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Barack Obama's
plan
"Universal
Strategies"
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| Items on this page are archived
alphabetically. |
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An Endorsement Of The Idea |
Speaking to a
gathering
of minority journalists in Chicago, Obama said, "I personally would want to
see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history,
acknowledged."
"I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native
Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most
important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words,
but offer deeds."
Exactly what Obama is
advocating here cannot be determined, but it seems to be something
of an endorsement of the idea of "reparations for slavery," which is
usually taken to mean cash payments. In this view, the following deeds
are insufficient to balance the ledger between America and the
descendants of slaves: the Civil War, the ratification of the 13th, 14th
and 15th amendments, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the continuing practice of
racial preferences.
When Obama walked on stage at the McCormick Center, many journalists in
the audience leapt to their feet and applauded enthusiastically after
being told not to do so. During a two-minute break halfway through
the event, which was broadcast live on CNN, journalists ran to the stage
to snap photos of Obama.
Obama, who acknowledged that he needed a nap, stood up to say farewell
to the audience of journalists, many of whom gave him another standing
ovation.
This is the first direct quote I've seen where
Obama clearly endorses reparations -- "When it comes to...reparations,
the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer
words, but offer deeds." -- he is saying the most important
thing for the government to do is offer reparations.
And, there he goes complaining about being tired again. On July
31st, 2008, a Google, using
-- Obama tired fatigue -- returned 238,000 items. Many others have
noticed that Obama, despite his comparative youth, often complains of being tired or
fatigued. |
| Blatant Redistributionism |
Given Barack Obama's relentless populism this cycle, the
Wall Street Journal analysis of his tax cuts should surprise no one.
They find that Obama relies less on actual cuts in tax rates and more in
specific, "refundable" grants that filers receive whether they have a
tax liability or not. Instead of reducing taxes, Obama makes his redistributionism explicit.
Six of the seven listed in the Obama plan are these "refundables," money
people get from the federal government even if they pay no taxes at all.
These are not Ttax cuts," but instead welfare grants based on specific
social policy. It's blatant redistributionism, as the money
comes from tax increases on the wealthy.
More . . . |
| Dramatic Redistribution Of Wealth |
First
hard numbers on the Obama Tax Plan show a dramatic redistribution of
wealth according to a new Tax Foundation analysis.
In Tax Foundation Fiscal Fact, No. 132, Tax Foundation president Scott
Hodge uses revenue estimates from the Tax Policy Center to show that
Obama's plan would greatly accelerate the decades-long trend toward a
federal government that depends for tax revenue almost exclusively on a
few high-income people.
This contrasts starkly with the McCain plan, according to Hodge, which
would give every taxpayer a cut and leave the current tax burden
distribution approximately where it is.
"Under the Obama plan for 2009," explains Hodge, "more than $131 billion
would be redistributed from the top 1 percent of taxpayers to all other
taxpayers."
Obama's plan to punish success is patterned
straight from Karl Marx -- "From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs."
Of course, Obama has his millions in a "quasi-blind
trust" -- exempt from his "tax the rich" plan. |
| Global Poverty Act |
February 17th -- Sen. Barack Obama, giving America a preview of his
priorities, is rejoicing over the Senate committee passage of a plan
that could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars in an attempt to
reduce poverty in other nations.
The nice-sounding bill, called the "Global
Poverty Act," sponsored by Obama, is up for a Senate vote on
Thursday and could result in the imposition of a $845 billion global tax
on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal
religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient
to the dictates of the United Nations.
The U.N.'s "Millennium Project," says that the U.N. plan to force the
U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of its GNP in increased foreign aid spending
would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a
13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development
conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is
expected to meet the "Millennium Development Goals," this amounts to
$845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money is through a
global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.
Here's an
abstract of the proposed legislation:
"To require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive
strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of
promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme
global poverty, and the achievement of the [U.N.] Millennium Development
Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between
1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day."
The
scary part of the bill is this:
In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits
nations to banning "small arms and light weapons" and ratifying a series
of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the
Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological
Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the
Child.
The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as "the indispensable
common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to
realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and
development."
Here's how Senator Obama's website
frames
the bill:
"With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world,
global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the
international community faces," said Senator Obama. "It must be a
priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme
poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking
water. As we strive to rebuild America's standing in the world, this
important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in
the developing world. Our commitment to the global economy must extend
beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing corporate profits
than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere."
Will somebody tell this idiot that it's not the job of the United States
to cut global poverty by taxing its citizens and giving those monies to
the corrupt United Nations.
Welfare doesn't work in America and its sure not going to work anywhere
else. It's just more billions and trillions down the toilet. |
| Joe The Plumber And Redistribution |
In this (video)
exchange between Obama and a plumber on the campaign trail this weekend,
the self-employed plumber said to Obama: "Your new tax plan is going to
tax me more. Isn't it?"
Obama responded: "It's not that I want to punish your success, I just
want to make sure that everybody that is behind you, that they have a
chance for success too. I think that when you spread the wealth around,
it's good for everybody."
Obama's not a socialist? -- geez Louise! |
|
More $$$ On Welfare Than The Entire Iraq War |
Fred Lucas reminds us that as a candidate for president, Barack
Obama decried the financial toll that the Iraq war was taking on the
economy, but Obama’s proposed spending on welfare through 2010 will
eclipse Bush’s war spending by more than $260 billion.
"Because
of the Bush-McCain policies, our debt has ballooned," then-Sen. Barack
Obama told a
Charleston, W.V., crowd in March 2008: "This is creating problems
in our fragile economy. And that kind of debt also places an
unfair burden on our children and grandchildren, who will have to repay
it."
During the entire administration of George W. Bush, the Iraq
war cost
a total of $622 billion, according to the Congressional Research
Service.
Obama’s welfare spending will reach $888 billion in a
single fiscal year -- 2010 -- more than the Bush administration spent on
war in Iraq from the first "shock and awe" attack in 2003 until Bush
left office in January.
Continue reading
here . . .
Barack Obama says Washington
shouldn't just offer apologies for slavery, but also "deeds." Don't
worry, he says, he's not talking about direct reparations. Relieved?
Don't be.
Obama knows that if he pushes too hard on reparations,
he might scare off white voters. So he couches race-specific welfare as
"universal" social programs that appeal to broad-based political
coalitions -- "even if they disproportionately help minorities," he
confides in his book, "Audacity of Hope."
Obama has a name for
his scheme: "universal
strategies."
"An emphasis on universal, as opposed to
race-specific, programs isn't just good policy," he wrote. "It's also
good politics."
"I consistently believe that when it comes to
whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations,
the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer
words, but offer deeds."
And if
this isn't enough, Obama wants to
steal $177 billion from Medicare Advantage and $300 billion in
additional Medicare cuts, for payments to doctors and hospitals, for a
total of $500 billion, to insure illegal aliens, indigents, criminals
and chronic alcoholics and drug abusers.
The Congressional Budget
Office estimates that Obama's plan will increase federal costs by almost
$1 trillion. This is why taxes will be increased under the plan,
not reduced. But Harvard economics professor Martin Feldstein
writes, "the actual costs will be much higher" because "the CBO's method
of estimating the cost of such a program doesn't recognize the
incentives it creates for households and firms to change their
behavior." Independent private estimates project increased federal
costs of $3.5 trillion to $4.1 trillion under the Obama plan.
This guy is all about stealing from the productive to pay off his
constituency, the non-productive -- remember
this welfare
queen? |
|
Share The Wealth With The World |
The New York Posts
reports that Barack Obama doesn't simply want to "spread the wealth
around" here in America, he's on record as favoring redistribution on a
global scale.
As the Democrat explained last year in Foreign
Affairs, he thinks we need to be "sharing more of our riches to help
those in need" around the world and promised to double American foreign
assistance. He also proposed a multibillion-dollar
Global Education Fund to eliminate what he calls the "global
education deficit."
Obama has already acted on these beliefs.
In the Senate, he co-sponsored the
Global Poverty Act,
which calls on the US to allocate 7/10ths of 1 percent of our GNP to
foreign aid and debt relief. (That's $845 billion more than we're
now set to spend over the next 13 years.)
In a statement on the
Global Poverty Act, Obama explained we need to
transfer massive amounts of money to the developing world and get
"beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing profits than
about helping workers and small farmers everywhere."
Profits, in
Obama's view, don't help people -- they hurt them. Whereas
redistribution can fix all kinds of problems -- including terrorism, a
global scourge that Obama believes is actually a result of inequality.
Obama has no experience in the business world. Few, however,
are as hostile to the notion of profit -- or as committed to
redistributing the wealth -- both nationally and globally.
Obama knows nothing about business
and commerce. He's never had to meet a payroll. He is an
enemy of profits, and business in general -- not surprising for someone
who has lived off grants and tax revenues for his entire adult life.
He has accepted Marx's elaborate fantasy construct, in which
profit arose purely from the exploitation of both workers and consumers.
Obama's self-admitted love-affair with Marxism has led him to believe
that profits were not a necessary part of the economic system. In
Obama's belief system, profits were an actual flaw that reduced the
standard of living for everyone.
Socialists have long regarded
profits as simply an "overcharge," as Fabian socialist George
Bernard Shaw called it, or a "surplus value," as Karl Marx called it.
The theory is that under socialism or Marxism, these surplus charges
would be eliminated and goods and services would become more affordable.
In reality, socialism doesn't make goods and services more
affordable, but less so.
Unfortunately, this appears to be the
model that Obama is working from. |
| Spread The Wealth |
Obama's
grand theme is to spread America's wealth to the world's poor, as
the onetime community organizer from the streets of South Chicago goes
global.
He says to his followers, "It's not too late to claim the American
dream," and they cheer wildly, and some even cry.
Don't they know that the American dream isn't a wish granted by a
politician, or an entitlement from the government? Do they need a
political seer to tell them what to hope for, and dream of, because they
are unable to find it for themselves?
In his
most recent victory speech, delivered in Madison, Wisconsin on
February 13, Obama named some of those guilty of creating America's
victims. They included:
Exxon, turning record profits from high pump prices
Wall Street, whose agenda smothers Main Street
NAFTA, where the American worker has no voice at the negotiating table
Lobbyists, who drown out the peoples' voice. |
|
Spread The Wealth -- Revisited |
|
From Powerline
blog
-- When Barack Obama responded to the Ohio plumber who didn't want his
taxes raised that he wanted to "spread the wealth around," I wanted to
tell him to spread his own wealth around. It was in any event a
rare moment of candor on the part of candidate Obama.
Obama all but told the plumber that his wealth should
be seized in the name of equity. The encounter played out one of
the old themes of democratic politics: the appeal to the many to take
from the few. It's traditionally an easy sell in small-d
democratic politics.
Obama's "spread the wealth around" gospel has many
intellectual and political forerunners. In American politics,
Obama's gospel harks back to Huey Long, among others. In his
regular Newsweek column George Will
calls
Obama an Ivy League Huey Long. He doesn't mean it as a compliment
and he doesn't much pursue the analogy with Long.
Interested readers may want to take a look back at
Long's
Share Our Wealth platform and
related
Share Our Wealth Society clubs.
"By the summer of 1935," according to the linked page on Long's program,
"there were more than 27,000 Share Our Wealth clubs with a membership of
more than 7.5 million. Loyal followers met every week to discuss
Long's ideas and spread the message."
Now, of course, Barack Obama has
Organizing for
America to do the legwork and the mainstream
media to spread his message.
Toward the end of his column Will makes good use of
Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green's essay on the cap-and-tax bill.
AEI has posted the Hayward-Green essay online under the title
Waxman-Markey: An Exercise in Unreality.
Please check it out.
|
| Universal Strategies |
Barack Obama
says Washington shouldn't just offer apologies for slavery, but also
"deeds." Don't worry, he says, he's not talking about direct
reparations. Relieved? Don't be.
Obama knows that if he pushes too hard on reparations, he might scare
off white voters. So he couches race-specific welfare as
"universal" social programs that appeal to broad-based political
coalitions -- "even if they disproportionately help minorities," he
confides in his book, "Audacity of Hope."
Obama has a name for his scheme: "universal strategies."
"An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn't
just good policy," he wrote. "It's also good politics."
Maybe so. But not all his plans for reparations are roundabout.
His book and Web site outline a separate plan calling for essentially a
government bailout of the inner cities. Among other things, he
proposes:
• Doling out faith-based grants "targeting ex-offenders."
• Subsidizing supermarket chains that relocate to the inner city to
deliver "fresh produce" to blacks, helping wean them off unhealthy fast
food.
• Imposing "goals and timetables for minority hiring" on large
corporations whose work forces are deemed too white.
• Continuing to fund the Community Development Block Grant program, Head
Start and HUD public housing subsidies.
• Funding Small Business Administration loans for minority businesses
who train ex-felons, including gangbangers, for the "green jobs" of the
future, such as installing extra insulation in homes.
• Doubling the funding for federal after-school programs such as
midnight basketball.
• Subsidizing job training, day care, transportation for inner-city
poor, as well as doubling the funding of the federal Jobs Access and
Reverse Commute program.
• Expanding the eligibility of the earned income tax credit to include
more poor, and indexing it to inflation.
• Adopting entire inner-city neighborhoods as wards of the federal
government.
• Spending billions on new inner-city employment programs, including
prison-to-work programs.
This is just a down payment on the "economic justice" Obama has promised
the NAACP -- financed by "tax laws that restore some balance to the
distribution of the nation's wealth," he says in his book.
"The problems of inner-city poverty arise from our failure to face up to
an often tragic past," Obama said.
Now it's payback time. |
| Reparations By Another Name |
Obama is close to
creating an Office of Urban Policy to allocate funds to urban areas
for a range of initiatives, including job training and the creation of
new jobs.
Obama's urban renewal plan -- from neighborhoods to
downtown corridors -- calls for creating more opportunities for minority
businesses, establishing more affordable public transportation, raising
the minimum wage, ending tax breaks for businesses that send jobs
overseas, providing additional funding for community policing and ending
racial profiling. |
|
H.R. 40 |
H.R. 40 is a
bill in the U.S. House
of Representatives to create a commission to study reparation proposals
for African-Americans.
The bill is to acknowledge the fundamental
injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United
States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to
establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery,
subsequently de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination
against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living
African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on
appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.
It should be no
surprise, that its sponsor is Rep. John Conyers, Democrat from Michigan
-- and he has an ally in the White House.
In this transcript of a 2001
radio interview, Obama
advocates redistribution as reparations for slavery and other
injustices towards "previously dispossessed peoples."
He said,
"the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of
wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice
in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to
characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical."
"It
didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the
founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted,
and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the
Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the
states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to
you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state
government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted."
"One of the, I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because
the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there
was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing
and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual
coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change
and in some ways we still suffer from that."
In ObamaWorld, a terrorist attack
is a "man caused disaster" and reparations are called a "stimulus
package." |
| Reparations For
"Alleged" Discrimination |
The Los Angeles Times is
reporting that more than $1 billion will be set aside for those who
alleged loan discrimination by the Department of Agriculture. The
agreement would allow the workers to seek damage awards or debt relief.
The Obama administration agreed Thursday to provide $1.25 billion to
compensate African American farmers who alleged racial discrimination by
the Department of Agriculture farm loan programs.
The deal,
subject to congressional approval, would set up a nonjudicial claims
process that would allow farmers to seek damage awards or debt relief.
This is in addition to more than $1 billion the federal
government paid to settle about 16,000 claims that were part of a
discrimination suit black farmers brought against the department.
The farmers won that suit in 1999.
"The agreement reached today
is an important milestone in putting these discriminatory claims behind
us for good and in achieving finality for this group of farmers with
long-standing grievances," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a
statement.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus had sought
to reopen the lawsuit after thousands of farmers missed the original
filing deadline to apply for compensation. Members of the caucus
met with U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and Vilsack to express their
concerns.
In May, Obama requested an additional $1.15 billion in
the 2010 budget to close the long-standing lawsuit against the
department.
"Today is a historic day for the American people,"
said John W. Boyd Jr., president of the National Black Farmers Assn. "We
have finally buried the hatchet."
"We have finally buried the
hatchet"
Not likely! -- and note the use of the word "alleged" --
no one has to prove anything once the race card is played -- $2.5
billion awarded -- based on an "allegation." |
| ObamaCare Taxes Will
Help Obama Spread The Wealth |
Barack Obama
said on the campaign trail in October 2008 that he wanted to "spread the
wealth around." By signing the sweeping health-care overhaul
legislation, he’s about to do just that.
If the final version of
the legislation passes the Senate, high-income investors will pay higher
Medicare taxes, tax breaks for out-of-pocket medical deductions will be
curtailed, and it will cost insurance companies more to pay executives
millions of dollars. Those levies will help fund expansion of
Medicaid services for the poor and subsidize health insurance to cover
millions who don’t currently have benefits.
"It’s very clear
that taxes are levied on the wealthy and the benefits will spread across
the entire income distribution, with a lot going to expanded Medicaid
distribution and expanding health insurance," said Roberton Williams, an
economist at the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research institute
backed by the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. "One
couldn’t claim he didn’t keep that promise" to "spread the wealth
around."
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Obama's Judge On
Reparations For Slavery |
Ed Whalen
says that in May 2008, Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu took part
in a discussion of the documentary film "Traces of the Trade," which
explores the role of New Englanders in the slave trade. Liu lists
the event in his questionnaire response, but doesn’t link to any video
or transcript (or any other account of his remarks).
Blogger
Morgen of Verum Serum has dug up a video of the event and posted a
striking two-minute
video excerpt, which I encourage you to watch. Here’s a
transcript of Liu’s remarks (with some asides deleted):
Then there’s a further issue, which is that
maybe there are white families who were not involved as directly or
even indirectly with the slave trade, but who still benefited from
it. And then there is the whole question, which you put on the
table, about people who came to America after, and, you know, like
my family. And why is it that this movie speaks to me so
deeply yet?
And so, what I would do, I think I would draw a
distinction between a concept of guilt, which locates accountability
in a sort of limited set of wrong-doers, and, on the other hand, a
concept of responsibility, which is, I think, a more broad
suggestion that all of us, whatever our lineage, whatever our
ancestry, whatever our complicity, still have a moral duty to … make
things right. And that’s a moral duty that’s incumbent upon
everybody who inherits this nation, regardless of whatever the
history is.
And I think, to add one more point on top of
that, the exercise of that responsibility … necessarily requires the
answer to the question, "What are we willing to give up to make
things right?" Because it’s gonna require us to give up
something, whether it is the seat at Harvard, the seat at Princeton.
Or is it gonna require us to give up our segregated neighborhoods,
our segregated schools? Is it gonna require us to give up our
money?
It’s gonna require giving up something, and so until
we can have that further conversation of what it is we’re willing to
give up, I agree that the reconciliation can’t fully occur.
Let’s expose the game that Liu is playing.
Just as Liu
completely ignores the innocent victims of racial preferences when
he urges the perpetual imposition of racial quotas as a remedy for
"societal discrimination," so he would make those who were not complicit
in slavery pay the price of his grandiose reparations project.
Moreover, he
continues to use the term "segregated" so expansively that only the
imposition of racial quotas will achieve the elimination of what he
calls segregation.
Even worse, Liu, far from making any
sacrifice himself (he didn’t give up his seats at Stanford and at Yale
Law School, or his Rhodes Scholarship, or his clerkship with Justice
Ginsburg, or his professorship at Berkeley), is making a career out of
benefiting from his grievance-mongering. It’s precisely his
hard-edged ideology that has made him a darling of the Left and that
explains why he is being nominated to a judicial seat that he
craves as a steppingstone to the Supreme Court. |
| ObamaCare Mainly Aimed At Redistributing
Wealth |
Byron York says that it hasn't attracted much
notice, but recently some prominent advocates of ObamaCare have spoken
more frankly than ever before about why they supported a national health
care makeover. It wasn't just about making insurance more affordable. It
wasn't just about bending the cost curve. It wasn't just about cutting
the federal deficit. It was about redistributing wealth.
Health
reform is "an income shift," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said on March
25. "It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income
Americans."
In his halting, jumbled style, Baucus explained that
in recent years "the maldistribution of income in America has gone up
way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the
middle income class is left behind." The new health care legislation,
Baucus promised, "will have the effect of addressing that
maldistribution of income in America."
At about the same time,
Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and
presidential candidate, said the health bill was needed to correct
economic inequities. "The question is, in a democracy, what is the right
balance between those at the top ... and those at the bottom?" Dean said
during an appearance on CNBC. "When it gets out of whack, as it did in
the 1920s, and it has now, you need to do some redistribution. This is a
form of redistribution."
Summing things up in the New York Times,
the liberal economics columnist David Leonhardt called ObamaCare "the
federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since
inequality began rising more than three decades ago."
Now they
tell us. For many opponents of the new legislation, the statements
confirmed a nagging suspicion that for Barack Obama and Democrats in
Congress, the health fight was about more than just insurance -- that
redistribution played a significant, if largely unspoken, part in the
drive for national health care.
Continue reading
here . . . |
| Obama's Culture Of Dependence |
"Do you realize," CNN's Susan Roesgen asked a
man at the April 15, 2009, tea party in Chicago, "that you're eligible
for a $400 credit?" When the man refused to drop his "drop
socialism" sign, she went on, "Did you know that the state of Lincoln
gets fifty billion out of the stimulus?"
Roesgen is no longer
with CNN, and CNN has only about half as many viewers as it did last
year. But her questions are revealing. They help us
understand that the issue on which our politics has become centered --
the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of the size and scope of government
-- is really not just about economics.
It is really a battle
about culture, a battle between the culture of dependence and the
culture of independence. Probably unknowingly, Roesgen was
reflecting the the midcentury sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld's dictum that
politics is about who gets how much when. If some guy is getting
$400, shouldn't he just shut up and collect the money? Shouldn't
he be happy that his state government, headed recently by Rod
Blagojevich, was getting an extra $50 billion?
But public policy
also helps determine the kind of society we are. The Obama
Democrats see a society in which ordinary people cannot fend for
themselves, where they need to have their incomes supplemented, their
health care insurance regulated and guaranteed, their relationships with
their employers governed by union leaders. Highly educated
mandarins can make better decisions for them than they can make
themselves.
Continue reading Michael Barone
here . . . |
| Does Obama Agree That ObamaCare
Redistribute Wealth? |
White House spokesman, Robert
Gibbels, has evaded
answering the question of whether Obama agrees with Dr. Donald Berwick,
his newly appointed administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, who has
insisted that health-care systems must redistribute wealth.
"Excellent health care is by definition redistributional," Berwick said
in a speech delivered on July 1, 2008.
When asked directly at the
July 7 White House press briefing whether Obama agreed with this, Gibbels
would not answer the question. Instead, he parried it with jocular
statements about the provenance of the quote.
On July 8,
CNSNews.com sent
Gibbels an email that included a link to a YouTube page on which is posted
a video of the portion of Berwick’s July 1, 2008 speech in which Berwick
made the comment. Gibbels was also provided with a transcript of the
relevant segment of the video and a copy of the July 26, 2008 edition of
the British Medical Journal (BMJ) which published a written adaptation
of Berwick's speech.
"You could have had a monstrous insurance
industry of claims and rules and paper-pushing instead of using your tax
base to provide a single route of finance," said Berwick in the video
recording of the speech provided to Gibbels. "You could have
protected the wealthy and the well, instead of recognizing that sick
people tend to be poorer and that poor people tend to be sicker.
And that any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized
and humane must -- must -- redistribute wealth from the richer among us
to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by
definition redistributional. Britain, you chose well."
Gibbels was again asked -- in the July 8 emai -- whether Obama agreed with
Dr. Berwick that "excellent health care is by definition
redistributional"?
Gibbels again did not answer.
Last
Wednesday, Obama made Berwick the director of the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services (CMS) through a recess appointment. |
| |
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Copyright Beckwith 2010
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