Tag Archives: Obamacare

Elsewhere in the News

May 17, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
There are only so many stories that even the most avid news-reader can follow, and lately they have been the ones about the various scandals afoot in Washington. These are important matters, and provide the amusing spectacle of White House officials flailing about as they deal with the first press scrutiny of their careers, but it is necessary to step back and take note that everything else is also going to hell in a handbasket.
Thursday brought bad economic news, with jobless claims rising and housing starts falling, and provided a reminder that unemployment remains high, growth slow, and the national debt mounting. Such sad statistics will cause the Federal Reserve to keep printing money at the frantic pace that has led to record highs on the stock market, which in turn has led to some strangely happy talk in the few stories that are reported, but other needed economic reforms are unlikely to become a national priority until the inevitable downturn. The sluggishness of the economy was a widely ignored story even before the current scandals began to dominate the news, with everyone in Washington preferring to talk about same-sex marriage or gun control or who was wearing what at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, even though it remains of some interest to the millions of Americans who are out of work or seeing their incomes fall further as prices rise.
It will be briefly noted deep within the pages of the more staid newspapers that the House of Representatives voted once again to repeal Obamacare, and the story doesn’t deserve much more attention given that it will fail once again in the Senate and that it would be vetoed by the president in any case. This means that Obamacare will continue to provide businesses with strong incentives not to offer employees more than 29 hours of work to any employee or to have more than 49 of them around, among its many unfortunate economic effects, but as previously noted that sort of thing is no longer considered newsworthy. Obamacare was more prominently mentioned in reports that the same woman who is at the center of the Internal Revenue Service’s scandalous targeting of conservative groups is now in charge of the agency’s enforcement of the health care law’s numerous tax provisions.
The distraction of the various scandals might provide an opportunity for congress to pass an immigration reform bill that would otherwise provoke greater public resistance. Several politicians in good standings with conservatives are backing a plan proposed in the Senate, and Democratic constituencies such as unions and blacks that have reason to oppose are apparently being kept in line, but there are widespread doubts that the promised border enforcement will ever happen and those distracting scandals do little to inspire trust. Given the fact of the aforementioned millions of Americans who are out of work there is also reason to question the wisdom of bringing even more millions of people into the workforce, but that once again raises those economic subjects that no one seems to want to talk about.
A short White House visit by the Prime Minister of Turkey, who was in town to talk about the deteriorating situation in Syria before heading off on a trip to Gaza that the Americans had asked him not to take, took up just enough of the news to remind readers that pretty much all of the international scene is also dismal. At a rain-soaked news conference the president agreed to increase pressure on the Syrian dictator, although he avoided any further mention of his widely-ridiculed “red line” declarations, and then wound up fending off questions about Benghazi, the IRS, and the Justice Department’s snooping around in the Associated Press’ phone records. No one wants to talk about that foreign policy stuff, either.
On a more positive note, no one wants to talk about whatever it is that the president wants them to talk about. Things have gotten so bad that even The New York Times reports that “Onset of Woes Casts Pall Over Obama’s Policy Aspirations.” The Gray Lady seems to regard this as an unfortunate development, but it might be best that can be said of a bad situation.

– Bud Norman

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A Fast Break from the News

April 1, 2013 By in Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
The nuclear-armed nut cases who run North Korea have declared a state of war with their southern neighbors and are threatening missile strikes on America, the European Union’s economy is staggering under so much debt that it has resorted to the outright theft of a member country’s private bank accounts, and there’s plenty more bad economic news even closer to home. Still, the big story around these parts is basketball.
Those plucky underdogs of the Wichita State University Wheatshockers basketball squad have somehow advanced to “Final Four” of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual championship tournament, and suddenly all that other stuff has been rendered at least momentarily unimportant. The team’s black-and-gold colors are on display all over town, that ferocious-looking shock of wheat that is the “WuShock” mascot seems to adorn every other shirt, and everywhere citizens are greeting one another with the plain-spoken battle cry of “Go Shocks.” All the local media have found little time for anything else, with even a good bloody crime or car wreck relegated to a few seconds after the first commercial, and the locally-produced ads for the car dealers and electronic stores are also featuring some sort of ‘Shocker reference.
It might seem slightly quaint and perhaps even a bit parochial to an outsider, but it doesn’t seem to have done any harm and has provided a rather pleasant diversion from reality. Wichita was very much in need of one, too, as the times have been hard and the mood glum lately.
Although the unemployment rate here is lower than the national average it’s still far too high to satisfy this hard-working city, and the political trends are even more worrisome than the economic data. The mainstays of the local economy are corporate aviation, agriculture, oil and gas, health care, and the United States Air Force, none of which seem to enjoy the favor of the current presidential administration or the “progressivism” it represents. Indeed, corporate jet owners have become the epitome of capitalist decadence and a favorite whipping boy of the administration, agriculture is being regulated right down to the last dust particle, oil and gas are to be punished so that “green energy” might flourish, with our hometown’s arena-sponsoring Koch Industries being the arch-villain of them all, there’s Obamacare to deal with all those doctors and nurses, and the defense budget seems to be the only part of those trillions of dollars of deficit spending that can be cut. Nor do gay marriage, gun control, subsidized contraception, or any of the other great leaps forward being offered have much appeal to this very traditionalist town.
It sometimes seem that the brave new world being created by the liberal elites will have very little use for a city such as Wichita, which heightens the usual insecurities of a middle-sized city in the middle of nowhere. Being a city that provides the world with some of the best darned airplanes in the world, an iconic campfire lantern, top-notch carnival rides, gas for the ride home, the literal bread on the table, and a base full of crack airmen who can re=fuel a bomber on its way to bomb the hell out of anyplace on the globe that needs bombing doesn’t get the much national recognition or respect, so we’ll gladly take it if the local basketball team is the lead story on SportsCenter. Basketball is another thing we do around here, with the same sense of pride felt in all the work that gets done. The driveways and park courts are full of basketball when the weather permits, and he Greater Wichita High School Athletic League, known around this hoops-crazed state as “The City League,” has produced decades of top-notch players and teams. The ‘Shockers are part of the city, too, with all the mechanics and barkeepers and small businessmen keeping the team’s schedule posted on the wall, whether they went to the school or not, and almost everyone feels obliged to root them on even if they went to snooty old KU with blue blood tradition. Over the years the team has been pretty good, too, with a few good tournament runs and unhappy periods of futility thrown in, but they haven’t been this far since the long-ago days of All-American Dave Stallworth, still a beloved figure in this town, so the city’s momentary giddiness should be forgiven.
Wichita knows basketball well enough to know that the ‘Shockers are a long-shot in the next game. They’ll face the University of Louisville, which has rolled through the tournament and earned its berth with a convincing win over perennial big-time college power Duke University, and the odds makers will give our boys little chance. Anything seems possible, though, and at the very worst the hometown heroes made it to the “Final Four.” That’s quite a accomplishment, and one can hope that the good feeling will last long enough to help out with the inevitable return to reality.

– Bud Norman

What’s the Symbol for Hate?

March 28, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Every now and then during our drives about town we will spot a bumper sticker on another vehicle exclaiming that the motorist loves Obamacare. A heart-shaped symbol substitutes for the word “love,” as if scanning the four letters would take too much time out of our busy days, and of course there’s no room at all for an explanation of this uncommon affection.
Which is a shame, because we’d love to hear these proudly Obamacare-loving drivers state their reasons. It was easy enough to understand the enthusiasm back when the so-called Affordable Health Care Act was being pitched to an unwary public, and it was going to provide coverage to every single citizen and perhaps even a few non-citizens while allowing everyone who was satisfied with their existing plans to keep them, somehow help the employers who would suddenly be stuck with reams of new regulations, and cost the public treasury a trifling $980 billion, and lower everyone’s premiums to boot. Only the hard-hearted skeptics didn’t love that, but now that they’ve been proved right in every regard those bumper stickers are hard to comprehend.
By now those drivers should know that at least four million of the uninsured will choose to pay a fine cheaper than insurance and remain uninsured, at least seven million people with insurance will be forced off their plans whether they like them or not, employers are hoping to reduce their newly imposed costs by limiting workers’ hours, the Congressional Budget Office’s estimated tab after the budget gimmicks expired has now swelled to $1.85 trillion, and in the latest bit of vindication for the skeptics a Society of Actuaries report says the price of an insurance premium will continue to rise for most Americans. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admits that at least part of the rise is directly attributable to Obamacare, telling a group of reporters on Tuesday that “These folks will be moving into a really fully insured product for the first time, and so there may be a higher cost associated with getting into that market.”
The secretary was quick to add that some people will see their insurance costs go down and that subsidies will be available for many lower-income Americans to help them with the cost of their newly-mandated coverage, and others with a heart-on for Obamacare will no doubt find other silver linings. There seems to be an awfully dark cloud within those silver linings, though, particularly for the now-quite-lower-income Americans who will be paying both higher premiums and higher taxes as a result of the subsidies, and Obamacare’s more realistic fans are already talking about the latest round of revisions and refinements. We anticipate that they’ll find all the problems are caused by the pesky remains of a free market insurance system and that even more government control is required, and if the problems persist they’ll prescribe more of the same.
Some conservatives have argued all along that Obamacare was meant to fail to such an extent that the public would at last demand a full-fledged single payer system such as can be found in the more fashionably socialized countries. They’ve been dismissed as paranoid right wing crackpots, of course, but we knew quite a few left-wingers who giddily espouse the very same theory as the reason for their support of the bill. Those who love Obamacare for its faults tell us that fully government-run health will be wonderful, but they’re hard-pressed to explain why something that’s so obviously a good idea can’t be sold to the public without mucking things up first, and they don’t seem to have planned for the possibility that a public fed up with higher premiums and worse care might turn to Republican congressional candidates disinclined to go the Swedish route, but they’re the only ones who seem pleased with the way things are going.

– Bud Norman

High Dudgeon and Higher Ceilings

January 15, 2013 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
President Barack Obama was in high dudgeon when discussing the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations with the House Republicans during Monday’s rare news conference. High dudgeon is Obama’s default rhetorical position, of course, but when it comes to his dealings with House Republicans nobody’s dudgeon goes higher.
Obama started things off by boasting of the $1.4 trillion in spending cuts that he has signed into law over the past two years, and touting his plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade. All those spending cuts haven’t prevented the federal budget from increasing in size over the past two years, and all of the budget proposals that he has gotten around to submitting entail a decade of unprecedented deficits, but given how much he would have preferred to spend perhaps he’s entitled to some credit for a relative stinginess. We note that he’s counting the $2.5 trillion of savings achieved by not fighting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars past this year, so we suggest he also add in the several trillion dollars we’ve no doubt saved by now from not fighting the Spanish-American War past 1898 and declare the nation’s accounts square.
The president’s plan involves a lot a lot of actual tax increases along with those mythical spending decreases, which the president proudly describes as a “balanced approach,” and he was quick to remind the press that he won re-election with this very appealing-sounding slogan. Although the president spoke loftily of a “balanced way where everyone pulls their weight, everyone does their part,” he also made clear that he was still talking about tax increases only on the hated rich and evil corporations, so it must be conceded that he is remaining true to his campaign promises if not economic reality. Trying to reduce the deficit without massive tax hikes, Obama seemed annoyed to explain, is “not a recipe for growth.”
Making a fair assumption that most Americans had never heard of a “debt ceiling” until it became an inescapable news story during his unpleasant squabble with the crazy Republicans a couple of years ago, Obama helpfully explained the issue as simply a matter of “paying America’s bills.” Apparently those bills were all racked up by spendthrift Republicans despite Obama’s penny-pinching objections, because he was clearly quite offended that those Republicans would now try to run out on the check. If the nation does not go further into debt, Obama said, it risks becoming a “deadbeat nation.” Refusing to allow the government to go just a couple more trillion dollars into the hole, Obama continued, would therefore be the height of fiscal irresponsibility. He seemed quite vexed that anyone would dispute him on that point. Indeed, the president could only conceive of the most sadistic motives for wanting to accumulate national debt at a slower pace.
“But it seems as if what’s motivating and propelling at this point some of the House Republicans is more than simply deficit reduction,” Obama said. “They have a particular vision about what government should and should not do, so they are suspicious about government’s commitments, for example, to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they get older. They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat or whether we should be spending money on medical research.”
The president went on to remind the press “That view was rejected by the American people when it was debated during the presidential campaign,” and in retrospect it doesn’t seem surprising that Romney’s anti-old people and pro-starvation platform wasn’t the big winner we Republicans had hoped for. Obama might have mentioned that those meals for the poor kids are all the more important since poverty has increased over the past four years, and that government medical research will be all the more crucial once the Obamacare taxes start discouraging the private efforts that have traditionally yielded the most important breakthroughs, but he apparently he didn’t want to overemphasize the point.
At least the president didn’t repeat his previous claims that the Republicans also want dirty air and water, and for autistic children to fend for themselves, and for various other Dickensian degradations to be visited upon the American people, but he appeared quite miffed nonetheless. It should make for an interesting sit-down with the Republican leadership, and we suspect that this unpleasant squabble will be just as inescapable as the last.

– Bud Norman

Regulating Our Way to Utopia

November 13, 2012 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment
Those of a certain ripe old age might recall a comic strip called “There Oughta Be a Law.” It ran for many years in all the newspapers, a once-popular form of mass communication which those of a certain ripe old age might also recall, and each installment featured an earnestly stylized illustration of a reader’s complaint about some minor annoyance or another which the reader deemed worthy of government-imposed punishment. The title became a popular catchphrase that outlasted the comic strip by many years, reflecting a widespread belief that a sufficient amount of law-making would be able to rid the world of all unpleasantness.
The strip’s disgruntled readers, and anyone else who has ever griped that “there oughta be a law,” will be happy to know that the United States of America will soon arrive at a point when there will at last be a law for every little thing. That’s the conclusion we’re reached, at any rate, upon reading that over the past three months the federal government has been generating new regulations at a brisk pace of 68 per day. According to the fine folks at the CNSnews.com, the past 90 days have brought new rules regarding everything from volatile organic compound emissions from architectural coatings to “enforcement criteria for canned ackee, frozen ackee, and other ackee products that contain hypoglycin A.”
Liberals who would scoff at the report because the web site’s “C” stands for conservative should note that they provide a handy link to the federal government’s own regulations.gov web site, which provides the same information with obvious pride in their industrious attempts to set everything right. There’s a listing there of the number of new regulations that have been added over different amounts of time, and although there’s a link to President Obama’s executive order for a thorough review of existing regulations there’s no tally of the regulations that have been done away with.
This proliferation of regulation will likely increase at a quickening rate for at least the next four years. The Obamacare bill and the Dodd-Frank financial reform law both weighed in with around 2,000 pages of new regulations, but those who perused those acts — nobody actually read them, of course — noticed that most of those pages were devoted to creating new agencies empowered to write even more regulations. The Obamacare bill created 159 of them, and Dodd-Frank established agencies ranging from a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to a Financial Stability Oversight Council to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. Each of these new agencies will soon be generating hundreds and hundreds of new regulations, and because every regulation usually creates some problem that necessitates scores of new regulations the creation of new rules will increase exponentially until every possible outcome in life has been regulated. If perfect bliss does not result, the public will conclude that there simply haven’t been enough rules passed and that still more are required.
Any conservatives inclined to worry about the effect of so many rules on the ordinary American’s liberty should take some consolation in the notion that the law of averages dictates that least some of these thousands of regulations make some sense. For all we know the federal government has spared us some ackee-related calamity, and for that we should be grateful. All this regulating should have a salutary effect on the paper industry, too, and once we’ve reached that nearby point when every citizen of the republic is required to engage the services of a compliance officer or two just to avoid running afoul of the regulators we will at last achieve full employment.
In the unlikely event that the growing army of wizards in Washington, D.C., overlook some small annoyance that continues to afflict you, be assured that they’re eager to hear about. The regulations.gov web site invites all suggestions about new rules, just as the authors of the “There Oughta Be a Law” comic strip did, but in their case they can actually make it a law. We have lots of ideas, ranging from those droopy trousers that the young folks favor to brain-dead behavior of fast food servers, but we’re only going to recommend a regulation that there be a lot fewer rules.

– Bud Norman

Ryan Gives Hope

August 13, 2012 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Vice presidential selections are usually of little interest to us, as the office is typically of such little consequence that even Joe Biden has done only minor damage with it, so we’ve happily refrained from the constant speculation and debate of the past weeks about the possible choices that Mitt Romney might make. Now that Romney has chosen Rep. Paul Ryan, though, we must say that we’re just pleased as punch.

There is no one currently active in American politics that we hold in higher regard than Ryan. He has the clarity of vision to see the economic calamity the lies at the end of our fiscal path, the broad imagination and hard-earned understanding of budgetary details needed to devise a workable solution, and most importantly — and most rare — he has the courage to confront his countrymen with harsh realities and offer his plan despite the fury he knew it would provoke. By selecting Ryan, Romney has demonstrated that he also understands the overriding issue of this election and is also bold enough to confront it.

The choice is not without risk, of course. Human nature is such that most people are disinclined to hear the kind of hard truths that Ryan proclaims, and millions of Americans will no doubt prefer the reassuring fairy tales of never ending and ever expanding entitlements that the president has so successfully peddled for the past four years. The complexities of baseline budgeting and other arcane tricks of the politician’s trade will permit Ryan’s opponents to convincingly lie about the prudent and necessary spending he has proposed, and when compared to the opposition’s false promises of government largesse at somebody else’s expense the Ryan plan will seem a most bitter medicine.

Still, the risk is justified by the possible benefits. The inevitable attacks on Ryan will only serve to focus attention on the issue of the government’s looming insolvency and the Democratic ticket’s conspicuous lack of a plan to prevent it, and Ryan is uniquely qualified to win that debate. Although his speeches rarely reach the level of rhetorical loftiness that characterize the president’s orations, Ryan’s style is grounded in hard facts, clear logic and plain logic. His fans still recall how Ryan left Obama speechless and seething during the health care debate, and the upcoming vice presidential debate against Biden promises to be the most fun Republicans have had in many years.

Critics will quibble that Ryan doesn’t have the ethnic appeal of a Sen. Marco Rubio, who would have also been fine choice, or isn’t as likely deliver an important number of electoral as Ohio’s Sen. Rob Portman would have been, and he was good, too, but these are mere quibbles. Having a man of Ryan’s stature on the ticket is a good thing.

– Bud Norman

Obamacare at the Local Level

July 25, 2012 By in Politics Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Our mailbox — the metal one affixed to our front porch, not the silicon one embedded in our computer — has lately been overflowing with correspondence from the various candidates competing in the upcoming Republican primary. Smart campaigns reduce their postage costs by checking the voting records to see who actually votes before sending out their mail, and because we haven’t missed an election since 1977 we’re very popular at the moment.

The most intriguing advertisements concern the race for this district’s state Senate seat, which has posed something of a dilemma for us. The race pits the longtime incumbent, a locally famous exemplar of moderate Republicanism, against her upstart challenger, who espouses a more conservative platform. We’re more inclined to agree the latter’s stands, but Wichita is a small enough town that politically active social gadflies such as ourselves often have an opportunity to chat with the candidates and we thus have formed a more favorable impression of the former. The challenger is a nice enough young fellow, and unmistakably earnest, but he seems a bit wet behind the ears, as we old-timers are wont to say, and with his rather baby-faced appearance we worry that he’ll soon be the butt of the same old jokes they used to tell about Dan Quayle. Already a group calling itself Kansans for Kansas — a name that defies parody — has sent us a flier that portrays him wearing a diaper and sucking on a milk bottle.

We’ve been wary of the incumbent, however, ever since an early candidates’ debate when she took a stab at winning the fourth district congressional nomination during the mid-term election in 2010. Each of the candidates were asked if they would vote to repeal Obamacare, and after all the others had finished trying to outdo one another with their determined disgust for that hated law she proudly announced she would not vote for repeal. We gave her credit for being willing to express an unpopular opinion and endure the boos that immediately arose from the crowd, and thought that it might even prove a smart strategy to win a plurality by staking out a “moderate” position while the rest of the field divided the conservative vote four ways, but we also decided to vote against her.

She wound up losing that race, of course, which is why she’s now working hard to keep her job in Topeka, and the issue continues to dog her. It’s a valid issue, because if the bill is not repealed in Washington it can only be thwarted by states refusing to implement its numerous provisions, and it seems to be of great interest to the voting public. The challenger has made much of his angry opposition to Obamacare, a flier from his campaign has warned that the incumbent “is prescribing a big dose of Obamacare for every Kansan,” and the incumbent has been forced to respond with her own flier citing some anti-Obamacare votes she has recently made.

Perhaps she has undergone a conversion since that ill-fated debate in the ’10 campaign, but there’s no way to tell if she’ll  lose enthusiasm for repeal in the general election. Our friends at the invaluable Voice for Liberty in Wichita web site have discovered a couple hundred or so changes of party registration in this state senate district, presumably because the Democrats around here aren’t bothering to seriously contest any of the races so they want to help defeat the more outspoken Obamacare opponent in the Republican primary, and we’ve also noticed yard signs for the incumbent in yards that once touted only Democratic candidates, so it does seem clear which candidate is more certain to fight the good fight.

That’s enough for us, in the final analysis. The jokes will be hard to bear, but not so hard as Obamacare.

– Bud Norman

Bringing Up Obamacare

July 3, 2012 By in Politics Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

One of our Democrat friends was warning us a few days ago that the Republicans would be foolish to make a campaign issue of their opposition to Obamacare. This seems to be a fashionable notion among Democrats, as we’ve heard it several more times since then. Sen. Chuck Schumer, for instance, took to the airwaves on Sunday’s “Face the Nation” to give the same advice.

Perhaps all these Democrats genuinely have the Republicans’ best interests at heart, and are generously offering what they truly consider wise council, but we can’t quite banish a nagging a doubt about their motives. Given that no Democrat seems eager to run on the party’s support of Obamacare, the warning sounds suspiciously like Br’er Rabbit imploring Br’er Fox not to throw him into that awful briar patch.

What Schumer told the nation, or at least the miniscule slice of it watching “Face the Nation,” was that “if the Republicans make as their number one issue the repeal of Obamacare” they will suffer electoral losses, and he’s correct to the extent that it shouldn’t supplant the bad and worsening economy as the Republicans’ main argument. There’s no reason not to add Obamacare to the lengthy list of complaints with the current administration, however, and Mitt Romney’s campaign should be able to make a convincing case that the health care reform law’s byzantine regulations and expanding costs are among the reasons that employers are reluctant to take on new help.

Our aforementioned Democrat friend acknowledges that the poll numbers don’t look good for Obamacare, but insists that they overstate the intensity of the opposition to the law. We think he’s got it precisely backwards. Much of Obamacare’s support comes from young people and other inattentive sorts who still believe that it will provide free health care, and that they’ll soon be able to go to a clinic for a dose of needed penicillin and have them send the bill to some rich guy, so when they find out that it really means they’ll be paying a penalty in order to have no insurance the law should become even more unpopular. Much of the opposition is comprised of people justifiably worried that the law will cause them to lose existing coverage that they’re mostly satisfied with, and that provides a strong motive to make it a voting issue.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ convoluted argument that Obamacare’s individual mandate passes constitutional muster because it is a tax should make it clear even to the most uninformed Americans that Obamacare isn’t free. The ruling has already provided plenty of comedy as Democratic spokespeople have desperately tried to explain why the costs that taxpayers will be forced to pay aren’t really a tax, even if that is the only reason the bill wasn’t struck down, and all the stuttering is in itself a sufficient reason to press the issue. Alas, Romney also has some explaining to do as a result of his support for a similar state health care reform plan while he was governor of Massachusetts, but at least he can always conclude by saying that he’s going to repeal the bill and institute more effective ideas such as tort reform and interstate competition.

The Democrats’ advice is much appreciated, of course, but is best ignored.

– Bud Norman

The Ruling of the Court and the Rule of the People

June 29, 2012 By in Politics Tags: , , , Leave a comment

The crucial chore of eliminating Obamacare, and preserving our rights as free men and women, is up to the people now. In a better world the Constitution would protect us from such outrageous expansions of governmental power, but not in this one. Not after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday that the deceptively named Affordable Care Act, better known to the public as Obamacare, is constitutional.

The majority decision for the surprise ruling argues that the act’s “individual mandate” — the requirement that citizens purchase government-approved health insurance or pay a fine — is tantamount to a tax, and is therefore valid because the Constitution grants government the power of taxation. Some conservatives have concluded that the court has given hope for future decisions limiting government power by offering such a circuitous rationale, rather than allowing the law to stand based on a more permissive interpretation of the commerce clause, and one can hope they are right, but future decisions that allow such expansions of government authority on the basis of the power to tax will still be allowing unrestricted government. Nor does the argument change the fact that the immediate consequence of the decision is that the government is allowed to restrict the rights of its citizens in ways that are certain to make the health care system more expensive and less effective.

Defining the individual mandate as a tax does offer one consolation, though, as it should offer much help in the political effort to repeal the disastrous the health care reform law. Obama won election on an oft-repeated promise that no one making less than $250,000 a year would see any new taxes or tax increases, and had famously argued with a television interviewer that the individual mandate did not violate his pledge because it is not a tax, but he now has to run for re-election with his name attached to an historically large tax increase that falls mostly on the middle class or concede that the bill is only constitutional by virtue of a fallacious argument.

The ruling also pushes Obama’s consistently unpopular signature achievement back into the political debate, with a timely reminder of its many faults. Anger toward the bill was a major reason that the Democrats suffered huge losses in the 2010 mid-term elections, and since that time the Congressional Budget Office has found it to be vastly more expensive than previously supposed, its CLASS program for assisted living has been scrapped because of the very reasons its critics had predicted, and insurance costs have steadily risen, so the issue could prove even more effective this time around.

While it would have been a good thing for the Court to establish a firm legal principle that the government cannot compel Americans to purchase products or services against their will, establishing the same rule at the ballot box might be even more effective. The judgment of the people has always settled issues more permanently than the opinions of five Justices, as the ongoing battles over the 39-year-old Roe v. Wade decision demonstrates, and it is possible that it might settle this one correctly.

It is of the utmost importance, however, that restraining the government’s lust for power happen one way or the other. The reason Thursday’s ruling came as a surprise to most observers is that the oral arguments had gone so badly for the government’s lawyer, especially when he was asked what limits on government power would exist if the Constitution somehow countenanced the individual mandate. There’s still no good answer to that question, and it certainly cannot be found in the Court’s decision.

– Bud Norman

Too Hot For Politics

June 28, 2012 By in Politics Tags: , , , , Leave a comment
It’s summertime, when the living is supposed to be easy, and this is usually the slow news season when politics and other matters of national importance are supplanted in all the papers by stories about bath salt-crazed cannibals, natural disasters, and celebrity sex scandals. Not this summer, though, as the politics continues unabated.

This hot and hazy Thursday brings two stories that would dominate the front pages at any time of year, as the Supreme Court will unveil its long-awaited ruling on Obamacare and the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on holding the Attorney General of the United States in contempt of Congress. Both stories will drag out over the rest of the summer, regardless of what news today brings, and will inspire seemingly endless arguments and analysis.

Much of the analysis will concern how the developments affect the ongoing presidential race, which has been constantly intruding into the news. Presidential campaigns once took time off after the primaries and didn’t begin in earnest until the conventions, but like so many other worthy traditions that schedule has fallen by the wayside. One can also expect any number of unforeseen developments to command the attention of the civic-minded throughout the summer, too, including foreign crises, economic calamities, and assorted scandals.

The relentlessness of the political news is wearying, even for those of us who find it fascinating, and offers yet another argument for conservatism. A properly limited government wouldn’t require the constant attention of its citizens, and would allow time for such happier pursuits as baseball, lawn work, and addressing all of the problems that government hopes to solve but usually winds up exacerbating. Politics has insinuated itself into almost everything, but it should at least take the summers off.

– Bud Norman

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