It’s an old joke among conservatives; when faced with an epidemic, a liberal will just pass a law banning illness, with draconian punishments for getting sick.

It just goes to show you – with liberals, today’s jokes are tomorrow’s bills:

“This amendment that I offer would be mandatory rather than permissive,” said [North Dakota’s soon-to-be ex-senator Byron] Dorgan. “If you have risen to be judged to have been ‘too big to fail,’ which would cause a grave financial risk to our entire economy … the best most direct and most effective approach will be to have those institutions divest those activities and those portions of their business that have made them ‘too big to fail.’”

I wondered if it might not be a fiendish spoof for a moment – one of those hoaxes that sweeps the internet.

According to Dorgan, his amendment will stop the future risk of taxpayer bailouts on Wall Street. The amendment will appoint the Financial Oversight Council to identify companies that pose a high risk to the financial stability of the U.S. and restrict their business activities until they are no longer a concern.

“It is another approach that is far superior, much more direct, more decisive and one that will produce better results,” said Dorgan. “It is the only one I think that effectively will end ‘too big to fail.’”

It’s galling to have to keep repeating to liberals; under a free market, no company ever gets “too big to fail”. Only the government declares companies “too big to fail”; under the free market, they just fail.  And that failure is a good thing.  It rids the economy of failed businesses, and makes room for new ones.

What we need is legislation to prevent Congresspeople from being too ignorant to serve.

(Rob Port at Say Anything also has the story)

I’ve been doing some digging – and I’ve found what really happened at a number of key moments of American history…

July 4, 1776: [Scene: Independence Hall, Philadelphia]. 

JEFFERSON:  “OK, here it is.  When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to fully fund entitlement programs which have connected them with another, and to assume among the budgets of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Government and of Government’s God/Goddess entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of The Budget requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation and the costs, amortized over 30 years, of said separation, as adjusted for inflation, with due diligence paid toward the opportunity costs arising from said separation.

MADISON:  “Good – but we need more on bonding.  Could we go back to the bit on bonding?”

August, 1864: [Scene: The War Department, Washington DC]. 

GENERAL HALLECK:  “President Lincoln, General Grant is a drunk”.

PRESIDENT LINCOLN: “Then perhaps all of our generals should have a bottle of whatever he’s drinking.  (Turns to secretary) We’ll call the program “The Cheap Blend Surge”; we can fund it through an excise tax on player pianos!”

GENERAL HALLECK: “Capitol idea, sir!”

December 25, 1944: [Scene: a basement, Bastogne, Belgium.  General MacAuliffe, commander of the US 101st Airborne division, which has been surrounded by seven German divisions for nearly a week, is approached by a German emissary under a white flag]. 

GERMAN:  “General, vot iss your ansah to ze offer of zurrendah?”

MACAULIFFE:  “Nuts”.

GERMAN: “Pardon me?”

MACAULIFFE: “Nuts – I cant’ find my slide rule.  I’ll have to take the idea under advisement, but honestly, I’m not sure that we have the budget to support 12,000 POWs.  Can we schedule a meeting on this?”

August 28, 1963: [Scene: The steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC]. 

MARTIN LUTHER KING:  “I have a dream that one day this nation will be able to fund a program that will pay community leaders to organize us to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are entitled to an equal share of this nation’s budget!.'”

June 12, 1987: [Scene: The Brandenburg Gate]. 

RONALD REAGAN:  “If you want peace, General Secretary Gorbachev, increase the funding for East Berlin’s transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation process!   Secretary Gorbachev, open the books on East Berlin’s transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation process!   Mister Gorbachev, tear down the barriers to fully funding the timely completion of the transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation documentation as part of the pre-design environmental impact and mitigation process preparatory to getting approval from the affected district soil, water and easement committees!” [1]

April 26, 2010:  [Scene: a house in the Midway of Saint Paul (whose bathroom is the pride of the entire neighborhood]

FLASH:  “The state can’t go through 4 more years of the same policies that have gutted they very budget items that made Minnesota great.”

Immigrant pioneers struggling through blizzards to eke a living out of the sandy soil.  241 Svens and Oles fixing bayonets and charging at 2,000 Bubbas and Billy Joes, saving the Union in the process.  Doughty miners doing daily war with the rock beneath our feet for generations.  Ingenious inventors working in obscurity to invent the modern flour mill, the gyrostabilized bombsight, the supercomputer,  the pacemaker, the amalgamation of R’nB and rock’nroll, the greatest medical center in the world…

…whew.  Good thing all of that was in the budget!

Thank you, State of Minnesota, for budgeting for life itself! (more…)

I’m thinking about the time I went to the Al Franken Obamacare rally.  And as they came out of the rally, and engaged in the odd debate or argument with us protesters, many of them duly parrotted the Obama party line; “he’s cutting your taxes”!

They’re not, anyway – and now, Obama wants to switch to switch on the tax afterburner:

President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days.

VAT Taxes are a money machine.  They also sap money from every stage of the economy.

I haven’t been to the Twins stadium yet. I hear it’s pretty neat; for all the taxpayermoney that went into it, and after the ramdown that Henco taxpayers got that led to the taxing and spending, it’d better

“Candice”, from the tack-spitting conservative blog Randomly Candice, observes:

The only place I’ve ever watched baseball was the Metrodome. Though over the past few years, I began to HATE going to games there. The ONLY things I liked about the ‘dome were the Dome Dogs, that awesome windtunnel effect when you left the game, it’s close proximity to 35W and 20+ years of baseball memories. I wanted a new stadium. During the ‘Great Minnesota Stadium Debate’ I felt torn, we needed a new ballpark, one that wasn’t shared with the Vikings and monster truck rallies. I wanted a stadium that captured the essence of baseball, not the feeling of claustrophobia while walking the concourse trying to make my way to my seat. But I didn’t want it paid for with taxpayer money. I didn’t think that was asking too much.

I read the paper, watched the news, and instead of seeing civil compromises, it felt like I was watching hostage negotiations. “Give us the money or we’re selling the team to [some guy] and he might move it to [randomly chosen city].” These guys were better than mexican drug cartel kidnappers!! The state really had no other option but to cave and let Hennepin county cover the $392 million tab. (Thanks Tim Pawlenty!!)

And she notes the problem that is going to hurt a lot of the current tax-hawkery that’s going around, if we’re not careful:

My problem with this lies in the fact that now that Target Field has been built, and the 2010 season has started, many people are forgetting how it came to be. Don’t get me wrong, I am so in love with this ballpark that I can’t really put it into words. I’m excited for the season and I cannot wait to get to a game. (Especially since I will be getting tickets from uncle Mark, who has seats in the first row right above the Twins dugout!! *brag*) I also know that the whole baseball experience will be better for thousands of Minnesotans each summer. I LOOOOOVE that!!

What I don’t love is that now that we have this beautiful ballpark there’s a feeling of “Well, it’s over and done with, can’t change it now, lets enjoy the hell outta it!!” But there’s the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach because this isn’t the end, it’s the beginning.

She’s referring to the queue of teams that’ll be lining up for their own stadiums and arenas – but it’s actually much worse than that.

Protesting against something that hasn’t happened yet.  But people will adapt to anything (especially when the IRS and the MN Dept of Revenue gives you no choice but to adapt).  Worse than that – turning something back is ten times as hard as stopping it in the first place.

Which is, of course, why the Administration and the Democrats in Congress rammed Healthcare down has hard as they did; something that’s in place is vastly harder to roll back than a mere proposal.

The big nasty untold (by the media) secret of the economy at the moment is that only government is hiring.  And if that stays the case, the country will never be prosperous; prosperity granted to by at the someone else’s sufference (and someone else’s expense) isn’t “prosperity”, it’s being a pet.

If America’s economy is to recover, it’ll be when American business recovers.  Not the “too big to fail” businesses, mind you, because if a business is “too big to fail”, it’s too big to really do anything new, innovative or transformative.  (Indeed, the concept of “too big to fail” needs to be taken out and smothered).

No, America will be back when entrepreneurs can invent the better mousetrap.

And a bill by Senator Dodd seems to try to ensure that that doesn’t happen, by making it very difficult for “angel investors” – investors operating largely outside the formal banking system – to operate.

There are three changes that should have a particular effect on angel investors, a catch-all category which includes everyone from friends and family members who invest in a startup, to unaffiliated wealthy individuals, to side investments made by venture capitalists acting on their own.

Frist, Dodd’s bill would require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then wait 120 days for the SEC to review their filing. A second provision raises the wealth requirements for an “accredited investor” who can invest in startups — if the bill passes, investors would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000). The third restriction removes the federal pre-emption allowing angel and venture financing in the United States to follow federal regulations, rather than face different rules between states.

And boy, nothing’s gonna help small business like waiting four months for government review, limiting the investor pool and subjecting entrepreneurs to the most restrictive regulations available between the states and the feds.

Several investors have written pointed critiques of the bill:

• Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures said startups will be “hit by shrapnel” from the bill.
• Robert E. Litan of the Kauffman Foundation, which researches entrepreneurship, wrote, “It is difficult to know why these provisions are in a much larger bill whose primary aim is to address the fundamental causes of the recent financial crisis.”
• Mike Masnick at tech policy site Techdirt described the restrictions as “somewhat horrifying.”

Investors offered more criticism on Twitter, with Slide vice president Keith Rabois tweeting, “Anyone still need more evidence that Obama and the Democrats intend to destroy Silicon Valley and the dreams of entrepreneurs?”

Anyone who didn’t figure that out before November of 2008 shouldn’t be working with other peoples’ money in the first place.

Read the whole thing.

And ask yourselves “why would Chris Dodd, a Senator with connections to Wall Street and the formal banking system so tight that he’d embarass a Republican, introduce a bill like this?”

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I’m disappointed that Betty GAVE her vote away, instead of holding out for more home-state swag, as did her colleagues from Nebraska, Florida, etc.

Well, that’s the difference between prostitutes mercenaries like Stupak, Nelson and Tester, and true believers like McCollum.  The former will fight the battle for their own perceived advantage; the latter does it based on pure zeal for the cause.

It’s unclear who actually first used the aphorism “Democracy can only survive until the people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”.  I’d always thought it was De Tocqueville, but a cursory search shows it could also be anyone from King George III to Jessica Simpson.  I just don’t know.

And, given yesterday’s news that Americans depend more on government than ever before…

Without record levels of welfare, unemployment and other government benefits as well as tax cuts last year, the income of U.S. households would have plunged by an astonishing $723 billion — more than four times the record $167 billion drop reported last month by the Commerce Department.

…and get more in bennies than they pay in taxes…

Moreover, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans took more aid from the government than they paid in taxes.

…it’s really a lot less important to know who said it, and more important to see if the unnamed sage was correct.

Because we may just find out, here.

Thomas Sowell comments on the perils of an administration dominated by academics; intellectuals; elitists.

What do you think of the Obama administration…?

It’s very hard to answer that without using language that is totally inappropriate in polite society. But it is quite clear that they believe it is their job to take decisions out of the hands of the voting public.

So what is Obama’s area of competence? Does he step out of it every morning when he wakes up?

Read this assortment of complaint letters received by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority about their tollbooth collectors.

And then remember that this is the level of commitment that the Dems want to bring to your healthcare.

See you at the next Tea Party.

President Obama seems to have realized that capital gains aren’t a chief concern of business owners and instead is now focusing on a $5000 per capita tax-credit to business that hire new employees.

WSJ: The details of the initiative, which Mr. Obama is expected to highlight when he visits Baltimore today, include a $5,000 tax credit for every net new employee in 2010. This credit would be retroactive to the beginning of the calendar year and could be received on a quarterly basis, if the business so chooses. In addition, employers would receive a tax credit to cover Social Security payroll taxes on wage increases.

As a small business owner that is in fact looking to hire someone in February, I can finally say that the President is proposing a policy that will

1. make me think twice about my plan to bring on a contract worker vs. hiring them full time; which is to say paying the self-employment taxes and
2. make me think twice about making it a full-time permanent position now versus a later date.

Tax cuts across the board would still be a better idea and the macro issues and effects related to this proposal have yet to be debated but I for one am pleased with the President’s initiative.*

*No, someone didn’t hack into my laptop to write something positive about Barack Obama.

Joe Lieberman walks a fine ideological line and trips over his own feet much of the time, plus he talks like a weenie (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

…but today he stands poised to be an American Hero.

If a government plan is part of the deal, “as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent whose vote Democrats need to overcome a GOP filibusters, told “Fox News Sunday.”

“I don’t want to do that to our children and grandchildren,” he said.

…or their parents for that matter.

…in other words, (again) “You Lie!”.

The White House is about to start singing the praises of the accelerated socialist government expansion stimulus program citing the “saving” or “creation” of 1 million US jobs.

The network news media have let the administration get away with using such a fictional metric for months now.

Basically it is a number pulled out of their butts via extrapolation, as if all the slated stimulus “dollars” had already been spent.

More reliable sources have pegged the jobs impact of the stimulus thus far at between zero and 30,000 jobs saved or created.

Predictions for 2010, widely calling for another tough year for unemployment throughout, have left the Obama Administration preemptively scrambling to find justification for their already lengthy record of failed policies.

Their plan is not surprising.

Smile, deflect and lie.

New Yorkers are  hitting the exits.  And it’s over taxes.  They’re leaving in six-digit box lots…

…and they’re leaving over taxes!

What’s worse is that the families fleeing New York are being replaced by lower-income newcomers, who consequently pay less in taxes.

Overall, the ex-New Yorkers earn about 13 percent more than those who moved into the state, the study found…It all adds up to staggering loss in taxable income. During 2006-2007, the “migration flow” out of New York to other states amounted to a loss of $4.3 billion.

And they’re moving…to low tax states!

While New York City and the state were the losers, the Sunshine and Garden States were winners. more than 250,000 New Yorkers who lived in and around the city fled to Florida.

Hm.  That’d be a red state, wouldn’t it?

The Dems are starting to turn the crank for another “S”-word.

Confronted with big job losses and no sign the U.S. economy is ready to stand on its own, Democrats are working on a growing list of relief efforts, leaving for later how to pay for them, or whether even to bother.Proposals include extending and perhaps expanding a popular tax credit for first-time home buyers, and creating a new credit for companies that add jobs. Taken together, the proposals look a lot like another economic stimulus package…

Wait for it…wait…for…it…

….though congressional leaders don’t want to call it that.

No.

I bet they do not.

Headline: “Saudis ask for aid if world cuts dependence on oil:

There are plenty of needy countries at the U.N. climate talks in Bangkok that make the case they need financial assistance to adapt to the impacts of global warming. Then there are the Saudis.Saudi Arabia has led a quiet campaign during these and other negotiations — demanding behind closed doors that oil-producing nations get special financial assistance if a new climate pact calls for substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels.

That campaign comes despite an International Energy Agency report released this week showing that OPEC revenues would still increase $23 trillion between 2008 and 2030 — a fourfold increase compared to the period from 1985 to 2007 — if countries agree to significantly slash emissions and thereby cut their use of oil. That is the limit most countries agree is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Subsidies for the Saudis.

Call it “Cash for Monarchs”.

Minneapolis is getting rid of some of its maze of one-way streets in downtown – most notably Hennepin and First Avenues.

The change is intended on one level to help make Minneapolis’ downtown streets more pedestrian-friendly, and on another to make the streets less-resemble spillways to allow commuters to escape the failed downtown area quickly at the end of the work day.

A story in the Strib focuses on the affect the change is having on downtown’s iconic  First Avenue nightclub. The problem, according to the cluster of management and staff interviewed by Strib music critic Chris Riemenschneider, is that the change (adding bike and parking lanes on the new northbound lane on First Avenue) obliterates the bar’s load-in area, requiring bands to haul their gear a block to get in the door.

The whole story – in part inasmuch as it is actual reporting, rather than “music criticism” – is very much worth a read.

But for me, the payoff came near the end, in conversation with Warehouse District city councilwoman Lisa Goodman, whose answer to the plan’s critics is the classic urban politician’s retort; “Why should we let actual unintended consequences alter the Master Plan?”

Well, not quite in those exact words:

Goodman was not sympathetic to the club, though. She accused First Ave’s staff of solely looking out for its best interests. She also said its soon-to-be-obsolete load-in area — hooded meter spaces that have been in use as long as anybody at the club can remember, and for which the club pays about $120 per night — is not even a legal loading zone.”Why should they get any preferential treatment?” Goodman asked.

Oh, I dunno, Lisa Goodman.  Perhaps because in the 39 years the club has existed in that space, the City of Minneapolis in its infinite wisdom has inflicted countless miseries upon that part of downtown – City Center, the Conservatory, Block E, the Target Center, the forced condemnation of an entire block of nearby downtown real estate to make way for a corporate HQ for a company that is quietly building a “real” headquarters  out in Brooklyn Park, light rail – and yet First Avenue has improbably managed to survive, a tiny, improbable island of the free market in a sea of failed government meddling?

Because they’ve earned a little “preferential treatment” or, as we call it in the real world, “a concession from the Master Plan”, due to having survived the infinite wisdom of Lisa Goodman and the rest of the gabbling hamsters that run Minneapolis for all these years?

The debacle of California is perhaps the most grossly underreported story in America today.

It should be no surprise that I suspect that this is because it’s a story of the failure – indeed, catastrophic collapse – of exactly the form of liberal, “everything-to-everyone” government that Obama and his Democrat majority want to bring the rest of us, and the media just can’t wrap their arms around admitting that just yet.

The London Observer comes oh, so close:

“If California was an experiment then it was an experiment of mass irresponsibility – and that has failed,” says Michael Levine.Nowhere is the economic cost of California’s crisis writ larger than in the Central Valley town of Mendota, smack in the heart of a dusty landscape of flat, endless fields of fruit and vegetables. The town, which boldly terms itself “the cantaloup capital of the world”, now has an unemployment rate of 38%. That is expected to rise above 50% as the harvest ends and labourers are laid off. City officials hold food giveaways every two weeks. More than 40% of the town’s people live below the poverty level. Shops have shut, restaurants have closed, drugs and alcohol abuse have become a problem.

Standing behind the counter of his DVD and grocery store, former Mendota mayor Joseph Riofrio tells me it breaks his heart to watch the town sink into the mire. His father had built the store in the 1950s and constructed a solid middle-class life around it, to raise his family. Now Riofrio has stopped selling booze in a one-man bid to curb the social problems breaking out all around him.

“It is so bad, but it has now got to the point where we are getting used to it being like this,” he says. Riofrio knows his father’s achievements could not be replicated today. The state that once promised opportunities for working men and their families now promises only desperation.

The story catalogues the woes – overwhelming and unsustainable social spending, the downside of sprawl – fairly capably…

…but, being from the Observer – the web end of the Labour-Party-oriented Guardian – it still misses the point:

California has long been an incubator of fresh ideas, many of which spread across the country. If America emerges from its crisis a greener, more economically and politically responsible nation, it is likely that renewal will have begun here. The clues to California’s salvation – and perhaps even the country as a whole – are starting to emerge.

Take Anthony “Van” Jones [yes, that Van Jones – but that’s not the point.  Bear with us, here – Ed.], a man now in the vanguard of the movement to build a future green economy, creating millions of jobs, solving environmental problems and reducing climate change at a stroke.

All in the future tense.

We see where this is going, right?

Jones believes California will once more change itself, and then change the nation. “California remains a beacon of hope… This is a new time for a new direction to grow a new society and a new economy,” Jones has said.

It is already happening. California may have sprawling development and awful smog, but it leads the way in environmental issues.

And in this entire, otherwise-fascinatingly-thorough piece, nobody connects the two points!  Nobody notes that California has clawed billions and billions from taxpayers and businesses and gutted the state’s business climate and employment base…

…to pay for the feeble “promise” of “Green Jobs“?  To pay for fripperies like solar panels while the state’s business are packing up and leaving to escape rolling blackouts and confiscatory taxes?

To pay for a vision of government that will perpetuate the problem rather than ever fix it?

If  this particular Andrew Breitbart piecewere about nothing other than the hypocrisy of Hollywood eminimenta lecturing and scolding the rest of us about not paying more in taxes for healthcare – and their inability to carry on a coherent argument to support nationalized healthcare that doesn’t submerge itself immediately in ad homina  – it’s be totally worth the read.

But that’s only the beginning:

Vera Wescott was a single-mother who worked in a factory and sprinted home during her half-hour lunch break to check on her kids during the summers. She had no high-school diploma and late at night after making dinner, cleaning the house and putting the kids to bed, she worked and worked, until she’d earned it. She went on to have a nice quiet life, remarrying a man named John, and the two traveled together, eventually retiring.

So far, so good.

But as they aged, the two decided to return to Canada so that their health care would be provided for. In the summer of 2004, Vera slipped in her apartment and was taken to a Canadian hospital. While there, they discovered that she had mid-stage, but treatable colon cancer. But because the government of Canada has to “cut waste” (sound familiar?) to have enough money to treat people, Vera was told she would need to wait 6 months for treatment. She was sent to a Convalescent Home near Toronto where she died in September.

I was a pallbearer at Vera’s funeral. She was my grandmother.

In the United States of America, her cancer would have been treated, and the treatment would’ve begun on the day they discovered it regardless of her insurance or ability to pay.

[Film director] Adam McKay [of Ron Burgundy fame] has never had to lower his grandmother’s casket into the earth because the government, acting as the final arbiter of life and death, decided it was time for her to die so that they could worry about someone a little younger or a little more healthy. I don’t expect him to understand.

Anecdotal?

Yep.  Over and over and over again.

I finally got to meet KTLK-FM’s Chris Baker at the Tea Party last night.

And when he was addressing the crowd, he came up with a spiel about the Dem’s pro-forma “you oppose Obama because you’re a racist” slur, that I have been slapping myself upside the head for the past 18 hours for not thinking of myself.

I’m going to paraphrase as closely as I can…

Yes; I’d love to support nationalizing healthcare and destroying our healthcare system – if only the President were a white guy.

I’d jump to jack taxes through the roof, destroy the economy and pass trillions in deficits on to my grandkids – if the President were white!

I’d beg to have the UN run our foreign policy – if only the Prez were a cracker!

Not bad for an FM guy.

What would America’s health care system look like with half as many physicians?

Let’s find out.

Pass Obamacare.

65%, of doctors say they oppose the proposed government expansion plan.

Four of nine doctors, or 45%, said they “would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement” if Congress passes the plan the Democratic majority and White House have in mind.

More than seven in 10 doctors, or 71% — the most lopsided response in the poll — answered “no” when asked if they believed “the government can cover 47 million more people and that it will cost less money and the quality of care will be better.”

Last one to leave, please turn off that x-ray thingee.

The U.S. shows up almost exactly in the middle of the pack.

The UAW! While Cash for Clunkers junkies lie on the sidewalks of America looking for their next fix, the only long-term benefactors are the government and the UAW.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), which donated more than 99 percent of its $25.4 million to Democratic federal candidates in the past 20 years, had a particularly good year, at least compared to other stakeholders as General Motors and Chrysler struggled and were forced into a government-managed bankruptcy by the White House.

Those auto company bailouts and bankruptcies were major stories this year, yet the network news media rarely discussed union causes of the car companies’ inability to compete, and the high cost of union labor compared to non-union labor. In fact, in some cases the UAW was portrayed to evoke sympathy from viewers.

The UAW, along with it’s country cousin the federal government now own GM.

But the union paid their dues, being the business savvy, cost-couscious, and visionary assembly that they are; gave up so so very much to save GM and get their cut.

“UAW workers gave up their customary paid holiday on Easter Monday and their right to overtime pay after less than 40 hours per week. They still get health benefits that are far better than those received by many American families upon whose tax money GM jobs now depend. Ditto for UAW hourly wages, though according to the task force, GM’s labor costs are now within ‘shooting distance’ of those at nonunion plants run by Honda, Toyota and other foreign firms. Cumbersome UAW work rules have only been tweaked.”

This will turn out to be either the largest government takeover and giveaway of a private corporation or just desserts for the UAW.

This what Obama meant when his campaign offered an end to politics as usual.

It would be even funnier if it wasn’t all true. Enjoy.

Click to play!

In “A Parliament of Whores”, P.J. O’Rourke famously calculated that if we had taken the money he Fed had spent on eradicating poverty since 1964, and simply given it, in cash, to people below the poverty line to raise them to the poverty line, we’d have at least legally eradicated poverty (you’ll note that trillions in spending over three generations have not managed that) and saved billions of dollars back when “billion” was still a very big number.

Which is no dumber than what we have been doing for the past 45 years.
About a year ago, my radio colleague Ed Morrissey and I interviewed a pair of experts on Minnesota’s heath insurance system, with an aim toward deflating the notion that Minnesota is bursting at the seams with uninsured people.  When you count Minnesotans who are not already eligible for some other kind of existing public or private health insurance, it turns out that around eight  percent of Minnesotans lack coverage.

Which is a problem, but one that can be dealt with without drastic, revolutionary, economy-changing measures.

“But”, I thought, “the rest of the US can’t possibly be doing as well as Minnesota is, right?”

Via Ed, Jazz Shaw at The ModVoice notes that no – but it’s s not nearly as far off as some would have you believe.

Of course, nobody believes it straight from conservative sources – but Shaw is taking his info from the Census Bureau:

Next, we need to go back to the Census Bureau report and turn to page 31 where we are informed that their total number includes the category of those who are listed as “non-citizens” (which are carefully broken out from naturalized citizens vs. native born citizens.) The non-citizen rate of uninsured individuals clocked in at 43.8%, or roughly 9.4 million non-Americans. Since these people are not here legally and not paying into the system, that portion of the crisis is better addressed in a debate on immigration issues, but taxpaying Americans don’t need to be on the hook for that segment of the total.

While the number continues to drop, it’s also worth noting that we’re not talking exclusively about the abject poor who can’t afford insurance. As this Business and Media report informs us, that same Census Bureau summary includes the following:

But according to the same Census report, there are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to “afford” health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326.

Once you do some fairly basic math, you come up with the same figure that the Kaiser Family Foundation arrived at.

The liberal Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number of uninsured Americans who don’t qualify for government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 8.2 million and 13.9 million.

As Ed notes, to buy each of these people private insurance would cost about 50 billion a year.

Since we’re talking a government program, let’s double it just to be safe.  100 billion dollars a year. Which is less than half of what Obama is talking about taking from the economy (which is itself almost certainly a hopelessly low estimate).

But the real story is this; according to the Census Bureau, the very problem that we’re supposedly threatening to dump our entire healthcare system over – the supposed 47 million uninsured Americans – is actually less than a third of that number, under 14 million.

One of the main motivators for Obamacare socialized medicine, we are told, is that America’s health picture is so dismal and that our life expenctancy is falling, and…

…well, no.  Just, no.  Life expectancies in the US are up, and sharply:

The increase is due mainly to falling death rates in almost all the leading causes of death. The average life expectancy for babies born in 2007 is nearly three months greater than for children born in 2006.

The new U.S. data is a preliminary report based on about 90 percent of the death certificates collected in 2007. It comes from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Life expectancy is the period a child born in 2007 is expected to live, assuming mortality trends stay constant. U.S. life expectancy has grown nearly one and a half years in the past decade, and is now at an all-time-high.

Last year, the CDC said U.S. life expectancy had inched above 78 years. But the CDC recently changed how it calculates life expectancy, which caused a small shrink in estimates to below 78.

I suppose it’s possible that socialized medicine will increase life expentancy; people who are waiting in line at the Department of Pharmacy won’t be subject to the risks of being at home, work or out on the street.

Just trying to find the silver lining.