Approaching the most sacred of
national holidays, at least if you hold the creation and continued existence of
the United States of America to be divinely ordained as I do, we would be well
served as citizens to take some time to reflect on the great and hard won gift
that we know as Independence Day.
Rather than cast a backward look, I
find my thoughts dwelling on not only the assaults on our freedom and liberty
contained in the 2,400 pages of ObamaCare (Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act, or PPACA or simply ACA), but also that our apparently encroached-upon,
diminished freedoms, still draw people from all over the world to our shores.
Admittedly, some immigrants come to partake of the benefits provided by
taxpayers, and to which they should have no access if they have not used legal
processes to gain entry.
But most of those coming here simply wish to
live, work, create enterprises and prosper in conditions freer by degrees than
their countries of origin.
So it can be said that even such unpopular
laws as ObamaCare have a mixed effect when seen from various
perspectives.
On the one hand, progressives and liberal advocates for
government health care mandates waxed triumphant over, first, its passage by
"any means necessary," and currently, that it is constitutional to the Supreme
Court (SCOTUS).
That it's never enjoyed majority approval, indeed quite
the opposite, has never dissuaded liberals from their
faith that, once people get used to supposedly "free" benefits and
features, resigned to living with the mandates and taxes necessary to fund them,
ObamaCare will come to be regarded similarly to Social Security and
Medicare.
The caveats are that voters overwhelmingly realize that those
programs are not what they were sold as: Social Security was supposedly prepaid
retirement insurance, not transfers from workers to retirees in a shell game of
growing outlays and diminished workers, leading inexorably to bankruptcy,
massively higher taxes, slashed benefits or all of the above.
Medicare
was projected to cost about one tenth (1/10th) what it actually costs to, again,
take from workers to fund retirees medical care, going bankrupt in a shorter
time than Social Security.
Indeed, ObamaCare's budgetary black hole is
growing by virtue of the Congressional Budget Office increasing the cost,
disingenuously pegged at about $900 billion to fulfill the arbitrary
"less-than-a-trillion-dollar" promise.
A funny thing happened after a
couple of years: the phoniness of using only seven years of expenses but a full
ten years of taxes produced massively higher CBOscored total costs.
Even
then, the cruel hoax of relying on squeezing $500 billion of Medicare savings
out of medical providers has become obvious.
One other little caveat to
the liberal narrative: After seeing Democrats run amok during the first two
years of President Obama's term, a vast awakening took hold of the center-right
majority of the electorate, most notably in the Tea Party movement, derided by
supposedly superior, arrogant and condescending progressives, but which
delivered the biggest electoral spanking to Democrats since, well, almost
forever (about 1928, I think).
Beltway media and leftist advocates (a
redundancy) have bemoaned the Tea Party's blatant determination to use the
Republican Party to advance shudder the thought fiscal discipline, economic
freedom and Constitutional liberty.
These same news reporters and opinion
writers apparently averted their gaze when all the actual socialists, including
then-community organizer and Illinois state senate candidate Barack Obama (part
of and endorsed by the socialist New Party) held conferences and formulated
strategies to hide their socialist intentions and fold themselves into the
Democratic Party.
Hence, we have none other than Mr. Obama on the record
wanting single-payer, socialized health care, back when few paid attention, and
even describing ObamaCare as a transitional measure.
One of his top
people in the effort spoke glowingly of the British National Health Service,
which places a monetary value on each additional year of life for the elderly,
and has been exposed allowing hundred of thousands of those same elderly to
expire on its watch.
To Democrats: 1) Be careful what you wished for
(from the Supreme Court), because you got it, and 2) You got what you want, now
you've got to take what comes with it.
Like most conservatives, I would
have preferred that Chief Justice Roberts had simply agreed with the four
conservatives Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito and held the whole mess of
ObamaCare pottage to be rotten.
What Roberts saddled Democrats with is a
reined-in Commerce Clause, used by liberals for a century to rationalize
anything the federal government, meaning an assertive President and agreeable
Congress, wishes to foist on an unsuspecting citizenry.
Likewise, the
Necessary and Proper Clause.
The majority relied on the government's
lawyerly argument that by "penalty" they meant, "tax"; Democrats from Obama on
down vehemently, and we now know falsely, denied it.
The 21 or so
individual taxes total at least $800 billion.
Many of those taxes will
indeed fall on "those making less than $200,000." Liars, liars, your collective
pants are on fire.
So, having been exposed as the prevaricators that they
are, Democrats may rue the day they won at SCOTUS, when a reenergized Tea Party
movement keeps the House in Republican hands, elects President Romney and a
Republican Senate Majority
