The Summer and Fall of 2009 can only be described as surreal. Any other description is simply inadequate. As the economy tanked, fueled by a crisis precipitated entirely from the worst consequences of government policies run amok, our President, the House of Representatives, and the Senate, controlled by its Super Majority of the same political party, embarked on legislation to inflict the single greatest transfer of economic output from any private sector to the control of government in world history. Throughout the entire national shouting match, during which time a full 65% of our citizenry vocalized staunch objection, we witnessed angry town hall meetings with Congressional Leaders soon to be voted out of office, endless phone calls to a Congressional Switchboard that actually went to the trouble of taking their phones off of the hook for the last 3 months of the year, protests, the birth of the Tea Party, and marches on Washington by normally complacent citizens. Several promises were made by the singular political party that enacted this crap, all on their own, with no help from the opposition party. This is despite the endless claims of bipartisanship which have followed, by a less than courageous Democrat class currently seeking reelection.
In order to pass this turd, Congressional leaders assured us that the current economic crisis made it necessary to pass this legislation quickly, despite the fact that it would take over 4 years to fully implement. Indeed the architects of it are, as I am writing this, proposing that the implementation be delayed by another 3 years, so that they can push the economic savagery which will result until after the 2016 Presidential Election. We were told that the passage of this turd would immediately create 4 Million high paying jobs, which, along with the new green economy, would give us an unprecedented growth in personal wealth not seen since the days of Reagan. (Stop laughing, I’m attempting to make a point here.) We were promised that we, meaning the overwhelming majority of us who were really and truly happy with our current health insurance, would be able to keep those plans, along with our choice of doctors, specialists, medical offices, hospitals, and more importantly, the hard earned fruits of our labors. This whole thing was not to cost us, as tax payers, a single thin dime more than what we were currently spending.
Those of us who had a working knowledge of basic economics, or third grade math, (before common core,) called shenanigans. We were shouted down, and told that not only were we wrong, but that the Unicorn magic dust would wipe away the laws of economics seeing as how those laws were not fair anyhow. We were assured that anyone who insisted upon applying that critical thought was a meanie head racist who watched too much Fox News, listened to Rush Limbaugh, or Sean Hannity. Further than that however, we were treated to an endless supply of academic studies that proved we were not as well informed as liberals, and in fact were suffering from a mental illness, known as conservatism.
Imagine our surprise when every single thing that we predicted, said, theorized, discussed, warned about, wrote about, or even whispered, turned out to be true.
So here we are in 2014, when this turd was to be fully implemented. The employer mandate has been extended until at least past the next election, the individual mandate of course is in effect, meaning individuals get to subsidize big business. (So much for Democrats looking out for the little guy.) This is no longer budget neutral, but now has added over $2.5 Trillion in deficit spending over the 10 year budget projections. And now, We get the glorious news that a funny thing happened to those 4 Million jobs. To be fair, this does not say that we’ll shed necessarily 2.5 Million jobs over the next decade, just that in total, we’ll lose that number of equivalent hours worked from the workforce. It’s a subtle distinction, but one worth noting. The reason for this is simple. As people who currently reside on the bottom rungs of the earnings ladder are going to figure out, almost immediately, there is a penalty for any slight increase in earnings over the course of a year, and that this penalty will produce a steep cliff in terms of take home pay. They will be discouraged from accepting anything that would cause them to fall off of that cliff. Since the income brackets in life are more often climbed gradually, the effect upon our economy will be as if someone had taken a saw and cut off the first 4 or 5 rungs to the economic ladder. In other words, if Jeff works part time for minimum wage, and his boss says, “Jeff, we have a full time job for you. It comes with a raise. Would you like it?” Jeff will undoubtedly be smart enough to use a calculator to figure out if the increase in pay due to raise and increased hours will be worth the extra out of pocket cost imposed by the Obamacare turd. The CBO report predicts that the Jeffs of the future will pass on 2.5 Million x 40 hours worth of employment. This is the very definition of Fredric Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy.
Now with this report has come some incredibly furious spin doctoring. Here’s Nancy Pelosi’s take. From the Hotair article linked to above:
“What we see is that people are leaving their jobs because they are no longer job-locked,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters after House votes Tuesday afternoon. “They are following their aspirations to be a writer; to be self-employed; to start a business. This is the entrepreneurial piece. So it’s not going to cost jobs. It’s going to shift how people make a living and reach their aspirations.”
Pelosi said she hadn’t “fully” seen the report, but, “this was one of the goals. To give people life, a healthy life, liberty to pursue their happiness. And that liberty is to not be job-locked, but to follow their passion.”
Get that America. According to the woman who told us that this Law was first and foremost a jobs bill Five years ago, and that it would produce 4 Million high paying jobs immediately upon its passage, has now declared that America’s real problem is too many among our numbers find it necessary to work. Her claim as of this week is that this law will solve that problem for us. Now, that’s some mighty fine spin doctoring! Thank you Democrats!
At least San Fran Nan is attempting to paint a smiley face on what has clearly manifested itself as the cold splash of reality creeping into the Unicorn infested Universe that she usually speechifies from. While Barack Obama and his team have been out there touting the virtues of this debacle, and mostly just making this crap up as they go along, Nancy is at least acknowledging that reality does in fact exist. So far this year I have heard the Bamster proclaim that, “we’ve already started to see costs coming down, we’ve added more jobs to the economy than any Administration since the Great Depression, our economy is now firing on all cylinders,” and my personal favorite, “the Healthcare.gov website is now working as it should.”
What we are seeing is a true disparity in messaging that is being offered up by the players calling the shots on the political left, which is worth noting. We can still get this crap repealed, and that gives me hope for the future of our Republic.
The end analysis is this, Obamacare is a wealth redistribution scheme that will have the exact opposite effect than what it was intended to have. It will rob economic wealth from the lower middle income group and gift that wealth to the highest wage earners, while leaving the people at the very bottom of the economic ladder permanently trapped there, and punished severely should they ever attempt to improve their circumstances, at least in any economic sense. It’s been years in coming, but I believe we’ve finally found something that outdoes Social Security in terms of Dennis Moore award consideration.
It only took the Democrats 80 years to accomplish this, but God love them, they kept trying.
