George Rebane

The passage of Obamacare promises to be the first salvo of the socialist trifecta that takes the country well beyond the tipping point from the Republic the Founders left us.  The left will celebrate this day as the beginning of the end of the evil United States that they have been battling against for most of the last century.  The free market conservatives will drape a different kind of bunting around this day.

The second salvo will come in the form of ‘immigration reform’ which is a thinly veiled program for maintaining the current open borders while giving amnesty to 12 million illegal aliens already in the country.  The obvious result is a very large welcome mat for millions more from Mexico alone – people desperate to escape the corruption and drug cartel wars.  The ‘reform’, of course, will promote exactly the opposite than its lying sponsors in Washington claim.  Mexico will have even less of a motive to become a functional country when a permanent, wide open relief valve for their growing population is installed.  The first step of any real immigration reform starts with an effective closing of the border.  Every other approach is futile and will hurry us to Reconquista.

The third salvo will be the cap n’ tax (Waxman-Markey) energy bill that in its implementation will deliver the coup de grace to America’s ability to generate wealth beyond the anemic pace of European countries, if that.  When we recall that none of the EU countries maintain a credible military, we realize that America will either 1) no longer be able to maintain its ability to project power, or 2) control and tax our economy to Soviet levels in the attempt to prolong our ability to field the already straining 12 carrier task forces and 7 expeditionary groups that we now maintain.  In either event, this global hegemony dynamic, coupled with the debt and unfunded liabilities disaster already baked in, will create a crisis of totally unprecedented proportions.

Such a national crisis, that may include a hot war between the US and China, will insure that the already trammeled citizenry demand the arrival of the notorious ‘man on a white horse’ to save the country.  Such a man has always been available, and his first act will be to set aside the established order so that new ‘temporary emergency measures’ can be instituted.   These measures will enable him to mobilize for and manage the crisis.  Everyone will cheer.  The cheering will fade when everyone realizes that there is nothing temporary about the emergency measures – they will be institutionalized.

So as we review today’s political theater, we see the Republicans vainly pointing out the fraudulent accounting of Obamacare.  The Democrats respond by totally ignoring these realities and increase the volume on the anecdotal recounting of individuals in medical distress.  This is a wildly successful tactic with under-educated and uninformed voters nationwide.

That Obamacare is bust from the gitgo is obvious even to the Democrats, the preliminary, marginal, and highly qualified CBO estimates notwithstanding.  It will now be added to Social Security, already bankrupt and requiring money from the general fund to make up for the deficit from current workers’ payments.  It will also be added to Medicare which will go bankrupt in five to six years, with Medicaid following soon thereafter upon receiving the onslaught 15 million new dependents.

None of this social engineering is sustainable.  In the short term the pain will be anesthetized by the residual momentum of the US economy.  After that, massive nationwide enforcement and rationing will be instituted through additional unbudgeted costs that range well north of $150 billion annually.  The cadres of newly hired bureaucrats, unable to sell their labor on the free markets, will rejoice and apply themselves with renewed purpose to grinding the country into nationalized healthcare.

This is a historical victory for the Pauls (cf. Peter/Paul Principle ) of our society, and for the Democratic Party.  They will have laid in a new tranche of voters who will be loathe to give up any new entitlements thrown their way, and will elect only those who promise to maintain their entitlements regardless of cost.  As I have explained elsewhere, to this the Republicans have no counter.