Herb Denenberg
Obama's Radical Proposals Should Be No Surprise
The Advocate
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
I have to say it, but all during the campaign, I said that then-Sen. Barack Obama was the biggest fraud, phony, and faker in our political history. I regret to report I was right on target.
He said he was against pork barrel project, pet projects, and earmarks. And the first budget bill on his watch has between 8,000 and 9,000 earmarks. And President Obama says its old business so he’s going to let it pass.
It’s the spending to take place on his watch, so he can’t let it by without breaking a key campaign promise. How can he get away with such a weak excuse? This has got to be one of the great moments in political double talk, promise breaking, and just plain old hypocrisy, fraud and phoniness. He could and should veto the bill.
Why won’t he veto the bill? Because Mr. Obama doesn’t want to offend the Democratic Congress, which wants to feed at the public trough, with the greatest pork-barreling splurge, earmarking frenzy and pet project feast in the history of the U.S. Don’t expect political courage from Mr. Obama. He wouldn’t even stand up to the corrupt Chicago (Cook County) political machine when called to do so. Don’t expect him to show a profile in courage any time soon.
This is a man who said he was going to change the way business is done in Washington, but he introduces change for the worse, making the Washington scene even worse than the one he repeatedly denounced during the campaign. The partisanship is worse than ever, and more sleazy special pet projects, pork and earmarks can be found in greater abundance than ever before. He delivers the opposite of what he promises. As Joe Welch might have said, “Have you [Obama] no decency?” There is one explanation of Mr. Obama’s position on pork. A comedian quipped that this is the way he proved he’s not a Muslim.
This world-class phony says he’s going over every line of every spending bill with a fine- tooth comb to eliminate wasteful spending. And yet his first major legislative project involves $800 billion ($1 trillion with interest), which wasn’t fine-tooth combed, and also wasn’t even read. I like to think I was right in calling him a phony and fraud throughout the campaign, but now I have to apologize for not being strong enough. This kind of phoniness is beyond belief and beyond the pale. I could go on and on with his displays of outrageous phoniness such as his claim to operate as a bipartisan. In fact, he’s always been highly partisan from his first days in politics, never in his career showing even faint traces of bipartisanship. And his first days in the White House shows he still goes down the highly partisan line, with only rhetoric about bipartisanship.
The Jesus commercial finally got the point across. If you spent $1 million a day every day from the time Jesus was born until now, you would have spent less than Congress did with its about $800 billion stimulus bill … and they did that without even reading it. And Mr. Obama’s piling on one layer of insanity after another to bring about his socialist economy. One layer of insanity is a tax increase in times of recession, the exact opposite of what is called for. He’s hitting businessmen, innovators and job creators hard with his upper bracket tax increase. He’s raising taxes on dividends and capital gains, exactly what will retard business recovery. He wants higher fuel standards for vehicles, at a time when the auto industry struggles to survive. And of course the energy tax (carbon tax or cap and trade among other descriptions) will hit manufacturing especially hard and other heavy users of energy. What’s more, it amounts to a tax increase on virtually all Americans … the same Americans Mr. Obama promised would not get tax increases.
He’s spending money and running up debt and deficits faster than anyone can compute the bottom line. His latest bit of fiscal insanity involves health care. He says we have to expand coverage and lower costs with a plan for doing so by year-end, as if it is an emergency. First of all, there is no emergency. I was writing about the health care problems like the ones we’re seeing now over 30 years ago. Since then, we’ve had long periods of prosperity. We ought to improve our health delivery system, but it’s a world-class lie to assert it has to be done this year. And the Obama claim that our recession is caused by failure to fix our health, energy, and education system is pure nonsense. The Obama people are just following the advice of Rahm Emanuel that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The Obama people are trying to get through liberal reforms when they should be fixing the banking/credit problems, which are now at the root of the present problem.
What’s more, it’s even a larger lie to think we can accomplish such far reaching reforms in a year … unless we do it like we did the stimulus package: throw it together over night and pass it without reading it. That’s not going to happen, and if it did, it would likely produce a health care monstrosity that would drive up costs and ruin the delivery system for everyone.
One thing is clear: Health reform can’t deliver economic stimulus in the short-run, which means it is not a sensible part of a stimulus package which should be timely, targeted and temporary. Many of the reforms will cost billions before delivering any cost savings. Take electronic health care records. That’s a sound reform. But it takes time to implement and it takes years to recover the costs. So this is a sound long-run reform, but in the short-run it will drive up costs.
Physicians News Digest (March 2009) reports it costs $44,000 to implement electronic medical records for each billing provider and it takes an average of 2.5 years to recover costs. In some cases, it took over nine years to recover costs. And in one practice, there were so many problems it almost drove the practice into bankruptcy. That’s the cost for a single provider, so it means it could cost a hospital millions of dollars.
Mr. Obama also wants emphasis on prevention. That’s a sound long-run reform, but in the short-run it drives up costs. You have to get providers to foster diet, exercise, stress control and other lifestyle changes. That takes time, and one of the reasons it’s not done now is that it takes time. That time will take higher insurance payments for doctors, which will drive up costs before significant benefits are delivered. Doctors might be with you all day if they were selling you on and teaching you about diet, exercise, stress control, etc. That takes years to accomplish and then it takes years for the savings to start showing up. And that’s true whoever does the consultations, doctors or some other kinds of providers.
Then he’s going to give coverage to about 46 million people now uninsured according to the Census Bureau. That would cost money, too, perhaps $1 trillion. So Mr. Obama has set a goal that is impossible to achieve, and that would only cause short-term disruption and costs. Can we really afford more trillions of dollars of debt, deficits and spending? What’s more, people like Dick Morris, in his book Fleeced, have persuasively argued that such sweeping grants of coverage would require some kind of rationing. There simply would not be the providers necessary to meet the new demands.
What makes the health care proposals and schedules more ridiculous is that Mr. Obama wants it done by the end of the year — less than 10 months away. And Mr. Obama doesn’t have the foggiest idea of a plan and whether he can accomplish his objectives. He’s just calling conferences to start to figure out where he is going.
What makes the health care misadventure more preposterous is that the one real emergency has not been addressed — the bank credit problem, which was turned over to one of the administration’s tax cheats, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who has been falling on his face at every turn, and has not come up with a credible proposal. Mr. Obama is so busy doing everything, he hasn’t done the one thing that is most essential to getting the economy on track. The latest fiasco from Mr. Geithner is that his designee for the top deputy position withdrew from consideration, and he still doesn’t have his key staff in place. The Associated Press reported, “Five weeks into his tenure, he has yet to name a single top deputy or assistant secretary. This has left Treasury with too few people authorized to make decisions or represent the department in meetings with stakeholders.”
This suggests serious questions about the competence of the Obama administration. Mr. Obama has had four months since the election and even time before that to come up with a plan to solve the banking and credit crisis. And at this late date, with the Obama recession in full swing, he is still flailing around. He’s not coming up with solutions and doesn’t even have a team in treasury to do so.
This credit/bank problem should have been the number one priority, and the first item accomplished. Instead of prioritizing, Mr. Obama is acting like the college professor he was, proposing an array of sweeping reforms involving education, energy, global warming, health care, and every other wish of liberals, with no sense of priorities and with no sense of sound drafting of proposals. Just as the stimulus bill was an unmitigated disaster, the other proposals are likely to go down the same track.
When you get in an irrational rush, you won’t get anything right. He’s even getting his statistics wrong, including the claim that someone goes into bankruptcy ever 30 seconds because of health care costs. That is not true. And perhaps that reflects on the planning and proposal process now in vogue at the White House. My suggestion is for the Obama White House and Congress to demonstrate they can achieve one small health care reform (e.g., electronic medical records) before they demolish much of the system and replace it.
It’s as though the White House and the Democratic Party are in a feeding frenzy, trying to take advantage of the financial crisis constantly advertised by the White House, to take every item on the liberal wish list, and ram them down the throat of the American people.
Of course, the Obama administration and the congressional Democrats will come up with more liberal proposals to retard any economic recovery. For example, the president said he was going to get the card check bill passed. That will eliminate the secret ballot in union elections, and authorize the use of federal arbitrators to dictate contract terms. Unions will be authorized when more than 50 percent of employees sign cards indicating they want a union. This opens up the way to all kinds of intimidation to force union acceptance. That means American business will be faced with unionization and federal arbitration, which will guarantee higher costs and less efficiency.
This endorsement of the card check law by Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party shows how radical both have become. The card check proposal is not only radical but also un-American, as it eliminates the secret ballot, a cornerstone of a democratic society. You know how far to the left the party has shifted, when ex-presidential candidate and former U.S. Sen. George McGovern is campaigning against card check, as it is anti-democratic. There are other anti-democratic proposals waiting in the wings such as the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine, designed to silence critics of the Democrats in conservative talk radio.
When you look at the whole package together, it’s obvious we’re headed for a European-style socialist government. We’re headed for an America that will be an economic failure, as all socialist economies eventually prove to be. And we’re headed for an economy that is too weak to maintain the kind of military necessary to assure safety in a world rocked by international terrorism, threatened by rogue nations, and endangered by the growing availability of weapons of mass destruction.
As government enlarges, our freedom and liberty will be contracting. That is another clear lesson of history, with the road to big government also the road to serfdom. We’re starting down the road, and we better reverse direction if we want America to still be the shining city on a hill in the years ahead.
The key question is how soon Americans will wake up to what is happening. They are still unaware of reality, as they are getting their news and information from the mainstream media, which is still acting as press spokesmen for Mr. Obama. And I told you so about Mr. Obama’s background. When you associate with a pastor who is an anti-American bigot for 20 years, when you have terrorists for close associates, when you make business deals with a crook, when you have a mentor who is a committed Communist, and when you come out of the sewer and slime that is Chicago machine politics, you are not going to behave as another Abraham Lincoln. It should surprise no one that Mr. Obama is continuing to follow the path of his whole life and his whole record in public life. If you look at his history, his record, and his associates, you will not be surprised at his political plans, proposals, and actions.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us
He said he was against pork barrel project, pet projects, and earmarks. And the first budget bill on his watch has between 8,000 and 9,000 earmarks. And President Obama says its old business so he’s going to let it pass.
It’s the spending to take place on his watch, so he can’t let it by without breaking a key campaign promise. How can he get away with such a weak excuse? This has got to be one of the great moments in political double talk, promise breaking, and just plain old hypocrisy, fraud and phoniness. He could and should veto the bill.
Why won’t he veto the bill? Because Mr. Obama doesn’t want to offend the Democratic Congress, which wants to feed at the public trough, with the greatest pork-barreling splurge, earmarking frenzy and pet project feast in the history of the U.S. Don’t expect political courage from Mr. Obama. He wouldn’t even stand up to the corrupt Chicago (Cook County) political machine when called to do so. Don’t expect him to show a profile in courage any time soon.
This is a man who said he was going to change the way business is done in Washington, but he introduces change for the worse, making the Washington scene even worse than the one he repeatedly denounced during the campaign. The partisanship is worse than ever, and more sleazy special pet projects, pork and earmarks can be found in greater abundance than ever before. He delivers the opposite of what he promises. As Joe Welch might have said, “Have you [Obama] no decency?” There is one explanation of Mr. Obama’s position on pork. A comedian quipped that this is the way he proved he’s not a Muslim.
This world-class phony says he’s going over every line of every spending bill with a fine- tooth comb to eliminate wasteful spending. And yet his first major legislative project involves $800 billion ($1 trillion with interest), which wasn’t fine-tooth combed, and also wasn’t even read. I like to think I was right in calling him a phony and fraud throughout the campaign, but now I have to apologize for not being strong enough. This kind of phoniness is beyond belief and beyond the pale. I could go on and on with his displays of outrageous phoniness such as his claim to operate as a bipartisan. In fact, he’s always been highly partisan from his first days in politics, never in his career showing even faint traces of bipartisanship. And his first days in the White House shows he still goes down the highly partisan line, with only rhetoric about bipartisanship.
The Jesus commercial finally got the point across. If you spent $1 million a day every day from the time Jesus was born until now, you would have spent less than Congress did with its about $800 billion stimulus bill … and they did that without even reading it. And Mr. Obama’s piling on one layer of insanity after another to bring about his socialist economy. One layer of insanity is a tax increase in times of recession, the exact opposite of what is called for. He’s hitting businessmen, innovators and job creators hard with his upper bracket tax increase. He’s raising taxes on dividends and capital gains, exactly what will retard business recovery. He wants higher fuel standards for vehicles, at a time when the auto industry struggles to survive. And of course the energy tax (carbon tax or cap and trade among other descriptions) will hit manufacturing especially hard and other heavy users of energy. What’s more, it amounts to a tax increase on virtually all Americans … the same Americans Mr. Obama promised would not get tax increases.
He’s spending money and running up debt and deficits faster than anyone can compute the bottom line. His latest bit of fiscal insanity involves health care. He says we have to expand coverage and lower costs with a plan for doing so by year-end, as if it is an emergency. First of all, there is no emergency. I was writing about the health care problems like the ones we’re seeing now over 30 years ago. Since then, we’ve had long periods of prosperity. We ought to improve our health delivery system, but it’s a world-class lie to assert it has to be done this year. And the Obama claim that our recession is caused by failure to fix our health, energy, and education system is pure nonsense. The Obama people are just following the advice of Rahm Emanuel that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The Obama people are trying to get through liberal reforms when they should be fixing the banking/credit problems, which are now at the root of the present problem.
What’s more, it’s even a larger lie to think we can accomplish such far reaching reforms in a year … unless we do it like we did the stimulus package: throw it together over night and pass it without reading it. That’s not going to happen, and if it did, it would likely produce a health care monstrosity that would drive up costs and ruin the delivery system for everyone.
One thing is clear: Health reform can’t deliver economic stimulus in the short-run, which means it is not a sensible part of a stimulus package which should be timely, targeted and temporary. Many of the reforms will cost billions before delivering any cost savings. Take electronic health care records. That’s a sound reform. But it takes time to implement and it takes years to recover the costs. So this is a sound long-run reform, but in the short-run it will drive up costs.
Physicians News Digest (March 2009) reports it costs $44,000 to implement electronic medical records for each billing provider and it takes an average of 2.5 years to recover costs. In some cases, it took over nine years to recover costs. And in one practice, there were so many problems it almost drove the practice into bankruptcy. That’s the cost for a single provider, so it means it could cost a hospital millions of dollars.
Mr. Obama also wants emphasis on prevention. That’s a sound long-run reform, but in the short-run it drives up costs. You have to get providers to foster diet, exercise, stress control and other lifestyle changes. That takes time, and one of the reasons it’s not done now is that it takes time. That time will take higher insurance payments for doctors, which will drive up costs before significant benefits are delivered. Doctors might be with you all day if they were selling you on and teaching you about diet, exercise, stress control, etc. That takes years to accomplish and then it takes years for the savings to start showing up. And that’s true whoever does the consultations, doctors or some other kinds of providers.
Then he’s going to give coverage to about 46 million people now uninsured according to the Census Bureau. That would cost money, too, perhaps $1 trillion. So Mr. Obama has set a goal that is impossible to achieve, and that would only cause short-term disruption and costs. Can we really afford more trillions of dollars of debt, deficits and spending? What’s more, people like Dick Morris, in his book Fleeced, have persuasively argued that such sweeping grants of coverage would require some kind of rationing. There simply would not be the providers necessary to meet the new demands.
What makes the health care proposals and schedules more ridiculous is that Mr. Obama wants it done by the end of the year — less than 10 months away. And Mr. Obama doesn’t have the foggiest idea of a plan and whether he can accomplish his objectives. He’s just calling conferences to start to figure out where he is going.
What makes the health care misadventure more preposterous is that the one real emergency has not been addressed — the bank credit problem, which was turned over to one of the administration’s tax cheats, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who has been falling on his face at every turn, and has not come up with a credible proposal. Mr. Obama is so busy doing everything, he hasn’t done the one thing that is most essential to getting the economy on track. The latest fiasco from Mr. Geithner is that his designee for the top deputy position withdrew from consideration, and he still doesn’t have his key staff in place. The Associated Press reported, “Five weeks into his tenure, he has yet to name a single top deputy or assistant secretary. This has left Treasury with too few people authorized to make decisions or represent the department in meetings with stakeholders.”
This suggests serious questions about the competence of the Obama administration. Mr. Obama has had four months since the election and even time before that to come up with a plan to solve the banking and credit crisis. And at this late date, with the Obama recession in full swing, he is still flailing around. He’s not coming up with solutions and doesn’t even have a team in treasury to do so.
This credit/bank problem should have been the number one priority, and the first item accomplished. Instead of prioritizing, Mr. Obama is acting like the college professor he was, proposing an array of sweeping reforms involving education, energy, global warming, health care, and every other wish of liberals, with no sense of priorities and with no sense of sound drafting of proposals. Just as the stimulus bill was an unmitigated disaster, the other proposals are likely to go down the same track.
When you get in an irrational rush, you won’t get anything right. He’s even getting his statistics wrong, including the claim that someone goes into bankruptcy ever 30 seconds because of health care costs. That is not true. And perhaps that reflects on the planning and proposal process now in vogue at the White House. My suggestion is for the Obama White House and Congress to demonstrate they can achieve one small health care reform (e.g., electronic medical records) before they demolish much of the system and replace it.
It’s as though the White House and the Democratic Party are in a feeding frenzy, trying to take advantage of the financial crisis constantly advertised by the White House, to take every item on the liberal wish list, and ram them down the throat of the American people.
Of course, the Obama administration and the congressional Democrats will come up with more liberal proposals to retard any economic recovery. For example, the president said he was going to get the card check bill passed. That will eliminate the secret ballot in union elections, and authorize the use of federal arbitrators to dictate contract terms. Unions will be authorized when more than 50 percent of employees sign cards indicating they want a union. This opens up the way to all kinds of intimidation to force union acceptance. That means American business will be faced with unionization and federal arbitration, which will guarantee higher costs and less efficiency.
This endorsement of the card check law by Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party shows how radical both have become. The card check proposal is not only radical but also un-American, as it eliminates the secret ballot, a cornerstone of a democratic society. You know how far to the left the party has shifted, when ex-presidential candidate and former U.S. Sen. George McGovern is campaigning against card check, as it is anti-democratic. There are other anti-democratic proposals waiting in the wings such as the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine, designed to silence critics of the Democrats in conservative talk radio.
When you look at the whole package together, it’s obvious we’re headed for a European-style socialist government. We’re headed for an America that will be an economic failure, as all socialist economies eventually prove to be. And we’re headed for an economy that is too weak to maintain the kind of military necessary to assure safety in a world rocked by international terrorism, threatened by rogue nations, and endangered by the growing availability of weapons of mass destruction.
As government enlarges, our freedom and liberty will be contracting. That is another clear lesson of history, with the road to big government also the road to serfdom. We’re starting down the road, and we better reverse direction if we want America to still be the shining city on a hill in the years ahead.
The key question is how soon Americans will wake up to what is happening. They are still unaware of reality, as they are getting their news and information from the mainstream media, which is still acting as press spokesmen for Mr. Obama. And I told you so about Mr. Obama’s background. When you associate with a pastor who is an anti-American bigot for 20 years, when you have terrorists for close associates, when you make business deals with a crook, when you have a mentor who is a committed Communist, and when you come out of the sewer and slime that is Chicago machine politics, you are not going to behave as another Abraham Lincoln. It should surprise no one that Mr. Obama is continuing to follow the path of his whole life and his whole record in public life. If you look at his history, his record, and his associates, you will not be surprised at his political plans, proposals, and actions.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us
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