I’d love to be a fly on the wall when the senior Whitehouse staff has it’s meeting to discuss the current state of the healthcare bill. The truth is, it’s dead…. finished… whatever the spin-meisters say, there will be no reviving Obama’s signature legislation now that the people have spoken and given Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat to a … gasp…Republican.
I can’t even type it without smiling, but the truth is I don’t really want to gloat. Scott Brown is no Ted Kennedy, which my readers know will be enough to spare him any of my future pugilistic intentions. And since he’s an ex soldier, and looks to be much tougher than bloated and gin soaked old Ted, I’m probably the better for it. But in my sewing circles he’d still be viewed as extremely liberal. He is from Massachusetts after all, and people only get so conservative up there. Even many of the reactionaries in greater Boston are still anti-gun and pro-abortion.
All the same though, he’s a liberal Republican that I’m glad to have join the party. But the question I have is… what will happen now?
It’s my belief that this sham of a healthcare reform bill has never been anything except a way to transfer assets to the unions. Collectivism is the ‘perpetual motion machine’ of modern economic thought. It sounds good in theory but it never works the way you want in practice. In the end, it always requires external support or the whole thing just grinds to a halt. The unions are no different, and they’ve built up an impressive set of unfunded liabilities that are sure to leave them bankrupt in the next few years without help from the government.
And the government is certainly going to give it to them. The nice thing about the healthcare bill was that it gave Obama and congressional Democrats good cover… it gave them a believable story that they were doing this all for ‘everyone’ and not just for their union paymasters. But with Scott Brown’s election that issue is dead so they’ll have to do something else.
My speculation is that we’ll see the private sector unions roll their retirement benefit plans in with the public sector unions. They don’t even need a law to be written to do something like that…they can claim it’s for ‘efficiency’ or something. But what that will give them is a way to benefit from the federal bailouts that are coming for the states and municipalities that go bankrupt.
It’s no coincidence that those states with the highest percentage of unionized civil servants are the states with the largest unfunded liabilities, and are also the most likely to go bankrupt. California is already on the brink. Just behind them is Illinois, Michigan and (guess who) New Jersey. All are deep blue states with firmly entrenched liberal political machines, and a reliable voter block in their unionized civil service.
1 in 9 New Jersey citizens gets their living from the State or local government in some way, and that doesn’t include teachers. The story is similar in the other deep blue states. A real slash and burn government cutter is unlikely to be elected to anything where that’s the case. And although voters in Texas and Utah are going to quickly tire of sending their tax money to voters in California and New Jersey, the ‘emergency’ should let the Obama administration slip a few of the worst offenders through the door before it’s slammed shut.
It will have a much higher political cost than the sham of a healthcare bill, but if we’ve learned anything from this healthcare debate, it’s that the Democrats will pay any price when they need to. Scott Brown has closed this road, but they’ll try all the others before giving up.
0 comments:
Post a Comment