It’s even worse than you think:

The Democrats want to spend $1.5 trillion over a decade, impose an $800 billion tax increase in the midst of the worst recession in a generation, increase federal borrowing by $239 billion (on top of the $11 trillion the Obama budget already requires us to borrow through 2019), impose costly mandates on employers that will discourage hiring as unemployment nears 10 percent, force individuals to buy one-size-fits-all government defined insurance, and insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients. All of that would occur whether or not the plan includes a “public option,” which at this point it does include and which will exacerbate all of these problems.

As these facts have become clear, Obama’s standing has fallen and public opinion has grown decidedly less enthusiastic for the administration’s approach. The trend is likely to continue, because the details of the plan reveal that its two most serious drawbacks–its cost and the prospect of government rationing–are worse than even most of their critics have grasped.

Of course, that won’t stop them, in and of itself. We have to make our views known to our representatives next month when they’re back in their districts.

Though perhaps it’s not fair to call it Obamacare, since the president admits that he doesn’t even know what’s in the bill. And yet he continues to flail around attempting (and apparently failing) to defend it.

[Update late afternoon]

Why “health care” is not a right:

…imagine if the government had a body of experts charged with figuring out what your free-speech rights are, or your right to assemble, or worship. Mr. Jones, you can say X and Y, but not Z. Ms. Smith, you can freely assemble with Aleutians, Freemasons, and carpenters, but you may not meet in public with anyone from Cleveland or of Albanian descent. Mrs. Wilson, you may pray to Vishnu and Crom, but never to Allah or Buddha, and when you do pray, you cannot do so for longer than 20 minutes at a time, unless it is one of several designated holidays. Please see Extended Prayer Form 10–22B.

Of course, all of this would be ludicrous beyond words.

Actually, I can imagine this gang coming up with something exactly like that.

Fred Barnes says that it’s clear that the president is an utter economic illiterate:

Obama professes to believe in free market economics. But no one expects his policies to reflect the unfettered capitalism of a Milton Friedman. That’s too much to ask. Demonstrating a passing acquaintance with free market ideas and how they might be used to fight the recession–that’s not too much to ask.

But the president talks as if free market solutions are nonexistent, and in his mind they may be. Three weeks after taking office, he said only government “has the resources to jolt our economy back into life.” He hasn’t retreated, in words or policies, from that view.

…A good example of Obama’s economic shallowness is his unrelenting defense of the $787 billion “stimulus.” Enacted in February, it has had minimal impact on the economy. Yet Obama has no second thoughts. He says he wouldn’t change a thing about the stimulus. It has “already saved jobs and created new ones,” he said at the press conference, neglecting to note that 2 million jobs–a net 2 million–have been lost since it was passed.

That was clear even during the campaign, to those of us who are not. Unfortunately, most people (including most journalists) are in the same boat as the president.

Victor Davis Hanson muses on how things might be if President Obama had lived up to the false campaign promises of candidate Obama.