As Banks Reel, Obama Pushes -- HEALTH CARE ?

[JVegas]

Interesting article I thought was worthy of print (from IBD 3-5-09)



As Banks Reel, Obama Pushes — Health Care?

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER | Posted Thursday, March 05, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks.
Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 — 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:
"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system.
One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy-money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates.
Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.
© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group

[Eric5273]

Writer fails to mention that well more than half of bankruptcies in the United States are a result of Health Care costs (I think the exact number is 68%). His analysis that Health Care has nothing to do with the crisis is simply wrong. Health Care costs have tripled over the past 10 years. It is hurting large corporations who provide these benefits to their employees (like GM) as well as individuals as is evidenced by the high number of bankruptcies due to health care costs. The increase in bankrupcies surely contributes to the banking crisis as those individuals default on their loans.

[AzX5]

Transcript of the President's followup phone call to a New York Times reporter to "clarify" something from an interview (teleprompter turned off, in case you can't tell).

OBAMA: See, uhhh, I -- I -- eh -- Just one thing that, uhh, I was thinking about as I was, uhh, -- as I was -- getting off the, uhhh, copter 'cause, I -- uhhh -- you know, it was hard for me to believe you were entirely seriously about that socialist question.

ZELENY: Mmm-hmm!

OBAMA: Uhhhh, I -- I -- I did think it might be useful point out that, uh, it wasn't under me that we started, uh, buying a whole bunch of (pause) shares of banks. Wasn't on my watch. And it wasn't on my watch that we passed, uhhh, a massive new entitlement, uhh, the prescription drug plan without a source of funding. Uh, and so I think that, uh, it's important just to note, uhh, when you start, uhh, hearing folks, uhh, throw these words around, thaaat (pause) .. Um, uh, we've actually been operating, uh, in a way that, uh, is entirely consistent with free market principles, uh, and that, uhhh, uh, some of the same folks who are throwing, uh, the word "socialist" around can't say the same.

ZELENY: Right. So whose watch are we talking about here, sir?

OBAMA: Well... Uh, heh, heh, heh. I -- I -- I -- I just think it's c-clear that by the time we had, uhhhhh. By the time we, eh, uh, got here, uhhh, ummm, there already had been, uh, an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system, aaand, eh, eh, eh, y-y-yuh-y-y-yuh.... The thing I constantly try to emphasize to people is that if coming in the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me, uh, to stay out of it.

ZELENY: Right.

OBAMA: Uh, you know, I -- I -- I have more than enough to do, uh, without having to worry about the financial system. Uh, and the fact that, uh, we've had to take these extraordinary measures, uh, and intervene, uh, is, uhh, not an indication of my ideological preferences --

ZELENY: Mmm-hmm!

OBAMA: -- but an indication of the degree to which, uhhh (pause) lax regulation, uh, and extravagant risk taking, uh, has precipitated a crisis.

[Wagner]

just remember the first day Obama kept his mouth shut about the economy, it got better Hey, didn't yet another Obama appointment have to back out? Isn't this some type of record