Talking Points Versus Reality

Ramesh Ponnuru over at NRO throws cold water on the latest round of lies the Wizard of 0 and his mendacious munchkins are throwing around:

Talking point: The bill will give tens of millions of Americans the same insurance choices as members of Congress.

Reality: Members of Congress are in a much less regulated system.

Talking point: The CBO says that the bill will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion over the next two decades.

Reality: CBO says that projections into the second decade are meaningless, and that even its first-decade projections include savings that it was ordered to assume will take place.

Talking point: Under the bill, small businesses will not have to choose between “hiring and health care.”

Reality: You might find yourself unable to get either a job or insurance from a small business because of this bill’s mandates.

On that last point, I would only offer that I believe that we will be hit by economic reality if ObamaCare passes. Jobs will become extremely hard to find as the economy nosedives. Small businesses will be crushed by these new rules and the tax hikes that are coming are going to stifle any growth for years to come.

America is being sacrificed on the alter Obama has built to himself.

I believe also that the Democrats have wildly underestimated the consequences of what they are trying to pass. They think they can “sell” it after they pass it. But America is being sold a bill of goods – and Americans have long memories.

Why Jump Over The Cliff?

The Orange County Register:

The argument is made that not passing a bill will create an aura of failure around the administration and the Democrats, hurting them much more than passing a bill with a bare majority in the face of public opinion. I would think that for moderate and conservative Democrats in districts taken by either Bush or McCain, the calculus is different. Those members, who are probably the key to assembling a majority, are probably thinking that they’re in some trouble either way considering the general anti-Democrat mood, but that helping to make sure no bill is passed will earn them more credit in their home districts than standing idly by while it passes, no matter how they themselves vote.

I think that’s right. They can follow their leaders off the cliff or they can slam on the brakes and maybe save themselves and their party in the long run.

I strongly suspect that the Democrats and Obama have badly – really badly – miscalculated the hit they are going to take this year and in the coming years. When people fully understand that they have been forced to pay for insurance from a private insurer – essentially being indentured by Democrat fiat to that private insurer – the backlash will be biblical.

When they also figure out that their health care is much less than what they surrendered for the “reform” the backlash will be apocalyptic.

The promise of laser-like focus on jobs was a lie – so is ObamaCare.

Going over the cliff on this one will be very, very bad for the Democrats.

Shorter Gibbs

When House Democrats vote for the Senate bill, there will be no reconciliation. If Reid even tries to pass one, the attempt will be as lame as everything Harry tries. So House Democrats will be jumping off a cliff – for nothing.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the healthcare bill will pass by next weekend.

“We’ll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week,” Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Gibbs added that those on next week’s Sunday talk shows “will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land.”

Obama will sign the House Democrat’s suicide bill and the rest of the “deals” will be immediately forgotten. At best, there will be a very short, very half-hearted attempt by hapless Harry to get anything through.

And the voters will pay back tenfold come November.

There will be no safe seats.

It has already failed, all the Democrats can do now is compound the damage.

The Psychotic Mathematics Of ObamaCare

It doesn’t add up – unless you count adding to the deficit and the deranged spending. Then it adds up real, real fast:

So how much must the government borrow to pay for reform? That’s the true measure of future deficits. Let’s start with the CBO’s “deficit reduction” estimate of $118 billion.

First, we’ll subtract the Doc Fix of $371 billion, which Obama does not pay for and must be borrowed. That wipes out all of the theoretical decline in the deficit and leaves a shortfall of $253 billion.

Then we’ll subtract the tax revenues that are owed for entitlements, and therefore excluded from paying for the bill: $70 billion from the CLASS Act, $52 billion for Social Security, and $113 billion for Medicare. That subtotal: $235 billion.

So the full amount that must be borrowed by 2019 is $488 billion. (That’s 39% of the total cost, composed of the $875 billion official estimate plus the Doc Fix of $371 billion, for a total of $1.25 trillion.) Add in interest, which is excluded from the official CBO cost, and the total amount approaches $600 billion. So the U.S. will need to borrow an additional $600 billion to pay for a new medical system — one that won’t be up and running until 2014.

In other words, Obama and his minions are telling lies. Flat lies. This is a road to bankruptcy for the nation. Please go over and read the entire piece, it is important. Spread the word about the accounting gimmicks and outright fraud that is being spread by the Wizard’s supporters.

This fraud will enrich unions, swell the bureaucracy and short-change Americans. The bill will drive up costs, reduce coverage and impose a lavishly paid and wildly over-benefited bureaucrat between you and your doctor. It will damage us beyond belief.

The damage will be immediate and lasting.

America is being sacrificed on the alter of Obama’s ego.

Start making calls, folks. Make sure your Representative knows that you will be very, very unhappy with a yes vote and will volunteer for and donate to any candidate who votes no – or who runs to replace the yes voter.

Say it with a smile and mean every word.

Wrong Bill, Wrong Time

You really, really have to go over and read the entire column by Shikha Dalmia over at Forbes. No, really, you do.

A very, very brief excerpt from a must-read:

In fact, the real reason why ObamaCare is so unpopular is that it is proposing a giant expansion of the entitlement state precisely when this state everywhere is coming apart: here and abroad; at the federal level and the state; in the public sector and the private. Suggesting a giant government takeover of a sixth of the economy can’t be a popular selling point in a country whose DNA has a programmed hostility to Big Government.

Please go read it.

Here’s the thing that I am seeing right now. The media continues to perform CPR on the Democrat’s plots to pass this monstrosity. Every day there are stories of how close they are to a deal, how great everything is going. How confident they are.

But the House has still not voted.

If Pelosi had the votes, this would already be passed.

If the House Democrats – the non-suicidal ones – had any trust in the Senate Democrats ability to pass a reconciliation, this would be done.

And a lot – a real lot – of Democrats would be gainfully unemployed come November. And the Democrat brand will be crippled if not utterly destroyed.

And Obama would be a lame duck with no other role left than to be the one who sets his successor up for untangling Obama’s wreckage and becoming a truly great president. This is more than Obama’s Waterloo. This is Obama’s political Little Bighorn.

Garryowen, Democrats. You can commit political suicide by following this narcissist over the cliff and into the valley, thereby wrecking your party and your personal political futures or you can recognize that this bill is a disaster and save yourselves – and your nation – from utter ruin.

He is not the one and this is not the bill.

Pickett’s Charge Redux

Dick Morris:

And now the House Democrats line up at the instruction of their blind commanders for a final charge into glory as they battle to foist a health care system on a country that neither wants it nor can afford it. The charge may or may not reach its objective. But one thing is certain: The carnage among those who vote for health care will remind Civil War buffs of Pickett’s Charge on the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

As a French general who witnessed the spectacle said, “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” (It is magnificent, but it’s not war.) The sight of so many Democrats throwing away their political careers may be arresting, but it is not politics.

Frankly, I don’t believe the Senate Democrats will pass a “fix” under reconciliation. Any House Deocrat who trusts the Senate – or the Wizard of 0 – to even try, much less succeed in doing so – is not playing with a full deck. And there will be a lot of House Democrats looking for work after November if they do pass this horror. Many, many more than if they do not pass it. There will be no safe seats.

Americans don’t want this and America can damn sure not afford the monstrosity that is ObamaCare.

If they do, it won’t be Pickett’s Charge, though. It’ll be Little Bighorn. Better be calling your Representative, folks. Make sure they understand what will happen if they vote yes. Say it with a smile and mean it.

Rhymes With Pies

Matt Welch:

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.

Welch is pointing out something here that bears repeating. The Wizard of0 does not tell the truth rather often. He is quite blatant about it. And it is why I predict that if the House Democrats pass the Senate bill, they will be surprised that reconciliation does not occur at all or does not even come close to the fixes they were promised to entice them to take the bait.

This man will not hesitate to double cross his allies.

How To Destroy An Economy

The CBO looks at Obama’s budgets:

If President Obama’s 2011 budget were put into effect as proposed, the U.S. federal government would add an estimated $9.8 trillion to the country’s accrued debt over the next decade, according to a preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.

By 2020, the agency estimates debt held by the public would reach $20.3 trillion, or 90% of GDP. That’s up from 53% of GDP in 2009.

Frankly, it will be a lot worse. The rosy projections of revenue will not work out. Nor will the planned spending. The latter will be ever so much higher than predicted and the former will be much, much lower. Bank on it.

A trillion here, a trillion there. Pretty soon you’re looking at real economic collapse.

Look at the interest alone, folks. Not only is this spending unsustainable, this spending is deranged. This is a recipe for a ruined economy.

And it is one man doing this with the assistance of the mad Democrats in control of Congress. How are they planning on fixing this mess?

Why they are spending even more.

Time to clean house. Come November, we have to fix this. Get these maniacs out, get some fiscal discipline. Or we are dooming ourselves and our offspring. For many generations.

Time to take it back, folks. Or we will all fall.

The New Rich

USA Today brings out yet another shocker: Federal pay exceeds that of private sector jobs of the same type. And the Federal benefits for those lavishly paid positions are absolutely obscene:

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

So the pay is about 11% higher and the benefits are more than 4 times as large.

What’s wrong with this picture?

This is where your health care dollars will be spent under ObamaCare. Not on keeping you actually healthy, but on keeping the new rich wealthy at your expense. Think of the vast numbers of bureaucrats who will get massively overpaid jobs and lavish benefit packages while you struggle to keep paying the insurance company you have been indentured to by Obama’s law.

Better start making calls to your congressman. Make it abundantly clear that the price of a yes vote on ObamaCare will be very, very high indeed.

Running On Empty

Or what?

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is ratcheting up the pressure on Congress to complete health-care legislation, setting March 18 as the deadline by which a final bill should be passed.

Noting that President Obama leaves that day on a trip to Indonesia, Guam and Australia, Gibbs said on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown” with Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie that “we believe that we’re on schedule, based on our conversations with the speaker and the majority leader, to get something done by then.”

The White House deadline means Congress would have exactly two weeks to pass a version of the existing Senate-approved bill in the House of Representatives and then pass a second bill filled with “fixes” in both chambers.

Gibbs modified his statement hours later, in his daily briefing for reporters, saying that the bill was “on schedule to get this through the House by then.” He did not address the bill’s fate in the Senate.

Back a few years, the one term county manager in the county I lived in issued a glaring threat in the local paper. The region had been hit by a massive ice storm and a full 50% of my utility company’s lines were down on the ground. Good old Ralphie got a headline demanding that the power be restored immediately “or else”.

What the “or else” was didn’t exactly get stipulated.

We got the power back on as soon as we were able given the immense damage.

He lost the next election in a landslide.

I really, really doubt the Emerald House staff munchkins will get this, but there is a lesson in that story.

The Reality

The reality is that the White House wants to force House Democrats to pass the Senate bill. The supposed “fixes” that will be applied to that bill via reconciliation are being touted as the reason that House Democrats should simply follow the Wizard down into the valley of the Little Bighorn.  Trust us, the Wizard shouts.

Unfortunately, there’s another reality in play.

There will be no reconciliation. There will, however, be a massacre in November.

The Senate will not be able to make any real changes to the Senate bill, if they even try. The little bit of tinkering they can do via budget reconciliation will leave all of the most objectionable parts of the Senate bill firmly intact and already signed into law.

House Democrats will have committed suicide on command for Obama. Because even “safe” Democratic seats will be in play after this horrible bill passes.

Americans do not want this bill by a very, very large margin. They will be in full payback mode in November. Repeal will be a massive weapon for the Republicans to wield and they will do so with glee.

I’m personally convinced that the health care “reform” will utterly cripple our already wounded economy.

And I have no illusions that the Wizard doesn’t know it will politically kill a lot of Democrats in Congress. I don’t think for a moment that he cares one whit about those future former members of Congress.

They should not be so stupid as to think he does, either.

The reality is simple. If the House passes the Senate bill, there will not be any reconciliation. It won’t happen. And Democrats in the House will be all alone to face the voters in November.

Pay For Play?

The Weekly Standard:

So, Scott Matheson appears to have the credentials to be a judge, but was his nomination used to buy off his brother’s vote?

Consider Congressman Matheson’s record on the health care bill. He voted against the bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee back in July and again when it passed the House in November. But now he’s “undecided” on ramming the bill through Congress. “The Congressman is looking for development of bipartisan consensus,” Matheson’s press secretary Alyson Heyrend wrote to THE WEEKLY STANDARD on February 22. “It’s too early to know if that will occur.” Asked if one could infer that if no Republican votes in favor of the bill (i.e. if a bipartisan consensus is not reached) then Rep. Matheson would vote no, Heyrend replied: “I would not infer anything.  I’d wait to see what develops, starting with the health care summit on Thursday.”

The new version of PayGo. Obama pays off people to go vote for his schemes? The timing is more than a little suspicious, as the Standard points out. We have seen more than a little sleaze in the early stages of the ObamaCare odyssey. The Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker kickback. Did you really think the end game would be squeaky clean?

But how  really, really ugly is the bill that is passed by such nefarious methods? The reality is that this monstrosity, if passed into law, will be even uglier than its passage.

The Multi-Pronged Disconnect

Deaf to America:

That was nothing, though, compared to the multi-pronged Democratic disconnect on health care. It was clear early on that the public wanted the president and Congress to focus on the economy, especially after the evidence mounted that the stimulus, whatever its disaster-preventing benefits, was not going to spur job growth any time soon. Yet the Democrats went ahead and devoted most of the last year to health care reform, which only reinforced the growing perception that Washington was still as arrogant and unresponsive as ever and that the Democrats, like their predecessors, were still out for themselves and their political aims.

Once that die was cast, it was obvious that the public’s top priority was reducing costs, and they had a right to expect that’s what Washington would try to do since that’s how Obama sold his agenda. Yet the Democrats on the Hill crafted a contradictory trillion-dollar bill–it called for cutting costs by increasing spending–that was largely seen as being about expanding coverage. And after all the recent federal intrusions into the economy, the frustrated middle was plainly skeptical about the federal government’s ability to re-engineer one-sixth of the American economy. Yet the Democrats came forward with an incredibly intricate scheme that even they could not explain.

And so they follow their Wizard over the edge and into the valley of the Little Bighorn. If you are serious about trying to stop this madness, you had better start calling. Make it exceedingly clear that the political price Democrats will pay for ramming their agenda down America’s throat will be too high to bear. Say it with a smile – and mean it.

Begin gearing up now for the repeal battle, because this monstrous bill will cripple America, cause health insurance to skyrocket in cost and greatly diminish the quality of your health care. Sure, they promise otherwise, but when have you seen them be right?

They promise they can spend money to save money all the time. When does that work for you, personally? If you are a union member, Obama is coming for your gold-plated health benefits. If you are a small business owner, Obama is coming at you with punitive taxation. If you like your current health care plan, you will lose it. You will be forced to buy government-approved health care whether you want it or not. You will be a thrall to an insurance company. You will see your taxes go to fund abortions whether you want them to or not.

There is literally nothing worth the price you will pay in this horrible bill.

Start calling, folks. Hold the center.

Up Until Now…..

Every weekly or monthly unemployment report that showed job losses has been “unexpected”. (Every job report that showed even a very, very, very modest decline in the number of unemployment numbers has been heralded as nothing less than the Second Coming.) This month’s jobless report is suddenly – unexpectedly, so to speak – being spun as “expectly” bleak – well before hand.

White House economic adviser Larry Summers said on Monday winter blizzards were likely to distort U.S. February jobless figures, which are due to be released on Friday.

“The blizzards that affected much of the country during the last month are likely to distort the statistics. So it’s going to be very important … to look past whatever the next figures are to gauge the underlying trends,” Summers said in an interview with CNBC, according to a transcript.

Construction activity was hit particularly hard by the storms, but many restaurants and stores also had to close, putting the brakes on hiring plans and temporarily throwing some employees out of work.

Translation: The numbers are going to be disastrous. As in appalling. They know it and are desperately trying to get out in front of it. This is the first time the administration has tried to spin ahead of time even though they have known about bleak – seriously bleak – numbers in the past year. Up until now, every bad report has been just “unexpected”.

That should warn you about what is coming.

But ask yourself a question or two – especially when you consider the particular spin being offered by Summers:

many restaurants and stores also had to close, putting the brakes on hiring plans and temporarily throwing some employees out of work

Now any sane person has to wonder about what hiring plans any business has had recently. One also has to wonder if those few businesses who were actually thinking of hiring were waiting to see what Congress might pass in the way of sweeteners before making their decisions whether to hire or not.

Lo and behold, Congress passes a bill that will give employers a “tax holiday” from paying a relatively small tax bill – if they hire employees who have been out of work for a few months.

Ask yourself how many really smart employers are buying a temporary “benefit” for a year as an incentive – knowing that they will repay the “holiday” – with interest – at a future date when taxes inevitably rise to cover the “holiday”.

Ask yourself how many entry-level jobs, usually the important first job for teenagers – just became victim of the new beneficence from Washington. How many never-employed-before teens just lost any hope of a job to some employer eager to take Washington’s short-term bounty and hire older workers who have been unemployed the requisite number of days to meet the requirements of the new largess?

Then consider the unprecedented pre-spin.

How bad is it going to be?

I’m guessing it is really, really bad.

Backfire

I had to work today, so I was unable to watch the “summit”. But I knew it did not go as expected when I heard NPR’s reporting on it.  They are desperately spinning the result as “nobody really expected it to work”. They were not crowing about Obama’s performance. In fact, they admitted that Obama had felt the need to hold an impromptu press conference on a lunch break to try to spin things his own way.

In other words, it is like Copenhagen (twice).

It did not work.

It appears to have backfired mightily. Paul Ryan has been heard speaking some very solid American values and common sense.

The difference is this. We don’t think all the answers lie in Washington.

By federalizing the regulation of insurance, and by mandating exactly how it’ll work, you make it more expensive and you reduce the competition among insurers for peoples business. We want to decentralize the system, give more power to small businesses, more power to individuals, and make insurance compete more. But if you federalize it, you standardize it and mandate it, you do not achieve that. And that’s the big difference.

That sound bite would never have been reported by the MSM. That alone damages the Wizard’s plans.

I’m quite happy that what I feared did not happen.  I’m pretty sure that the White House wishes today had not happened.

Because it did not work as planned. Obama did not overawe and silence the opposition. His awesome awesomeness failed – yet again.