Zingers coming in 1,000-page bills only Obama reads
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Pilots have chuckled at the grim humor in the apocryphal advice, “If you’re going down at night, turn on your landing light. If you don’t like what you see, turn it off.”
Navigating the dark halls of Congress, many members apparently fear what they might find in the 1,000-page tomes posing as legislative bills coming out of the Obama White House.
So it’s “lights out” on major legislation — that is to say the Democrat majority with little inquiry is content to pass trillions of dollars worth of future-shaping laws for auto industry nationalization, cap-and-trade (energy) and health care-health care insurance.
And it has all got to be right now!
On health care, President Obama absorbed the mistake Bill and Hillary Clinton made by showing their cards face up in their health care plan.
The big mistake was putting all the specifics in the “Hillarycare” bill itself and allowing enough time for the public to react – very negatively as it turned out. Citizen ire was severe over patient limitations in dealing with their doctors and over multiple ways for bureaucrats and actuaries to meddle with health care.
An aroused Congress, goaded by an angry public, dumped “Hillarycare,” pegging it for the entry into socialism scheme it was.
Obama has shown that isn’t going to happen to him. His health care bill likely will be a model of good intentions but vague on specifics. And, unless the Democrats sober up, it will be rammed through with no time for the public to get hopping mad.
“Everything is on the table” is the catch phrase from the Obama camp. That approach is a variation of Frederick the Great’s military dictum: “Who defends everything, defends nothing.”
“Everything” sounds nice, but when everything is not possible, anything done quickly might look good to a politician eager to tell constituents “We did something.”
The idea is to leave bills wide open and ripe with possibilities on a wave of high-sounding generalities. As soon as Obamacare becomes law, however, the president takes over. Strategists fill in specifics to be carried out by regulators, career bureaucrats and high up Obama appointees.
Much of Obama rhetoric flies the banner of “reform.”
But how is it reform to turn the world’s best practical, working health care system into a socialized scheme of hugely increased costs, bureaucratic delays, rationed care, less cutting edge research, and diminished interest in medical careers by doctors not wishing to work for bureaucrats.
Ironically, two examples of socialized medicine are flirting with private options.
As noted in this space last week, months of delay for diagnosis and treatment are bringing growing numbers of Canadians to the U.S., some simply to beat the system and stay alive long enough for treatment.
And British subjects for years have complained about delays, disinterested medics, sloppy conditions in government hospitals, rationed care and other health matters.
Obamacare, on the other hand, seems to want to “reform” us into this deteriorating European-Canadian model.
“Reforming” the Detroit automakers by adding government and unions to management also seems quirky.
The domestic auto industry, this writer believes, would have been saved by honest and quick bankruptcy filings by General Motors and Chrysler. Allowing creative destruction to work, as it always does in the end anyway, would have purified the ground for new American entrepreneurs to form new companies to make cars, probably even in the same Detroit factories.
Neither of the doomed American automakers was bereft of ideas. Some snazzy cars are out there from GM and Chrysler, and from Ford too (which has not required bailout money so far). But as operating models, GM and Chrysler couldn’t compete, hamstrung as they were by lay-about unions. Can it really help adding the federal government and the unions to their management?
On energy, it is not reform for politicians to undo generations of free enterprise that built U.S. industry into the world standard by passing, as the U.S. House just did, a cap-and-trade energy bill in the name of increasingly debunked man-made climate change theories.
It is an interesting question, how are we reformed by losing factories, jobs, whole industries to China, India and others — nations with no belief in Al Gore’s fantasies or with any intentions to see them carried out, except possibly by the competition, us, America?
One of the bitterly humorous, non-apocryphal asides coming out of a weekend straw poll by Fox News Channel is how few members of the House of Representatives had even read Obama’s cap-and-trade energy bill, the one they had just passed.
In cynical Washington, with hypnotized Democrats especially, the logic might be if capitalism and free enterprise are to be crashed, skip the landing lights. Just get it over with!
July 2009
