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.