If it's too good to be true, it usually is
[Cue the celestial trumpets, part the gloomy heavens with rays of golden sunlight]
The One, halo shimmering, is promising hope and change. His downtrodden, disenfranchised devotees are experiencing rapture over the assurances of the dismantling of an unfair America, free "stimulus" payouts,
free jobs for all, free college educations, free child stipends, free health care, free happy, chubby bees buzzing in every flower-laden field, and free doves cooing liltingly in every tree across the promised land.
All this and more, and without additional taxes -- except those imposed to justly punish the evil rich. You've heard the in-the-Obama-tank, Drive-by Media parrot the sermon ... no new taxes for 95 percent of the population, but significant tax increases for that awful, greedy five percent. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
Not so fast, my friends.
Cure worse than the illness
In the first place, Obama's own handlers have admitted that the math simply doesn't add up. Punishing that wealthy, greedy, evil five percent will in no way bring in enough federal revenue to offset the initial $300 billion giveaway and stimulus packages Obama, Pelosi, and Reid have planned for 2009, let alone those planned for the following years. So who's going to pay?
Oops, I almost forgot. That $300 billion is in addition to the bogus $1 trillion mortgage bailout with which we were just stuck.
Secondly, what do you think is going to happen to our already shaky economy when Obama unleashes his tax Jihad on the very people and businesses who make it happen? Who will pay when the economy worsens?
Who's going to pay when the small business producers, 80 percent of our economy, figure out that it doesn't pay to work hard, provide jobs, and invest? Remember, those tens of thousands of Mom and Pop businesses, the backbone of the American economy, are also part of that greedy, evil five percent.
Have you figured out yet who will foot the bill? Hmm?
Unhealthy health care is a prime example
If what you just read perked your interest, you're going to love this. It seems that Hawaii's governor, Linda Lingle, just trashed her state's celebrated, government-funded free health plan for children after just seven months in operation because it was breaking Hawaii's budget. "But B2, B2!" you choke, spittle running from the corner of your mouth, "How can this be?"
Ahem. As one with Canadian relatives stuck in a broken, government-managed health care system, I can answer that -- from their lips to your ears ... er ... eyes:
- 1.) Why carry your own insurance coverage or participate in company coverage when you can suckle at the government teat for "free" treatments?
- 2.) Study after study shows that recipients of "universal" coverage go to the emergency room for routine care, care that is many times more expensive than going to a general practitioner.
- 3.) Emergency room care is preferred over visiting a doctor assigned to you rather than one of your choice, and the emergency room is immediate -- no waiting for a doctor's appointment;
- 4.) Government-run "universal" health care is bureaucratically inefficient and the care provided simply cannot compete in quality or availability to private care.
Hawaii is no fluke, neither is Canada. There are other examples of states already floundering from or rethinking this folly:
- Massachusetts. Its universal coverage plan has experienced such major cost overruns that the federal government agreed to bail out the state with an extra $4.2 billion in Medicaid funding, increasing that state's tax burden on the rest of us non-residents to a total of $21 billion;
- California. This year, the state Senate's health committee rejected Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's "near-universal" plan -- it was simply too costly for the near-bankrupt state to support. In fact, California's giveaway economy is so bad that the governor is looking to chop billions from Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program;
- New York. The Empire State is considering a giveaway health care program at least as expensive as Massachusetts' -- currently under budget review in a state that overtaxed its businesses to the point where those outside the metro areas closed or moved away; and
- Wisconsin. Despite a frenetic statewide push by its liberal sponsors, the Badger State's "universal" plan died in the Legislature because it would have been too costly to provide.
Marx and Engels in the house
It seems that when it comes to the socialization of America wrapped in the Messianic phenomenon that is The One, many of you have forgotten the two prime investigative factors that B2 has drummed into your bone-encrusted, case-hardened skulls for all of these many years: 1. Cui bono? Who benefits? and 2. Follow the money.
So in closing let me ask again: Have you figured out that, short of printing scads more money and thus assuring our economic doom, five percent of us cannot possibly carry all of the non-producing freeloaders, cannot possibly pay for The One's naked redistribution of wealth?
Nothing is free -- Nothing -- and if it seems too good to be true, it usually is.