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October 19, 2009
Exclusive: Congress Critters’ Fantasies
What Grows into the Spaces between These People’s Ears?
There’s no free lunch, right? Well, some might disagree. Consider Colorado’s junior U.S. senator, who came to office just nine months ago sporting a bio with a respectable formal education and impressive experience in both business and government. Not the sort of fellow one would predict to be a free-lunch believer. Yet he could be Exhibit A for the O-R-P (Obama-Reid-Pelosi) free lunch reeducation program.
Featured here is Michael Bennet (D-CO), appointed by Democrat Gov. Bill Ritter to succeed Democrat Ken Salazar, whom Barack Obama appointed Secretary of the Interior. I e-mailed Bennet recently to urge a vote against upcoming health care legislation reported, among other mostly bad things, to limit or eliminate Medicare Advantage.
The senator’s reply includes this:
“Congress and the President have set bold goals for our country to address these challenges [he had listed ‘rising unemployment, home foreclosures, and companies on the verge of bankruptcy’] and lay the foundation for sustainable, long-term economic growth. We must make responsible investments in health care, education, and our new energy economy, while providing much-needed tax cuts to middle-class families. As we do so, however, we must work to reduce the deficit, because economic recovery will be short-lived if we mortgage our children’s future to achieve it.” (Bolding added.)
To recap, we
· will lay the foundation for sustainable, long-term economic growth …
· by providing much-needed tax cuts to middle class families and
· by making “responsible investments” in health care, education and energy …
· all the while reducing the deficit.
My eyes have rarely feasted on such a grand promise of free lunch! But, alas, there are problems.
1)
TThis satirical column in a recent issue of The Denver Post expresses beautifully the skepticism we should all hold toward the “investments” in health care the Congress critters are planning. Truly responsible action would consist largely in unwinding current laws. Enable citizens to buy the insurance they want wherever they find it, including outside their own states; reform tort laws that make providers rich targets for trial lawyers; relieve hospitals from emergency treatment mandates under which non-financially-responsible persons (free-loaders along with indigents) get all the health care they show up to demand. Nothing like that can be found in the socialist agenda of the few in the O-R-P government privileged to write the stealth clauses comprised by its major legislation.
2) We have been making so-called “investments” in education (read, government monopoly schools) for some 50 years, all in exchange for promises from its advocates that the product would be improved. In that period, per student spending adjusted for inflation has gone up several multiples and the product is generally worse. Ample data exists to support the counterintuitive argument that spending and quality of outcomes are inversely related! We should all be long past nodding mindlessly when this politician, or that union mouthpiece, tells us more money will give our children the educations they need. Bennet, most recently superintendent of Denver’s government schools, knows better. He needs to develop the honesty and courage to tell it like it is.
3) “New energy economy” is a euphemism — entirely laughable but popular among elected officials like Barack Obama and Bill Ritter — for a gaggle of energy sources called “renewable,” especially including solar and wind but strangely excluding nuclear. They are certainly worth putting into the mix if they can reverse 30 or more years of subsidized economic failure and make it in the market. However, barring the nasty possibility that the U.S. economy is destroyed, they will supply only a small part (well below 10 percent) of U.S. energy demand during the remaining expected lifetime of any adult reading this message. It’s below one percent today.
The “new energy economy” euphemism also embraces the carbon caps and taxes Al Gore has advocated for well over a decade. People all over the world are coming to realize that this scheme is a fast track to economic ruin. The body of science undergirding this strategy is tainted by censorship and, in some cases, outright fraud. If Bennet wants to support the global warming charade making Gore a very wealthy man, he should ignore the “new energy economy” hype and dedicate his efforts to getting more non-carbon-emitting nuclear power on-line.
History now shows that Ronald Reagan knew how to lay the foundation for sustainable, long-term economic growth. For him that was a lot more than nice figure of speech coming up on a Teleprompter screen. Tax cuts were prominently a part of Reagan’s obviously successful strategy. But he didn’t load the middle class up with, say, taxes on so-called Cadillac health care plans like those in many employment agreements. And nationalizing businesses? That would have been absolute anathema to him and his equally brilliant alter ego in Great Britain, PM Margaret Thatcher. (But who can’t love the “Cadillac” metaphor here in the wake of Obama’s nationalizing GM?)
Sen. Bennet is barking up the wrong tree. The O-R-P government is well down the road to doing great harm to the Republic. He should get his head cleared of that DC infection and act like a traditionally sensible Coloradan.
FamilySecurytMatters.org Contributing Editor John Dendahl is a distinguished force in American business, politics and education. He served eight years as Chairman of the Republican Party of New Mexico, served as chairman of the board of directors of the Mountain States Legal Foundation and as CEO of a leading supplier of analytical instruments and services for the defense and nuclear power industries. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (1)
Good blog, get that message out!
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