“What Just Happened?”
Our daughter, aetat 2 and a bit, has been talking up a storm lately. The world, she has discovered, is a surprising place. When something happens that she doesn’t understand, her usual query is: “What just happened?” There’s an unexpected noise: “What just happened?” Her mother exclaims over a dropped stitch: “What just happened?” I scan the latest news out of Washington and mutter: “What just happened?”
It’s hard to know how to respond. One thing that happened is that she is already nearly $40,000 in debt: how precocious the young are today! A week ago, the Obama administration, aided by its Democratic allies in the House, passed one of the most unpopular and radical pieces of legislation in the history of the Republic. What just happened? The United States suddenly became poorer. How much poorer? It will take years, maybe decades, to tabulate. AT&T acknowledged the obvious by taking a billion-dollar charge in its first quarter to help pay for the anticipated cost of Obama’s experiment with socialized medicine. Caterpillar, 3M, Deere & Company, and AK Steel Corporation also announced that they would be taking huge charges in order to prepare for the government’s intrusion into their businesses. What just happened? The recession just got longer. Adding tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of liabilities to your balance sheet isn’t exactly a prescription for growth, is it?
What just happened? In the kaleidoscope world of Obama, it’s hard to keep track. A few days into the brave new world of ObamaCare and at least a dozen major companies have seen the future and have seen that it is expensive. Just wait till the health insurance companies finish totting up the damage, dividing it by the number of policies they write, and passing along the cost to you, the consumer, in the form of higher premiums.
But wait! Wasn’t ObamaCare supposed to make thing cheaper? That’s what the Democrats have said. (Well, some of them. Nancy Pelosi, in an uncharacteristic burst of candor, said that “we have to pass the health care bill so that you can find out what is in it.”) But companies across the country have started assessing what’s in store and are planning accordingly. They have looked to the market, not The Narrative, for their marching orders. As Andrew McCarthy observed over the weekend, our Democratic masters in Washington do not appreciate this forthrightness. The Narrative according to them is that ObamaCare will make health care cheaper. Ergo, if premiums go up, if companies lose various tax credits for providing health care or drugs, that’s just too bad. More expensive is the new cheaper. The Narrative demands it. Hence, as McCarthy reports,
People’s Commissar Henry Waxman is now planning to haul the companies before his committee because their disclosures fail to play along with our Leftist rulers’ script that Obamacare “will expand coverage and bring down costs.”
But, say, aren’t companies required to disclose events that materially affect their balance sheets? Isn’t that part of what financial transparency is all about?
Yes, but in this case, honest reporting of liabilities takes a back seat to promulgating The Narrative: that spending trillions of dollars and putting the government in charge of health care will make the delivery of health care cheaper and more efficient. Does anyone — anyone — believe that? Does Henry Waxman?
Ah, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive! Would that Sir Walter were with us today. Now companies are wedged between the rock of disclosure requirements and the politically correct requirement to get on board with The Narrative. It’s what McCarthy calls the “whipsaw” effect.
If we are now under a system where disclosure gets you a public whipping and other threats by the Powers That Be while nondisclosure promises the ruinous expenses of defending against criminal investigations and civil enforcement, this is no longer anything but a thugocracy.
Americans are entering upon untrodden ground here. What just happened? Everyday, it seems, brings some new enormity. ObamaCare is a bludgeon with which Obama beats down capitalist instincts. Spreading the wealth around requires that he spread the pain around, too. Suddenly, anyone with a job is “rich.” Taxes must rise. Regulation must become more onerous. Individual initiative must be stifled. Everything must be more complicated, more subject to oversight by the only part of the economy that’s booming: the public sector, the sector the rest of us pay for with our taxes.
What just happened? It’s untrodden ground in this country, but other countries have not been so fortunate. For decades, the Soviet Union labored under similar contradictions. How was the wheat production this year, comrade? The correct answer is “Absolutely splendid!” The true answer is “Disastrous.” Hunger, of course, is a counter-revolutionary sentiment, as is dissatisfaction with the paradise your masters are preparing for you. Dissent is now unpatriotic. Criticism is a sign of greediness. What just happened? Something glorious, friends. We’ve put ourselves deeper into debt which means we are ever so much more prosperous. We are about to see taxes rise enormously, which means we will become enormously richer. We have just passed a bill that will employ 16,000 new IRS agents, which means we will be freer than ever of government intrusion. We have cut our defense budget, obliterated critical programs, therefore we are more secure. What just happened?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that it is a mark of genius to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously. If Fitzgerald were right — “if” as in per impossible — Obama would be one of the greatest political geniuses we have had to suffer under.
Truth is lie and lie is truth. Better get with the program, Mr. Kimball.
It would be fun to watch Waxman on C-SPAN when the greedy CEOs from the greedy corporations cite the SEC laws chapter and verse …
Bet: there’ll not be a congressional hearing.
“Adding tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of liabilities to your balance sheet isn’t exactly a prescription for growth, is it?”
The leftists who dominate the Democratic Party could care less about economic realities. They are supremely confident that their intellects and benevolent sentiments will help us to get out from under the mess. Also, these arrogant elitists are convinced no harm will ever happen to them. Only the common people will suffer any possible consequences. Never forget, for instance, that the elites are not going to participate in the newly created government health care system!
What a wonderful way to put it. I just reposted this on our face book page; http://bit.ly/b3bnuT
Now the next big question… what’s gonna happen next????
What just happened? Obama and his jackals are now guilty of one of the worst crimes known to man. Obama and his gutless, selfish, minions have sentenced this once great nation to an eternity of European-style mediocrity. We will have huge debt, high unemployment, extraordinarily high taxes, low economic growth, and a military that will be slashed to the bone to pay for all of these new social-welfare programs. In short, we’ve become France.
Hope you like it. Now will you get up out of that chair and try to convince anyone who will listen to you to elect any conservative running for any position in any local, state, or federal election? Because it’s now up to you and me to bring some sanity back into our lives and help beat these bums in the next election. Stand up and be counted. You can do it. All it takes is a lot of tenacity, backbone, and courage to get out there and spread the word that we are not going to take this anymore. I think Americans are up to the challenge and we will prevail.
Right now my voter registration card is so hot that I had to remove it from my billfold and back pocket, November 2 is not that far away. I guess I need to keep this card in ice until then!
Geez, hasn’t the Obama Admin. heard of the 8-K disclosure reqs? Its as if not a one of them has any private business acumen! Its almost as if ALL of them are a bunch of academic theoreticians with no real-world rubber-meets-the-road experience! Its as if…err, what’s that? Oh, well then…
I don’t think our Telepromter Messiah has contradictory thoughts. He is a guided marxist missile intent on “fundamentally transforming” America. He says contradictory things, though.
This is what happens when people want a change without thinking about the person who brings the change. If big O’s past associations didn’t matter to our citizens why complain now?
As they say “you ain’t seen nuttin yet”!!!
We have spent billions providing health care for the Middle East, Africa and recently, the Caribbean. Therefore, I do not see the problem with looking out for own citizens for once. Actually, its a breath of fresh air. I think America is a great country and the fact that we can provide access to health care, by using private insurance companies, is quite an achievement. Of course, the far left and the far right are not happy about it but they are only out for their own gain and do not really care anyway. Thats how most Americans see it anyway.
we are in the greatest game of musical chairs. as each round ends there will be fewer contestants. the secret is to not play and watch the long faces at the end of each round. grab your cake and toys and head for the hills. this is gonna be one of those parties where the underlying animosities will surface and the fur is gonna fly. kind of like a family reunion lol. reduce your assets to things you can carry if you have to run when the revenuers come in the middle of the night. or you can vote them out in 2010 and 2012.
it’s perfect postmodern style thinking from someone with narcissistic personality disorder.
Everything revolves around him and his (irrational) thought processes. The more you try to figure it out, the more confused you become.
I have an NPD in my family – I speak from experience.
How many narcissists does it take to change a light bulb?
(a) Just one — but he has to wait for the whole world to revolve around him.
(b) None at all — he hires menials for work that’s beneath him.
Check it out – it’s scary!
http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/traits.html
“…as McCarthy reports, ‘People’s Commissar Henry Waxman….’”
Right away we know that we’re going to get an unbiased, clearheaded look at the facts … as is always case with RK.
Are you referring to “Henry the Nostril Waxman” like Rush Limbaugh like to call him. The guy really looks kind of like a rat gosh I hope he loses his seat in November, it hurts me to see his weird face!
The mainstream media continues its silence about what the bill contains. It’s almost as if the big nets and certain national newspapers were a part of the Obama continuing campaign.
See where CBS “reporters” are going to play basketball with The One. They’ve been playing ball with him for going on two years now.
What has happened to the press?
What just happened?
Any illusion that you are living under a constitutional government is now gone. That’s what just happened.
If government can mandate health care and other state, county, city and personal spending, it can mandate anything it damn well pleases…and short of a united and violent uprising by the people of America, you can’t do a damned thing to prevent it.
That’s what just happened…
Thugocracy — that sums it up nicely.
All owe a debt of gratitude to Nancy Pelosi. Why? Because the Democratic Party has made an all or nothing bet that the battered economy will be able to sustain an enhanced social welfare state. If they lose that bet, the whole structure will collapse.
Just as the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 made it impossible to ignore the insidious effects of slavery on the economy of the United States, so too the acts of last week make it impossible to ignore the insidious effects of the welfare state, from the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society, on the modern American economy.
Slowly, by degrees, we were on the path to state socialism. The acts of Congress last week only made that destination appear to be sooner, rather than later. So now it is clear that the “middle way” is untenable. And a polarized electorate always comes before a popular consensus.
Let’s see, communism is the public ownership and provision of all private goods. Didn’t work out. Capitalism is the private provision of public goods. Worked to well, providing for: Socialism, the state subsidizing the public and private provision of public and private goods; Fascism is the state telling you to do socialism or else, because it’s too poor and in debt to do communism. Feudalism is similar to fascism, but without the rule of lawyers for the Beverly Hills witch hunts over declining revenues and services. Now with a health care mandate to purchase private insurance products, I’m looking forward to that neo-colonial American experience where congress requires all free males and females to purchase an AR15 assault weapon for defense of the local gated community, just like in those multicultural colonial times. The coming feudalism, don’t you just love it?
Fire all Democrats first!
One thing that The One continues to forget is that a Depression is not a case of severety of the recession but rather the duration.
Therefore Obozo lies once again when he refers to having avoided a Depression. We’re starting to see that this recession just may stretch on into a depression. And Obozo along with hs Deomcrat allies are doing everything they can to assure that we do.
Dear Poor Citizen;
If I pull out a gun and take you from your home and force you to attend a baseball game with me, I AM NOT PROVIDING ACCESS TO A BASEBALL GAME TO YOU!
Establishing a bare minimum of a turnkey policy for everyone to have as a plan is not containing costs.
You need to get a small dose of reality.
The response is simple:
don’t forget, don’t forgive, get even – next election day.
The White House and Congress are confident that come next election day the public will have forgotten. I am afraid there may be an element of truth to that. If we, the citizens of Massachusetts, were able to send them a message, so can the rest of the country – they did not appear to heed our warning – but any number of us know that “D” students require remedial lessons.
You can count on me to not forget and my voter registration is handy and waiting!
What happened is that a tax loophole was closed. Roger should know this. The disclosures are accurate and necessary for accounting whether the Dems like it or not. But do they destroy wealth?
Is AT&T losing a billion dollars in sales? No.
AT&T because of Medicare Part D (the unfunded Bush entitlement expansion we liberals trot out all the time) businesses were given incentives to keep their prescription drug plans.
So we the American people agreed to subsidize 28% of the plan costs. Taxpayer money goes to AT&T for the part of the costs which isn’t a bad deal because it offsets Medicare costs.
The kicker is the write-off. AT&T got to write off 100% of the drug plans even though their outlay was 72%.
So, it doesn’t seem like AT&T actually is losing money, they just don’t have the same sweetheart deal that gave them a 28% increase in tax write-offs.
Anyway, you can keep knee jerking about how we’re on the road to socialism, the truth is far less earth shattering. That is what happened.
Nice attempt to tell half the story.
Yes, businesses were provided a tax break to convince them to keep their prescription plans for retirees, rather than dump them on the govt.
Now that the tax break has been eliminated, most of those companies will start dumping their plans, which will cause the cost of the govt plan to sky rocket. The CBO assumed that despite losing the tax break, companies wouldn’t dump their plans. Another epic fail for BarryCare.
As to the write-offs, are you trying to argue that the amounts being reported are wrong? If not, what’s your complaint.
As to this not being an example of creeping socialism. How can govt taking over much of the health care system not be socialism? The govt has decided that everybody must buy health insurance, and they are dictating what the terms of that health insurance must be. How is that not socialism?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that it is a mark of genius to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously. If Fitzgerald were right — “if” as in per impossible — Obama would be one of the greatest political geniuses we have had to suffer under.
George Orwell described the same phenomenon in his novel 1984, where it was called “double think” and the implications were that no totalitarian state could survive without it.
Orwell was the secular prophet of our time.
I thought that was the Red Queen. (No, not Hillary.)
So we’ve passed a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress who hasn’t read it but exempts themselves from it, signed by a president that also hasn’t read it and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, all to be
overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke.
What the heck could go wrong?
Nothing I suppose except for some strange reason Obama is still flying around the country still trying to sell this pile of crap (but calling it caviar)! He spent 17 minutes trying to answer a simple question from a woman who said she thought her taxes were too high already, manypeople became so restless at his non answer they started to leave the building, even Obama realized he spoke too long about NOTHING as he does frequently!
Trickle-up povery is back and this time it’s all-out war against the private sector.
Foist we levels ‘em, then we controls ‘em…for their own good, har har har.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
pc #10:
“We have spent billions providing health care for the Middle East, Africa, and recently the Caribbean.”
How true. It makes for a godawful line at the emergency room, though.
No comment. Juan said it all.
25. juan,
YIKES! That was brilliant…(and scarily all truth)!
I keep finding myself quoting this bit, but perhaps that is because it is so accurate:
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
-Kipling: The Gods of the Copybook Headings
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm
jd and Prior: Especially if it is Cubs game.
Lefty:
Except if you consider that Medicare Part D costs us a lot more than the credit we were giving to corporations to fund their private insurance. New number suggest that instead of giving the health care plan a windfall of 5 billion dollars, it will actually cost tax payers an additional 5 billion dollars (after the government saves 5 billion dollars, so a total of 10 billion dollars) if these corporations no longer offer their private funded programs, and these folks have to get Medicare Part D, which do not provide the same level of reimbursements as the private plan. IMHO, that is not a savings for anyone.
Someone voted for him. I hope they’re enjoying it.
Twern’t me!
The socialist democrats have immorally enslaved us all. Why? Sob stories. Real or made up. That’s the only way they can win the aurgument. They also won with sneaky secrecy. All of us, no matter what skin color or race came out losers in regards to this HC plan. Under the name of fairness, we are all now slaves of the government. We all lost our liberty. Someone should tell this to the race baiters.
What just happened ?
Spurred on by beating the system and the majority of the American people, the community organizer has dropped the pretense of being a “uniter” & is moving full bore into what he knows best, stirring up the pot, agitating & bullying.
White House Seeks to Rally Supporters With Aggressive Tone Against Opponents
Just think. We have been saddled with Obama by only 30% of the electorate. Next time get out and VOTE!!!! I can’t believe that he has converted more people to his way of thinking. Especially since all of our taxes [fees?] are going up.
Poor Citizen:
You are just plain dumb. You should take some time off from work (if you have a job, or are you on the public dole?) and read a comprehensive account of world history. You will learn about all the little tin gods throughout history who wanted to take control through all-encompassing government and about all the suffering, misery, death, poverty, and destruction that this caused. For example, Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Cuba, China, Uganda, Venezuela, to name just a few. And, this is why America exists today. The Revolutionary War was fought in America to throw off the tyranny of George III and Britain! If you don’t learn anything else, learn this:
When you allow the government to take over things that you typically and currently do for yourself, you lose FREEDOM!!!! What about that don’t you get?
You are severely under-educated and unknowledgeable.
Tut, tut, all.
The real pain, er, ah, effect of “sharing” won’t be felt until long after Dear Leader, Pelosi, Reid, etc, have retired to their homes on the Cote d’Azur.
However, once we get used to Russian-style health care (garlic, anyone? six month wait for a CT scan?), forking over 75-80% of our income in some form of tax, massive unemployment, staggering inflation . . . at least we’ll all be in the same boat, even if we’re collectively miserable. Just think of all the fun we’ll have, bartering back and forth for things!
Don’t you agree?
P.S. I have some “F Capatalism” tees for sale, $14.95 in a variety of colors and sizes. Made in Pakistan, but you know how things are today.
“Every day brings some new enormity.” Truer words were never written. I’ve lost count of the idiocies and criminalities perpetrated by the Obama Gang — really lost count!! Every time I start counting (dumping England and our special relation, spitting on Israel, promising not to raise taxes and then doing that on your first day in office, sending SEIU thugs to beat up Tea Partiers)…well, I lose count.
What is most amazing is that this criminal gang in the White House seems to imagine that people are FORGETTING all these things (“We make up the rules as we go along.”) Oh, November is going to be a bloody month.
40. Forget that- sell T’s with the insignia of the Home Army (Polish resistance movement during WWII).
Obamacare is such poorly designed legislation, so 1930’s style state-run “command and control” policy that it won’t likely have but tiny bits of it enacted. It destroys capital, incentivizes more dependency on government and stifles business enterprise, which means fewer jobs for Americans by shifting some healthcare jobs overseas. In fact, you could call it a job stimulus program for China and India.
Top-down, central planning, by Washington lawyer/politicians. Yeah, this is gonna work out well!
I give it 12 months before much of Obamacare is gutted as unworkable, stifling to business and thus creating unemployment and the loss of individual liberty at the expense of trying to be all things to all people (what libs love – egalitarianism).
Wouldn’t it be nice to believe that the yahoos who elected the boyking were as concerned about this mess as those who are paying attention? Most of them are probably just waiting for their cut of obama’s stash. And when we drag the nation back from the brink, the next round of elections will feature the democrats calling on them to ruin “those selfish Americans” who put a stop to burning the nation down. Never again.
here’s something else to add to what just happened?
apparently mr. obama attends no church. instead, according to him, he gets “daily devotionals” from “pastors with whom he prayed during his campaign”.
can we finally understand this cretin is muslim.
Humorous cartoon on the real cost of Healthcare at http://drawfortruth.wordpress.com/category/health-care/
To Anny: Lefty is actually right (so to speak.)
As far as the overall question goes: what just happened is that Obama managed to drive off the barbarians at the gate and finally do something about the bad and getting worse health care situation in this country. Barbarians, being barbarians, are simply behaving as extremely poor losers.
I agree on the aspect of the health care not being helpful at all in helping to cut down the debt of the country and the bill mostly being a radical redistribution of wealth. After a stimulus plan with a multiplier of around .1 or 0, clearly this administration needs to figure out a way to decrease the debt. While this bill does technically pay for itself in the long-run, we need to step back and ask, “who is being hurt by this bill, and do we want these people to get hurt by the bill?” This bill will help the poor who do not have health care. Almost everyone else is worse off, especially the young-adults entering the workforce straight out of college, which happens to include myself in two years time.
Why redistribute the wealth? How is it possible to have a trickle-down effect when businesses are now being charged more money? This health care plan will put a huge damper on the economy. My main concern is that the multiplier they have attached to this bill is 1.5… Where in the American history have we seen a multiplier above 1, let alone 1.5? During WWII, the multiplier was around .8, and that was only due to the war since war-related purchases have the highest effect on real GDP. While I’m curious to see how this bill plays out in the coming decade, I am a tad bit confused as to the mathematics behind both the health care plan and the stimulus plan, which I am positive had almost no effect on the current economy except to keep big failing banks in business. The increase in jobs has been minimal at best thus far. The American public would be lucky if the stimulus plan increased jobs by 500,000, let alone the 3-4 million jobs promised by the Obama administration.
To add to my previous comment, this bill also incentivizes one major sector of the economy: small business. When I say incentivize, I am not referring to small business growth, but rather small business deflation. Small businesses who have under 50 employees have the option to not pay for their employees’ health care costs. This means small businesses have no incentive to increase above 50 employees, once again decreasing the trickle down effect and decreasing the potential increases in real GDP. This bill hurts too many sectors of the economy to possibly be thought of as a positive.
Americans, and through you the world, will pay the price for being led by the nose through a smog of lies, into electing a Socialist president that hates his country, its freedoms, democracy, and all it stands for.
BC: No, he and you are both wrong. Color me shocked.
There was no tax “loophole”; there was an arrangement between several businesses and the government to fund part of Medicare Part D through this subsidy/write-off arrangement. This was overall a win for the government (and taxpayers), since it funded retirees’ drug coverage at a lower cost than if Medicare was picking up the full tab.
Now, that arrangement has been abridged by one party, and the other party has to react to it. Their costs just went up, no matter how you slice it. You may prefer that the arrangement had never existed in the first place, but that’s a separate argument.
So, your view is that it’s desirable for the government to unilaterally “renegotiate” any deal at whim, as long as it’s for something you support. Why do people who think this way never understand that the government can use this power for things they don’t support?
Yes, Obama managed to do something about health care – he made things worse.
“What just happened? In the kaleidoscope world of Obama, it’s hard to keep track.”
First, Obama couldn’t do anything. Now you can’t keep up. Fasten your seat belts!
Great post, I totally agree. If I may deviate off topic and emphasize that despite paying taxes to the federal government and sending our citizens to fight and die in every war, Washingtonians have had no voting representation in Congress and have had to seek approval from people they did not elect on all legislative and budgetary matters. That my freinds is crime against society, and America. Let’s hope it will change soon. Cheers.