Wanted: honesty in the health-care debate.

President Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office with a veritable halo over his head. In the eyes of his backers, he could say or do no wrong because he had evidently descended directly from heaven to return celestial order to our fallen world. Oprah declared his tongue to be “dipped in the unvarnished truth.” Newsweek editor Evan Thomas averred that Obama “stands above the country and above the world as a sort of a God.”

But when it comes to health care reform, with every passing day, Obama seems less God and more demagogue, uttering not transcendental truths, but bald-faced lies. Here are the top five lies that His Awesomeness has told—the first two for no reason other than to get elected and the next three to sell socialized medicine to a wary nation.

Read the whole thing. Though it’s a little harsh. He’s sufficiently ignorant of economics and other matters that he may have persuaded himself to believe the nonsense.

…of the leftists.

My view of them is that they’re like locusts, or leeches. They find a prosperous area, like California. It is a natural environment in which they can thrive, because the economic conditions have been good for a while as a result of sensible economic policies, and the hosts have become vulnerable to takeover, because it’s been so long since the good policies were put in place that the natives themselves (and certainly the leftists) don’t understand why they’ve been doing so well. They run it into the ground with their insane voting patterns, and then, dissatisfied because they can’t plunder as much as they have in the past due to the suffering economy, move out, to other places like Washington, Nevada, etc., to wreck the next place.

But as Maggie Thatcher notably noted, at some point, you run out of other peoples’ money, either at a state, or national level. We’ll see if the Californians have finally caught on…

Gee, I could expand this into a PJM column.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mourning California.

“If it wasn’t for California, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” said Arizona of Westside 3, the popular sunbelt trio who recently benefited from the late state’s generous gift of fleeing taxpayers and businesses. As a tribute to their mentor, Arizona vowed the group would start spending money “like crack-addled hip hop stars.”

“California’s financial and musical legacy will never die,” said band mates Nevada and Oregon.

At the official funeral service at the LA Coliseum, a grief stricken Washington, who teamed with California on several hit software and wine projects, had to be physically restrained from climbing into the deceased’s gold plated casket.

Similar emotional outpourings were the rule of the day. Stories – apocryphal or not – of the late state’s bizarre self-destructive behavior and fondness for molesting children did little to dampen the the flood of tributes from fans who preferred to remember California as America’s Sweetheart.

From a humble beginning as a water-poor remote Spanish mission outpost, California proved to be a precocious and talented child performer. It struck gold with ‘Sutter’s Mill’ in 1849, earning accolades and attracting millions of crusty bearded prospectors. Black gold soon followed with ‘La Brea Tar Pits.’ Unlike many child acts, California made a smooth transition to adolescence, scoring a major hit with ‘Agriculture’ in 1891.

Even a frightening bout with tremors did not stop the flow of hits. The 1915 megasmash ‘Hollywood’ broke all records, as did the wartime favorite ‘Aerospace.’ More recently, California topped the charts with ‘Tourism,’ ‘High Tech,’ and ‘Coastal Pretension.’

For a time it seemed as if the superstar could do no wrong, but behind the glittering facade of Disneyland Manor troubling signs of mental instability began to emerge. The state developed a well publicized drug problem during filming of 1967’s ‘Summer of Love,’ and briefly dabbled in strange religious cults. Under the influence of spiritual guru Jerry Brown, it began wholesale experimentation in exotic spending programs, eventual resulting in a traumatic 1979 stay at the Prop 13 Rehab Center.

I know I miss California. The California of my youth. I grew up as a little kid wanting to move there from Michigan, and spent a happy quarter of a century there as an adult, but I have to think twice about moving back.

[Update late evening]

Why California is going down the tubes:

THESILKY1

Do you know for a fact, what will happen if you lay-off 100,000 State employees?

Here is an answer to your statement. Half the businesses in the private sector will fold, and the other half that remain open, will not be open for long.

tejouzi

How is laying off thousands of state workers going to help the economy? You want to help the economy, TELL THE PRIVATE SECTOR TO STOPPPPPPP RIPPING OFF THE STATE!!!!! AND WASTING MY TAX DOLLARS BY CHARGING THE STATE TWICE AS MUCH FOR THE SAME SERVICE!!!!! Go take a math class.

Yeah, I’d feel better as a Californian, knowing that these people are on the public payroll.

This kind of thing is what happens once you put the government in charge of your lives.

Of course, no one will read the bill before it passes, so it’s OK.

Veronique de Rugy has found a couple of interesting analyses. I particularly agree with this take by Alex Tabbarok:

I find the debate peculiar for a number of reasons:

1) Picking out one measure of health care “costs” to compare systems is sadly reminiscent of the arguments for socialism. Do you remember those arguments? Under socialism:

* “Think of how much money we will save on advertising!”
* “Socialism will lower costs by maximizing economies of scale!”
* “Money will be used for production not profits!”

Exactly these arguments are regularly trotted out in the debate over administrative costs in health care so color me unimpressed. To be clear, the point is not that these statements are false – the point is that these premises to the argument are all in some sense true it’s just the conclusion, socialism is more efficient than capitalism, which turned out to be false. We tried that and it didn’t work. In other words, you have to compare systems not arbitrarily pick out for comparison one type of costs.”

They never learn.

How about let’s treat borrowers like adults. For that matter, how about treating all of us like adults (even if many of us don’t always act that way)? At least those of us who are legally adults?

It’s chapter three, on Woodrow Wilson. Go take the quiz, and discuss.

If California is really where national trends start, the nation is in trouble. The good news, though, is that an anti-big-government revolt may be brewing out there.

[Update]

Michael Barone: Are Americans getting cold feet over Obama economic proposals? Let’s hope so, finally.

…better than Obama’s first one. It’s not hard.

If they want a “second stimulus,” step one would be rescinding the first one.

It would help a lot of the government wouldn’t keep stomping them down.

But you can’t waste a crisis, and if you haven’t accomplished everything you want with it yet politically, you have to sustain it, just as the Roosevelt administration did, for years. Let’s hope that we’ll be on to them this time around.

[Update a few minutes later]

Will we be saved by California?

The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat…

…The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S. I would imagine that he would be the intergalactic champion as well, if we could gather the data on deficits on other worlds. Obama has taken George W. Bush’s inattention to deficits and elevated it to an art form.

The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether to achieve its short-term political goals. Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits in part because he believed that his tax cuts would produce economic growth, and ultimately pay for themselves. He may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.

Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.

Well, it does to some of the economic illiterati in my comments section. As I said, let’s hope the rest of us figure it out by next November.

Ask the manufacturers:

More than 17 percent of those who answered said they would have to shut down their business because there is no way they could handle the kinds of increases being predicted.

The unscientific poll taken of Manufacturing & Technology eJournal readers from June 28th through July 1st drew 943 responses.

OTHER CHOICES INCLUDED:

Would raise the price of my product or service to customers (22 percent);

A combination of price increases, personnel cuts and reductions in pay and benefits (20 percent);

Switch to a 4-day workweek (15 percent);

Layoff workers (14.5 percent).

But hey, what do they know?