In an interview with C-SPAN on Friday, the president candidly admitted that the nation had run out of money. Then he proceeded to promote his egregiously expensive health care plan and multi-billion-dollar takeover of GM.
by Michael Naragon
At least he told the truth once.
“Well, we are out of money now,” the president told C-SPAN’s Steve Scully, showing with his keen grasp of economics that he may indeed be the smartest president we’ve ever had. “We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far.” Except, perhaps, for decisions to continually expand Medicaid and Medicare to bring more people under the government umbrella.
Had the interview stopped there, a reasonable person may have interpreted this to mean that the president was backing away from his commitment to replace the best health care system in the world with a socialized bureaucracy.
On the contrary, somehow this president sees the nation’s financial woes and budget unsustainability as being the result of our budget not being big enough. Now he wants to add over $1 trillion of nationalized medicine to our already failing Medicare and Medicaid systems.
“This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades,” the president began his pitch.
“So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it’s too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can’t afford it. We’ve got this big deficit. Let’s just keep the health care system that we’ve got now.” If Obama wasn’t mocking the fiscally responsible perspective, and if this one statement was taken out of context, again, you may almost believe that he was coming to his senses. No such luck.
“Along that trajectory,” the president continued, “we will see health care cost as an overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow until essentially it consumes everything.” And this is his pitch to tell us the government needs to spend more on health care? If our federal spending is growing because of the health care system, it is doing so only because the government has allowed it to. Nothing in the Constitution requires–or even allows–the government to pay for the health care of those who don’t have their own.
If Obama is so righteously concerned with the health care expenses of government, then perhaps he should turn inward. To lawyers. Frivolous malpractice law suits waged by trial lawyers, such as 2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, on “behalf” of wronged clients are one of the major factors driving physician costs. Tort reform has been attempted in Congress in the past. Amazingly, that lawyer-filled organization continually shoots it down.
When asked about the potential government takeover of automaker General Motors, Obama took upon himself the mantle of savior once again.
“Well, you know – look we are trying to help an auto industry that is going through a combination of bad decision making over many years and an unprecedented crisis or at least a crisis we haven’t seen since the 1930′s,” the president explained, not mentioning the fact that the auto industry is one of the most regulated businesses in the country and that government support of the UAW has kept American companies from competing with those who are not beholden to the unions.
“And you know the economy is going to bounce back, Obama said in an apparent attempt to encourage those watching C-SPAN, “and we want to get out of the business of helping auto companies as quickly as we can. I have got more enough to do without that.” Yes, like government health care, cap-and-trade taxation, amnesty for illegal immigrants, and ensuring our nation’s educational system continues its death spiral.
Sounds like a full docket to me.
I think we’ve been out of money since Bush spent the surplus money that Clinton had built in his last years in office.
Hello! Bush was borrowing money from Chinese to fund the wars that he started. People don’t borrow money if they are not broke. The sad thing about is that it took President Obama to say it for people to finally understand.
We were broke way before President Obama took office.
Ah, yes, the surplus built by Kasich and the Republican Congress of 1994 that cut spending and produced tax cuts to pull us out of the economic doldrums of the early 1990s.
We were out of money long before Obama… that is entirely correct. And if he was simply telling America that we were broke, then perhaps your admiration of his honesty would be well founded.
Unfortunately, he was telling us we are broke in order to sell his next round of spending–in this case, health care. You claim we’re running deficits because of the war on terror. Obama claims it’s because of our health care costs.
Regardless of the reasons for the fiscal mess we’re in, the prescription for healing the financial malaise should have nothing to do with running even higher deficits. Will the president use this same tact when he pushes the cap-and-trade tax that some estimate will cost families up to $3,000 per year more in fuel expenses? Or will the next reason for the federal debt be our poor education system that the president needs to spend trillions to reform?
You’re right, it’s nice to see a politician state the obvious. But when it’s being done in order to perpetuate the problem, I take issue with it.
And, for the record, Clinton quickly spent his “surplus” long before George W. Bush ever reached office. Sorry.