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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Richard Baehr
The Obama administration wants to "pivot" to jobs. A bit late, I would say.
They wasted a year pushing health care reform. That passed with zero
Republican votes in the House and Senate, and about the same number of
Republican ideas. When the Democrats controlled both branches of Congress
and the White House, they shoved their approach down the throats of
Republican in Congress, and an American public that opposed it then, and
still opposes the legislation by a 3-to-2 margin.
There was not a lot of concern about a "balanced approach" to health care
reform. That is why tort reform was absent, and HSAs and pro-competitive
approaches were set back. Rahm Emanuel favored a much more modest, less
costly approach than ObamaCare, one that assisted those who were uninsurable
to get coverage.
But Obama wanted something big, and he got it -- a big and bad approach that
will raise health care spending by hundreds of billions a year, at a time
when existing spending on government care programs -- on Medicare and
Medicaid -- is threatening the fiscal future of both the federal government
and many states.
Close to two-thirds of the financing for the new health care entitlement
spending comes from new taxes on the wealthy (if you consider 200K a year
wealthy). The Democrats never mention the new taxes in ObamaCare, since
they do not fit neatly with their "storyline" of the need for a balanced
approach and shared sacrifice. Taxes already on the book don't count; only
new taxes represent the balance that is needed.
The Democrats had their spokespeople on the Sunday TV news programs to
respond to the S&P downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt, and to provide the
talking points we can now repeat from memory: we need a balanced approach to
deficit reduction; that means revenues from taxing the ill begotten gains
of millionaires and billionaires, oil companies, yacht and jet owners, and
hedge fund managers. And by the way, they noted, S&P was a major
contributor to the subprime collapse, and they made a two-trillion-dollar
error, so they have no credibility. We now need to spend hundreds of
billions more on jobs and to raise taxes.
The New York Times had its short list of suggested tax increases in an
editorial Sunday: income tax rates for everybody, capital gains rates, a new
value-added tax, a new carbon tax, higher gasoline taxes, and eliminating
all the tax loopholes for corporations and wealthy individuals.
Perhaps the administration thinks it can create anger at S&P, and it can get
flash mobs, or its allied union goons (once they are done intimidating
people in Wisconsin) to come to New York State and threaten S&P executives
in their homes. These S&P rating analysts are like Tea Party leaders in the
"minds" of the left -- they are terrorists, financial jihadists,
threatening the reelection of the president, and the progressive dream to
remake America into a European social welfare state, at exactly the time the
European nations are coming to realize they have over-promised, and can no
longer afford that vision.
In my health care career, I made many presentations to rating agencies to
get hospital bonds rated and answer questions about financial feasibility
studies my firm prepared. The analysts were serious, and most of the time,
I thought they got it right. Sending out political hacks to insult S&P this
weekend is a sign of desperation by the administration. You don't win the
future (to use another oft repeated talking point) with a downgrade of your
debt.
The Bush administration did a miserable job with the nation's finances,
running up over $4 trillion in new debt in 8 years. Obama will blow past
that number in a bit over 3 years. The left cannot talk about Medicare and
Medicaid and Social Security. They must be off the table, or they will lose
the ability to demagogue Paul Ryan and the Republicans and scare seniors,
deliberately ignoring the fact that Ryan's plan would not impact anyone over
age 55. The Wisconsin congressman had the guts to offer a serious multi-
decade plan to get spending in line with historic revenues on a glide path
approach, without sudden sharp hits to anyone. This required addressing big
entitlements, including the newest one: ObamaCare, whose spending pace
guarantees future financial collapse.
We cannot be Germany or France as far as social spending, when our current
health care costs are twice as a share of GDP that of other countries, even
with gaps in coverage. The big health care problem is cost, not access.
The best estimate was that 3 million of the uninsured were uninsurable.
ObamaCare provides subsidies for more than ten times that population,
creating a vast new middle-class entitlement.
Since the Democrats won't consider serious entitlement reform, we will spend
our way to oblivion, and the average standard of living will be reduced
sharply at specific future points when buyers of our federal debt decide to
pass on new bonds, or demand much higher rates. We will get the kind of
standard of living reductions now being enforced in Greece, and Iceland, and
Ireland, and Italy.
For the record, I think the private economy is where the engine of job-
creation exists. Government jobs are costly and make-work jobs are
temporary. Ask Rahm Emanuel about the efficiency of unionized government
workers, now that he has inherited the wasteland of the city's financial
future delivered to him by Mayor Daley, who basically caved to union demands
on wages, pensions, and health care benefits. As, for that matter,
Governor Blagojevich did, ensuring Illinois's long-term decline in
competitiveness.
For the record, I would eliminate pretty much all the noise in the tax code.
Dump all the deductions and special-interest approaches to incentives for
real estate or other industries (green jobs and alternative energy, oil and
gas companies, hedge funds). In exchange, get a simpler tax code with lower
rates that are permanent, for both individual and businesses, and which
provide real incentives for work and investment.
A government that serves K Street is a tool of crony capitalism, and serves
only the few. Piling on hundreds of thousands of pages of new regulations,
issued by unaccountable agencies such as the EPA, will make Al Gore and
Barbara Boxer happy, and also inhibit job growth. We can send hundreds of
billions to the oil cartel each year, or extract our own resources in shale
oil and gas, and create a million or more new private-sector jobs in the
process.
The left trusts government to rearrange the wealth and income of society,
and believes private industry is greedy and unfair. The left went crazy
last week because the debt deal cut future spending by $2 trillion. But it
did not cut spending. It cut $2 trillion from a schedule of $13 trillion in
new spending, and $50 trillion in total spending. That is what a cut in
government spending means. One angry Pennsylvania congressman, Mike Doyle,
blurted out that "the other side won't let us spend any money." I guess $3.
7 trillion in one year does not count as spending any money. Has a more
ignorant comment ever been made by a member of Congress?
One out of every four dollars in GDP is now federal spending, up from one in
five 3 years back. And then there is spending by cities, counties and
states, another 15% of GDP. But the left says we need more spending --
extending unemployment insurance, some more shovel-ready projects (you know
-- the ones that never got created when money from the stimulus was
shoveled to the states to allow them to keep the unions happy and defer the
day of reckoning for these spendthrifts). The left says to trust big
government to get us out of the hole they dug.
Wouldn't you downgrade this mess? |
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