that.

From Town Hall:

Rather than moving dysfunctional America off the welfare state, as we did with welfare reform in 1996, we are now moving the free, functioning, and once prosperous part of our nation onto the welfare state. Bills out of committees in both the House and the Senate contain all the elements of President Obama's dream to get as many Americans onto the government health care plantation as possible.

That's right. Instead of getting people off of a dependence on the government, socialized health care is an attempt to get people dependent on the government.

More:

We've got creation of the new government run insurance plan that supposedly will create new competition. We've got fines on employers who don't provide insurance and fines on individuals who don't buy it. And we've got the trillions of dollars in new spending to subsidize insurance purchases for low to middle income Americans and expand Medicaid to get more low income Americans into it. And, of course, we've got the massive new government bureaucracy to oversee it all.

You read that right. More fines and more taxes. Health care reform was supposed to make things less expensive but the fines and taxes are going to make it more expensive for us. And why is Obama so hell bent on fining someone who chooses not to buy health insurance?

Here's some more insight you won't read about in Old Media:

Obama continues to tell the many millions of Americans currently insured through their employer not to worry, that "If you like your health care plan you can keep that..." But we know this is a slight of hand. Many employers will gladly pay the fine and purge their employees into the government plan. And how will private plans possibly compete with the government plan when politicians can reach into taxpayer pockets anytime they want to keep on subsidizing it? The Lewin Group estimates that a hundred twenty million Americans may be driven into the government plan.

120 million Americans. (140 if you count the 20 million illegals who will be eligible for taxpayer-funded health care.) And how are we going to pay for health care for all of them? New taxes. If you are one of the top 5% earners who happens to live in the state of Maryland, then you will be paying over 50 cents on every dollar you work to earn if the new taxes to pay for other people's health care goes through.

And about that promise to keep private insurance companies "honest?" Let's look at the government's track record on that:

Harvard's Malcom Sparrow, a specialist in health-care fraud, estimates annual Medicare fraud at $85 billion. The Government Accountability Office estimates Medicaid fraud at around $33 billion annually. So that's $120 billion a year in government health care fraud! This is who will keep private companies "honest?"

This socialized health care plan is a disaster waiting to happen, just as it happened in every other country it has been tried in.

We need to stop it before it wrecks the entire health system.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Government Health Care Plantation Looms
Star Parker
TownHall.com
July 20, 2009

Star Parker is the author of Uncle Sam's Plantation:

Uncle Sam's Plantation on amazon.com

The Coming Budget Fight And Why We Need To Make Sure It Is A Big Fight

What will the ultimate results of Obama's budget and tax hikes be? In general terms, bad news. But in terms of how much of the U.S. economy is going to be swallowed up by government, it looks even worse.

Patrick Buchanan, writing for Town Hall, gives us some particulars:

Where the U.S. government usually consumes 21 percent of gross domestic product, this Obama budget spends 28 percent in 2009 and runs a deficit of $1.75 trillion, or 12.7 percent of GDP. That is four times the largest deficit of George W. Bush and twice as large a share of the economy as any deficit run since World War II. Add that 28 percent of GDP spent by the U.S. government to the 12 percent spent by states, counties and cities, and government will consume 40 percent of the economy in 2009.

40%. And most of that is going to be wasted on welfare programs and socialist wealth redsitribution schemes.

More:

Since the budget was released, word has come that the U.S. economy did not shrink by 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter, but 6.2 percent. All the assumptions in Obama's budget about growth in 2009 and 2010 need to be revised downward, and the deficits revised upward. Look for the deficit for 2009 to cross $2 trillion.

Do you remember just two years ago when the Dems were screaming that Bush's budget was causing a deficit and how the Dems were going to fix that for us? I guess when the Dems said "fix" it they meant they were going to send it soaring even higher than Bush ever tried to do.

And this:

Who abroad is going to lend us the trillions to finance our deficits without demanding higher interest rates on the U.S. bonds they are being asked to hold? And if we must revert to the printing press to create the money, what happens to the dollar? ... Who is going to pay for all this? The top 2 percent, the filthy rich who got all those Bush tax breaks, say Democrats. But the top 5 percent of income earners already pay 60 percent of U.S. income taxes, while the bottom 40 percent pays nothing.

And that bottom forty percent are going to get nice fat checks next April, that is, wealth will be redistributed to them despite the fact that they do not invest, they do not employ other people and their tax burdern was 0. In other words, Obama is making good on his promise so that he can complete the deal of buying off their votes. What is going to happen when the banks no longer honor those government checks, though?

And the reason we know that Obamanomics is going to be a disaster:

Markets are not infallible. But the stock market has long been a "lead indicator" of where the economy will be six months from now. What are the markets, the collective decisions of millions of investors, saying? Having fallen every month since Obama's election, with January and February the worst two months in history, they are telling us the stimulus package will not work, that Tim Geithner is clueless about how to save the banks, that the Obama budget portends disaster for the republic.

Which is why we need to put up a huge fight over the budget and the way this administration is dragging us towards socialism.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

Pitchfork Time
Patrick J. Buchanan
TownHall.com
March 3, 2009

The Obama Presidency: Here Comes Socialism

Well, we voted for change. The question is, will the change be good or bad?

I'm betting bad. Just as Jimmy Carter had a liberal Democrat Congress to tinker with the economy, so does Barack Obama, only moreso. But, the Dems today are much further to the left than the Dems of the 70's. Back in the 70's, the Dems actually cared about the well-being of America while today's Dems care more for forcing their socialist agenda on a population that will regret it.

Just look at Europe. Depsite their touting themselves as being "enlightened" and better than the rest of the world (i.e. the United States) their collective economy is in a permanent state of shambles and their societies are deteriorating at the hands of leftists in conjunction with immigrants who refuse to assimilate. High unemployement, high taxes and low quality services. That is what they offer.

Socialism is and always will be a disaster.

And now, we have voted for just that type of disaster to happen here.

Writing for Town Hall, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann have this to say about Barack Obama's policies:

[W]e enter his administration as free enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom or Sweden -- a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.

This will all be part and parcel to Obama's New Deal which will be every bit as disastrous as FDR's, whose policies made the Great Depression last at least ten years longer than it should have. Here is a recap of how well it went:

[H]is New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933 when he took office to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment rose to 17 percent in 1938 and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent.

First, Obama will ensure that he can buy votes for the next election as follows:

In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever expanding welfare checks from the government.

That wonderful Florida voter named Peggy the Moocher must certainly be licking her chops right now at the premise that she can be as lazy as she wants to be while other hard-working Americans support her.

Here are some other aspects of Obama's New Deal:

With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. ... Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity since the only people who would have to pay them would be rich Republicans. In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize it. Using TARP funds to write generous checks to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for preferred stockholders -- the government, not private investors.

And what about Health Care? Obama and the socialist Dems will seek to force a Nationalized rationed health care system like the disasters that cover Canada and the United Kingdom.

Without a lot more doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and equipment that currently serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And as government imposes ever more draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question so the government will impose health care rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral).

Even more scary is how Obama plans to get an even larger share of the vote by buying off illegal immigrants with amnesty:

He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30 percent of the vote.

Is this the "change" you voted for? Have more of your money confiscated and then have it redistributed among illegals and other moochers? Have your quality health care replaced by sub-standard nationalized health care?

If so, you will reap what you sow. If not, you'll have a good, long, hard four years during which you may consider the results of the previous four years.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

The Obama Presidency: Here Comes Socialism
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
TownHall.com
January 21, 2009