Medicare for Millionaires: brought to you by Democrats, Party of the Poor (C)

“Republicans wanted to deny the premium subsidies to people who had annual incomes of more than $100,000 or assets of more than $1 million. They also wanted to prevent people with more than $1 million of family income from taking advantage of the Medicaid option for the unemployed.

Democrats voted down those proposals in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. (emphasis mine)

Representative Nathan Deal, Republican of Georgia, said “the poorest of the poor” had long been subject to income and asset tests when applying for Medicaid. But, Mr. Deal argued, under the new option, a millionaire could get Medicaid benefits, financed entirely by the federal government, without being asked about such matters.

The committee chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said, “It’s highly unlikely that you are going to find millionaires who would like to go on Medicaid.”

Moreover, Mr. Waxman said, the purpose of the new options is to “streamline the enrollment process” and speed assistance to people who are unemployed.

“It’s going to set up an unnecessary barrier if we have any income test,” Mr. Waxman said, adding that the enforcement of a means test could require “a whole new bureaucracy.””

Bush is a regulate and spend liberal!

Michael Tanner over at Cato is very, very right. Obama can blame Bush or he can blame the free market for America’s recent problems, but blaming both is just ridiculous. The massive trends towards privatization and deregulation in the past eight years that Obama went all Kucinich on during the campaign are not a part of observable reality. If anything, they stopped when Clinton left office.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/01/13/of-course-that-implies-he-had-principles/

“President Bush says that he ‘chucked aside my free-market principles’ when faced with the current financial crisis. Well, duh!

The president said that he had no choice because he was “concerned that the credit freeze would cause us to be headed toward a depression greater than the Great Depression.” Even if one accepts that rather contestable premise, one is tempted to ask what caused him to chuck aside conservative and free market principles when he:

* Increased federal domestic discretionary spending (even before the bailout) faster than any president since Lyndon Johnson.
* Enacted the largest new entitlement program since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, an unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit that could add as much as $11.2 trillion to the program’s unfunded liabilities;
* Dramatically increased federal control over local schools while increasing federal education spending by nearly 61 percent;
* Signed a campaign finance bill that greatly restricts freedom of speech, despite saying he believed it was unconstitutional;
* Authorized warrantless wiretapping and given vast new powers to law enforcement;
* Federalized airport security and created a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security;
* Added roughly 7,000 pages of new federal regulations, bringing the cost of federal regulations to the economy to more than $1.1 trillion;
* Enacted a $1.5 billion program to promote marriage;
* Proposed a $1.7 billion initiative to develop a hydrogen-powered car;
* Abandoned traditional conservative support for free trade by imposing tariffs and other import restrictions on steel and lumber;
* Expanded President Clinton’s national service program;
* Increased farm subsidies;
* Launched an array of new regulations on corporate governance and accounting; and
* Generally did more to centralize government power in the executive branch than any administration since Richard Nixon.”

Rise of the Unqualified

Sanjay Gupta, 39, has been offered the position of Surgeon General by President-Elect Obama. You likely remember him from CNN, where he serves as top medical adviser. Performing emergency surgery on a few Iraq War vets is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but it qualifies you to be head up the American government’s public health care bureaucracy about as much as Ben Goodman is qualified to sit on the War Powers Committee because he (presumably) attended Model UN one year.

Leon Panetta has been nominated to serve as the director of the CIA. He is best known for being a Washington insider who can pull strings for presidents and make politics happen. During his terms in Congress, he never sat on the Intelligence Committee. Since then, much of his work has focused on protecting the world’s oceans. If confirmed, he will be in charge of rooting out corruption and abuse, hunting for Osama bin Laden, and discovering the truth about nukes in North Korea and Iran, and at the sprightly age of 70, leading the entirety of America’s covert intelligence operations.

Timothy Geithner has been nominated to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. In his 47 years of life, he has enjoyed fly fishing, tennis, skateboarding, and cussing. His qualifications include advising the government to buy out AIG and Bear Sterns (but not Lehman Brothers) and helping spend US dollars to bail out Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Thailand in the past two decades.

President-Elect Obama, 47, served part of a term in the Senate. He is best known for a riveting convention speech in 2004, immediately after which he began running for president. He introduced two pieces of legislation in his Senate years: one to prevent nuclear proliferation and one to set up a website to track government spending, which he pledges to increase. He becomes leader of the free world in 14 days.

Michael Novak, a lifelong Democrat and Catholic intellectual, wrote in the latest edition of First Things about some of the lack of foresight that got our economy into a mess. Perhaps it is worth reflecting on what happens when good intentions result in awful things when executed by people who simply don’t know what they’re doing:

“The core of the crisis lay in the field of mortgages…. Beginning with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, the political system helped create this mess. The aim was a noble one: to put as many poor people in homes as possible. And it had its early successes, with more than a million poor people coming to own their own homes for the first time. Indeed, in the 1990s (under the leadership of Franklin Raines and Leland Brendsel) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—mortgage lenders secured by government commitments—were given this as their leading purpose.

This was a goal I had shared since at least my 1971 book The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, and I applauded Fannie Mae for this achievement—despite the foresight of my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute who warned of the eventual costs to the nation. Many in Congress cheered as well, but gradually they did more than cheer. They began to violate age-old banking cautions and practices: forbidding mortgage lenders to demand down payments or to do strict scrutiny of the ability of new borrowers to make regular mortgage payments. They also made mortgage lenders subject to lawsuits—by special-interest groups and pressure groups—if they insisted on what for generations had been thought to be due diligence.

These decisions attracted swarms of speculators to new homes to take advantage of these wholly new and unheard-of incentives. A great many mortgages were granted to well-off people who made use of the incredibly lenient terms to buy or build extra homes for resale. Many economic conservatives warned against this Ponzi scheme. Several attempts by Republican members of the Congress to introduce serious reforms were rebuffed by the friends of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in Congress, who insisted that the financing of these two enterprises were [sic] sound and safe: Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, and Christopher Dodd, prominently, with many others joining in.

Independent investigators at last inspected the Fannie Mae accounting books, and massive irregularities were discovered. Top leadership was obliged to resign. But fundamental regulatory changes were blocked. The loose, unregulated practices, defended in the name of noble intentions, were allowed to stand. In a crucial way, the mortgage crisis of 2008 was initiated by specific acts passed by Congress and fiercely defended against detailed warnings about the dreadful consequences to come. All those warnings were dismissed as politically motivated, but they turned out to be accurate.”

Confessions of a Disillusioned Republican

1) Sarah Palin is entirely, categorically, and grossly unqualified to be the Vice President of the United States.
2) John McCain has done nothing since the primaries to earn my vote and has, due to political necessity and not personal depravity, sold out the very attitudes that once made him respected by nearly all Americans.
3) I will be voting for them anyways.

1) Ever since she was selected as Senator McCain’s running mate back in August, I have sought at every turn to defend Governor Palin’s credentials and qualifications. Indeed, she has proven herself a competent reformer of a broken political system and a courageous maverick – yes, I said maverick – in defeating a corrupted machine. She has also become an expert on energy policy and learned the ins and outs better than most politicians. As the Governor of Alaska, she is talented, and I would likely vote for her re-election when that issue arose.

As a Vice Presidential candidate, though, Palin has been a gross libaility. She is no idiot, but she has proven utterly incapable of communicating with the media. That image issue could be easily overlooked, were it not for her complete lack of other worthy credentials. Palin might, and I mean might, be credentialed enough to be the Secretary of Energy, but her selection as a running mate was a complete lapse in judgment from the candidate of experience and leadership. Yes, she is an everywoman. But the everywoman is not competent to be Vice President. Only the other, the exceptional, the experienced, the educated elite is. McCain wielded that argument quite well against Senator Obama – indeed, he still does even after picking Palin. But trying to make the GOP look like it cares about average folks by picking a completely inexperienced hockey mom was a slap in the face to countless highly-qualified, compassionate individuals like Governors Pawlenty, Jindal, Barbour, and Romney and Senators Hutchison, Martinez, Frist, and Ashcroft. Any one of these men and that other woman would have been highly qualified to serve in the second-highest office in the country, they are all credentialed conservatives, and quite a few of them come from humble roots. Why did McCain feel the need to grab his own inexperienced tabloid celebrity to run alongside him?

Palin undercuts the ticket’s promise of reform as well. Regardless of how much she brought down the Murkowski Regime and was probably justified in ensuring that a violent, distemperate trooper got fired, this casts an unavoidable pall on her reputation as a fighter of corruption. It is unfortunate and, in a state like Alaska, will likely not hurt her career too much. It does, however, show that Palin is willing to break the law to get what she wants, regardless of whether it is right or wrong. Couple this with her agreement with Cheney’s interpretation of the Vice Presidency and she is not ready to honor the dignity of the office.

She is also woefully inadequate on foreign policy and economic expertise. McCain brings more foreign policy expertise than is needed in the job and will likely pick a highly-qualified Secretary of State, but you cannot learn foreign policy in a real and meaningful way from the comfy confines of Wasilla. Sorry, Sarah, but your experience paying bills does not make you an adequate economist, either. Yes, she knows that cutting taxes and spending is a good combination for the economy, especially in recessions, which sets her above Obama. It would be nice, though, to have a candidate somewhere out of the four who can actually talk about how the Fed’s interest rate policies are flawed and why the debasement of currency encourages corporate irresponsibility rather than four people standing up and slamming Wall Street for committing suicide. McCain does not have to be that man, but why couldn’t the party of business find someone who can tell Americans why those liberals over there are going to make matters worse?

McCain couldn’t get Lieberman because someone was smart enough to tell him that it would be a toxic ticket. That was a good sign of restraint on McCain’s part, but what did he think he was doing when he picked this radically unqualified and uninformed pit bull wearing lipstick?

2) McCain has made many more tragic errors than just this big one. McCain started to win the Republican nomination while fighting waterboarding to the teeth, gunning hard for a path to citizenship for immigrants, and running a clean campaign that fit with his record of respect and dignity. Since then, he has sold out. It was for very practical, direct reasons. Had McCain continued to campaign as a moderate on immigration, North Carolina and Georgia could well have gone for Obama due to a downturn in voter turnout on the right. Had McCain gone on the attack against the President on torture and other issues, he could have made more would-be GOP voters in West Virginia, Ohio, and Virginia stay home. Had he stayed on the defensive, praising Obama and seeking to forge national consensus, he never would have had a headline other than those attacking Palin.

I do not judge his character for what he has done lately. McCain has sought to win the election. Starting from a point of representing the party that elected President Bush, I cannot blame him for trying to paint Obama something ugly. That said, when Obama airs ads about the economy, housing, war, and energy, retorting by calling Obama a Paris Hilton-terrorist-foreigner sounds ludicrously stupid. This election could have been about the issues. Had McCain taken the time to learn economics inside and out and selected a running mate with a comprehensive understanding of the issues, he could have fought Obama and distanced himself from Bush. Instead, he has embraced Bush’s approach of insults, degradation, and distraction on the campaign trail.

It worked in 2004 against a man incapable of connecting with ordinary Americans or defending his honorable record. It will not work in 2008 against a guy people flock to like a liberal messiah. It looks like what it is at this point: immature politics as usual. John McCain will lose this election and a part of his well-earned reputation as an intellectual deliberator as a result of these desperate campaign gambits.

3) John McCain and Sarah Palin as campaigners deserve neither my vote nor yours, but that cannot ultimately be allowed to distract us from the issues at hand in this election. Will we have a president who promotes market forces to heal our economy or will we look to more unconstitutional and expensive government intervention? Will we look to reform and competition to provide health care and education or will we look for more federal regulation and control? Will we leave Iraq a secure, stable, self-governing nation or will we leave them again? Will we respect the 2nd Amendment or will we give up our collective and individual rights to defense? Will we honor the dignity of the unborn or will we cement-in a judicial branch that values choice over life?

The answers will likely be the second of the two answers for Americans come November. I will cast my vote for the first and await the day when the Bush-era is over and the right can finally get down to business on fixing America. The sooner we can go on the offensive, the better. I am sick and tired of defending people representing my party who do not deserve it and spending the rest of the time writing confessionals like this whenever my conscience smothers the partisan in me.

Consider me officially “disillusioned” and “mild” in my support of this ticket.