Whatever you think of Conrad Black and his tangled legal history, he’s a brilliant man who makes some excellent observations about the health care debate:
Instead of following the Roosevelt 1933 formula of squarely acknowledging a crisis and pledging an immediate plan of action with inspiriting calls for solidarity and national effort, [Obama] magnified the problems in order to try to create an appetite for a more radical turn to higher taxes and social benefits than the country wanted. Instead of sending precise bills to Congress and generating public support for them as Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan did, Obama left it to the Democratic congressional leadership, which festooned every bill with pendulous payoffs to key votes and interests.
It’s a mess—yes—but The Olympian Snowe’s vote to get the Baucus bill out of committee—and her incoherent reasons for doing so—should strike fear into the hearts of all who realize that the health care discussion isn’t really about reforming health care. It’s about changing our country in fundamental ways. Ms. Snowe should be able to see this. That she doesn’t could be a harbinger of disaster. Or maybe she just enjoys getting a lot of attention.
Here are some thoughts on the likely results of passing the Baucus bill from Conrad Black:
It looks like a patchy health-care measure almost certainly adding substantially to the deficit may limp through via the politically hazardous reconciliation process. The president’s proposed tax increases, which have been the subject of an indecent amount of dissembling for over a year, will not pass either (and would be insane anyway).
And the forecast trillion-dollar annual deficits for a decade are allowed to fester in the thoughts of the financial world, unaddressed, pushing gold over $1,000 per ounce and dragging the dollar inexorably downward. This administration shows no will to pay down the debt accumulated by 15 years of borrowing trillions of dollars from China and Japan to buy trillions of dollars of non-essential goods from China and Japan, while outsourcing millions of jobs to China and Japan to produce these imports and admitting millions of unauthorized entrants who could have filled the vacated American mills and factories whose production was outsourced. Instead, it will just devalue the currency in which the debt is denominated and end America’s long reign as the world’s wealthiest per capita large country, an honor it already shares with six other advanced nations.