A crippling fear of a long word — “redistribution”

On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, John Harwood presented a lurid picture of what scares the best liberal marketers since the New Deal. Obama’s White House is afraid that voters will learn now what history will surely note: Obamacare is a big deal because it actually does redistribute health benefits and costs among Americans.

Liberals and social democrats may or may not be better parents, lovers, and poets than conservatives. On this continent, however, they’re certainly more sensitive about the words they decide to use in politics.

Universal health insurance, as Harwood points out, will redistribute purchasing power from those with substantial pre-tax incomes, robust health, no family responsibilities, and no blemishes on their health records to other Americans with modest or no taxable income, with risky health profiles, and with kids to worry about. Also, it levels insurance premiums for men and women, at the expense of men who never get pregnant. It waters down the exorbitant privilege that seniors have enjoyed as automatic recipients of "socialized" medicine.

Obamacare is defensible on grounds of fairness, and politically. As with social insurance and unemployment insurance, it will probably elect future politicians committed to making it work and will defeat statewide and national politicians who’d wish it away. If Obamacare survives the next couple of years and becomes another feature of the status quo, it could be a winner for liberals. But getting there means change — and change requires “redistribution.”

However, Democrat power broker William M. Daley has laid down the law:

“Redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds,” said William M. Daley, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff at the time. Republicans wield it “as a hammer” against Democrats, he said, adding, “It’s a word that, in the political world, you just don’t use.”

Norman Mailer (in his book Miami and the Siege of Chicago, I think) sneered that a liberal would rather “jack off at a beautiful thought than have a dubious fuck with a mean woman.”

Little did he know.

Liberals love the idea that politics can change things for the better. They even admit publicly that they believe in public power. They just can’t seem to spit out the mean words that accurately describe what all productive governments do: redistribute resources, alter market rules, and provide new benefits to some individuals — but not to everyone, equally, at the same time.

Harwood ends his piece with a cringingly fatuous defense of Obamacare by its author, Barack Obama:

“Understand this is not a redistribution argument,” the President told his audience then. “This is not about taking from rich people to give to poor people. This is about us together making investments in our country so everybody’s got a fair shot.”

Actually, social justice and the amelioration of pain are only incidentally good investments. They’re more affordable in affluent societies. They’re done, however, for reasons of conscience and fellowship and are financed by levying taxes and charges, whether by brand-name liberals or conservatives.

Not being truthful about what government does weakens the credibility of reformers on any number of fine causes. Calling for a "price" on carbon, insisting that we need universal public daycare, enriching public pensions, and even fiddling with taxes all involve championing some individuals and not others.

Governments can’t do anything worthwhile without creating winners and losers.

The most philistine Republican will at least utter in public the big words he or she uses in private. He or she will take advice from expensive wordsmiths, but won’t hide words they especially like: private enterprise, profit, capitalism, states-rights, and liberty, for instance.  

Barack Obama better secure a decent record of liberal accomplishment, if only to excuse his consistent unwillingness to restore liberal-friendly words in American politics.

Senator Ted Cruz’s citizens’ arrest

America just had a horrible experience with Florida’s single-minded George Zimmerman, who caused mayhem allegedly to keep other Americans safe.

Senator Ted Cruz is trying to convince Republicans to act like vigilantes in Washington and with the same righteous zeal. A nation asleep must be saved from itself as well as from suspicious young men in the neighborhood.

Indeed, fear of young people also drives his nightmare.

 

Conservative pundit George F. Will captures Cruz’s case for doing whatever it takes to stop the implementation of universal health insurance:  

“It is two minutes until midnight. On Jan. 1, the ACA’s insurance subsidies begin, like a heroin drip, making Americans instant addicts. The Obama administration knows that no major entitlement, once tasted, has been repealed.”

The heroin that’s been cooking in Washington for three generations, of course, is fine for veterans, the disabled, children of the very poor, Congressmen and Congresswomen, most public servants, and anyone over 65. They can manage it; and, anyway, those individuals who overdose, after all, were doing something for America before they grew old.

Ted Cruz proves again that you can be brassy, Ivy School–educated, called a conservative populist and not understand your civilization’s history or trust the people you’re paid to represent.

The word “entitlement” is being thrown around now with the same promiscuous dread that “greedy,” “inattentive,” and “shiftless” were whispered by aristocrats to express their unease about the mischievous idea of extending the vote to the wider population.

The aristocrats, at least, were afraid of a new idea.

After more than a century of experience with wide-open mass democracy, however, the Cruzes and Ryans of Washington still believe that although they can learn from their mistakes and live within their means, the insatiable, myopic masses cannot.

It’s easier to recommend an icy shower than take one.

Still, in Canada, Europe, and the United States, popular public services are reformed and replaced by governments that survive and go on to get re-elected. With a compelling case against business as usual, people will accept weekly garbage collection, user fees, de-control of rents, less protection for labor-intensive industries, elimination of electricity rate subsidies, and, for instance, tighter conditions on unemployment, pension, and health benefits.

Universal health insurance needn’t limit the freedom of future national governments to make fiscally responsible decisions and should make America a healthier place to live.

A democracy that can manage nuclear weapons, Senator Cruz, will survive Obamacare.  

“ObamaTax” won’t defeat Obama in November

Some consultants bank on being listened to by identifying the latest terrifying political “third rail.” Many pundits today think that Justice Roberts figuratively laid Obama across one by characterizing the individual health insurance mandate as—gasp—a tax penalty. Was the term “individual mandate” that much better? Did it really disguise something far worse—a tax?
Last year, political blogger Pat Caddell advised Obama simply to give up on being re-elected and settle for being an honorable one-time president, like his old boss Jimmy Carter. This week, Caddell’s telling Mitt Romney how to prove him right, how to lick Obama in November.

“So Romney must wield that cudgel, and wield it hard.  And so must Republicans, because if the campaign against Obamacare--the ObamaTax--is to be truly effective, it must be a top-to-bottom message.  Indeed, as we shall see, the anti-ObamaTax message could be even stronger for down-ballot Republicans than for Romney himself.  
“The challenge is to keep the focus on the tax--the ObamaTax.  Obamacare is many things, but the biggest single thing is the thing that they said it wasn’t--the ObamaTax.”  

Click on: www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/07/09/taxes-and-trust

There’s much to criticize, amend, and worry about in Obama’s 2,700-page liberal/conservative/public/private/federal/state health legislation to ensure universal access to America’s gigantic inflationary health care system. Fine.

(Indeed, Justice Roberts may come to be seen as Obama’s wise helper by making the states more equal and, thus, more accountable partners in its implementation and expansion.)

However, a small health tax on that fraction of American citizens who have the means but presently simply choose not to insure themselves is the least of Obama’s problems.

It’s conceivable that the Republicans might succeed in exaggerating this new tax penalty burden, for instance, repeatedly calling Obamacare one of the “biggest tax hikes on the planet.” But, will Obama actually let them get away with another “death panel” campaign?

Mitt Romney can say pretty well anything, but he can’t be Sarah Palin.

In any case, is that word “tax” always death in American politics? When it comes to accepting common sacrifices, are Americans really that exceptional? The draft and the history of US taxation suggest not.

Look north and you’ll see that typical Canadians pay quite similar levels of taxation and regularly re-elect tax-raising governments.

Really.

Bruce Bartlett’s column of May 12th includes a revealing table on personal taxes as a percent of the labor costs for an average worker in OECD countries, in 2011. The “tax wedge” on the Canadian worker was a whopping 30.8% compared to 29.5% on his American counterpart.  

Click on: http://kalamazoopost.blogspot.ca/2012/05/bruce-bartlett-us-is-low-tax-country.html

In 2004, a new McGuinty government introduced the Ontario Health Premium to collect another $3billion annually to bolster the finances of Ontario’s burgeoning public health care system. Up to $900 annually has been levied on everyone making over $20,000 ever since.

Click on: www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/tax/healthpremium/index.html

It’s not a better tax than Obama’s so-called health tax; it wasn’t discussed in the Ontario election, it doesn’t single out bad behavior, it’s harder on the working poor than on the rich, it covers only a fraction of the health system’s financial pressures, and it doesn’t lead necessarily to a better-run, more accessible system.

Nevertheless, it was quickly accepted and didn’t stop Dalton McGuinty from being re-elected twice.

The magic of the Ontario health tax is not the superior appeal of the Ontario premier. He’s not in Obama’s league. Its rationale, however, was compelling—it was seen as a health tax, necessary for additional investments in healthcare.

Ontarians, like Americans, will pay a little more if they think they’re paying to get into and keep up, respectively, the “greatest” health system in the world.

Putting the word “health” in front of a tax is very sexy. Obama can’t do better. Posthumous letters of endorsement by Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, and Mother Teresa would pale by comparison.

Republicans bet the farm on repealing Obamacare

Barack Obama hasn’t transformed the Democratic Party but he’s making history by driving Republicans crazy. 

For 40 years, Republicans worked brilliantly to sell the Republican Party as more than assembly of rich white protestants who play electoral politics to keep their lessers out.

The moderns in the Republican Party stopped trying to re-fight the New Deal or market their own ideas about how to make the poor upper-middle class, too. Essentially, they promised better times and found things to attack that the average guy worries about as well—like other countries, run-away government spending, street crime, foreign influences, and white-collar officials and other snobs who don’t talk common sense.

In these hard times, campaigning against Obama as an incompetent would be good enough for these Republicans. Nevertheless, no-drama Obama has excited his opponent to go extreme.

Thanks to Republican staging by 26 Republican states, congressional votes, billionaire PACs, and dozens of primaries across the country—Americans are now four months away from an election with a vivid choice.

Obama, temperamentally and visually a liberal, will defend a conservative record and a half a dozen new universal rights and benefits for individual Americans.

Romney, temperamentally and visually a conservative, will call for radical change, promising to repeal new health consumer rights, and make government poorer and business more profitable.

By going to the Supreme Court, Republicans declared that what middle-class families in other successful democracies can claim as a right as citizens—guaranteed nation-wide access to basic and preventative health services—is impermissible in the United States.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court added “constitutional” to the various selling points of Obamacare.

A strong, as well as smart, Republican presidential candidate would stand back and think. He’d look at options, including amending the legislation and claiming to have the necessary experience to make the reforms truly affordable. Mitt Romney, however, doubled down simply promising to repeal the legislation.

In effect, he’s asking for a filibuster-free sweep. In tax, and social policy, he’s inviting individual Americans to break the government rather than do anything more to make life more secure and more comfortable—beyond what they can win for themselves in the market.

No doubt it will “galvanize” the Republican base. The Charge of the Light Brigade was vehement as well.