Trump Ryan combination could not pass Trumpcare to replace Obamacare, and America should be glad, that is if the claims we hear are true. We heard from so many that they wanted Obamacare repealed and their old insurance back, well, with a few niceties left over. They still wanted their kids to be able to remain on their parent’s plans till age twenty-six because college takes half a lifetime you know. They liked that existing conditions should not have to be penalized with higher premiums. Oh, yea, the people receiving high subsidies; got to keep them. So what exactly was it they did not want from Obamacare again? Oh yes, the people who had lost their doctors and their insurance plan or had their hours reduced at work or were simply fired or owned a small business and were afraid to expand past forty-nine employees. So the problem is the same old problem with all Democrat buy vote plans when they replace something that worked with something which really didn’t work but could be patched, smeared, slid along, tweaked, twirled a few times, rewrapped and it would eventually fail tragically and then like the Phoenix some new plan would rise from the ashes to replace it and the entire cycle restarts. That has been the way and the reborn is usually called an overhaul even though much of the new plan appears very similar to the old plan with the debt just tossed aside and we pretend that there had been no problem. So we stand where we always stand, where we have stood on education since the birth of the department of Education, on crime since the War on Crime, on drugs since the War on Drugs, on immigration since the promise to enforce immigration laws in the 1980’s, on you name the federal program since it replaced the church, charity, public institutions, the family, the private sector, or simply replaced people being people and had the government become our teacher, our best friend, our employment guarantee, our minimal income provider (welfare and related programs), our retirement planner, our security blanket, our fair housing guarantor, our fair everything guarantor, our everything over the last three or four generations as government has swallowed responsibility for darn near everything and that they have not they regulate to death.
It turns out with Obamacare the same two forces are tugging and we all know which one will win. The forces are those whose lives have been made easy with free stuff against those who know there is no such thing as free stuff because they have to pay for those other people’s free stuff. The people getting the free stuff have more time to make noise while those paying for the free stuff have two or three jobs to pay for the free stuff and no time to make noise or any energy with which to do so. Further, the people paying are seldom around or have the time to take those calls asking their opinion while those getting the free stuff have all the time in the world. End result is the polls show that the people want the free stuff. There really is only one simple answer to the entire situation, a complete and total reset. By that we mean that we take the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and only very delicately tweak things such that we include the additional succession adjustments, the incapacity of a President Amendment, term limits on everything except judges, include the demand that each piece of legislation must include every aspect and enforcement and all the particulars and there can never be anything outside of what the legislation states added or altered by any bureaucrat, administrator, judge or other official without there being legislation stating exactly what is to be altered, added or subtracted passed by Congress and signed by the President. There should be an agreed upon maximum tax rate. And the biggest change is that the government must be precluded from performing any charity, setting a guarantee of minimal income or wages, providing insurance of any nature especially unemployment, any service which can be served by the private sector must be forbidden to government, and the people must be permitted to challenge any legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the President for a period of ten years through a recall by collecting some reasonable number of signatures not to exceed one-half-of-one-percent of the national population. There are likely a great number of other items which people would like to see incorporated into such a new Constitution and Bill of Rights and as long as they do not diminish any of the rights laid out in the original Constitution and Bill of Rights as taken in their most general and originalist interpretation, then they should be voted upon by the people and those accepted incorporated. The only other modifier would be that these suggestions would need be one of two types, guarantors of rights to the people and the individual states as incorporated by the Tenth Amendment or be a limit on the government starting at the federal level and even including the state and local level if desired also as per the spirit of the Tenth Amendments empowerment of the people themselves. Until something such as this occurs expect more demonstrations and suffocating government laws and regulations, especially regulations.
One thing which we found most threatening by the Obama Administration was their positions called Czars who were nothing more than a shadow government replacing the actual power of the Cabinet Secretaries by people who were never vetted by the Senate as they were never required to be confirmed by the Senate as other appointees are required. This permitted a government level within the administration which was unanswerable to the elected representatives of the people which was a way around the confirmation system and placed Obama appointees who were beyond reproach. One such position had no equivalent Cabinet position, the Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein whose position defined his position as reviewing all previous legislations, laws and even regulations to see whether additional regulations could be derived from these items which had not previously been conceived of and were in line with the desires and goals of the administration. There was no record kept on the numbers of new regulations generated by his position but he remained in this czarist fiefdom for close to the first four years that President Obama was in office. We guess he left when he had run out of things to review and felt that X many thousands of additional regulations should be sufficient to muck up the works of anything anybody in the private sector desired attempting to do without first greasing the wheels of governance. Many estimates place the number of added regulations over the past decade to exceed half of a million pages of new regulations on the books. We do know that the deficit spending through 2010 with 2011 projected in the graph below proves that government is broken and very probably unsalvageable. Without a massive cutting of the size, scope, width, breadth, depth, reach and overall weight of the gargantuan, all-encompassing and devouring behemoth which now threatens the health and welfare of the nation which we call the federal government, the United States will drown in its own swill of regulations, taxes and overreaching programs. This is the sad truth and many know this and still insist on continuing with the same mindset claiming they can spend their way out of this morass.
Deficit Spending Through 1980 – 2010 (with 2011 CBO estimate)
That is what was wrong with the Trumpcare and Ryan should have realized that and worked to do the right thing. The solution to Obamacare is to hunt down every last single shred of that monstrosity whether it was part of the original legislation or passed as a set-up piece hidden in a defense spending bill, and omnibus bill or an extending government operations bill and nix every last letter and punctuation from the record and then hunt down every single regulation written to enact every scintilla and erase them with equal fervor. The only true solution to the Obamacare nightmare would be to remove it all and if that means that some pieces of other healthcare existing strategies and programs will be cut back, good. Then allow churches and clubs to offer group plans which would spread their care over those who need coverage but cannot find affordable programs and these systems can get group rates which will bring costs down for those in need. Allow charities to pay for healthcare for the people needful of such assistance and do something horrific, require those who are able-bodied to get work and pay their own healthcare. Please pass tort reform, good luck as congress is chocked full of lawyers. Pass limits on malpractice rewards lowering malpractice insurance costs and allow hospitals and health maintenance groups to get group plans for their physicians’ malpractice bringing those costs down. By promoting group insurance for all forms and across state line coverages the prices will become more competitive. There could even be plans made where people residing in a community to purchase healthcare as a group which would offer another means for lower price coverage. Health savings plans should be encouraged and even allow one support from government that money put into a health savings accounts to be tax free along with the interest earned and once an account reaches the set amount, it can then serve as their insurance plan as long as they continue to contribute a minimal amount monthly so that as costs rise with inflation they remain covered sufficiently well plus as they age they will accrue more coverage as it will be necessary. There are ways through private sector to cover almost everybody and almost all who desire coverage, and for those who require care and do not have insurance, there should be a means for loans for such coverage from financial institutions willing to take such ventures under their programs offered similar to vehicle loans and charities for tragic cases as per their discretion. Americans are a people known and renowned for their generosity and are perhaps one of the most giving nations on the planet (we think possibly with an exception except that the exception gives in such ways as cannot be measured as there is no record as much of the charity is through religious institutions where no records as from where their donations came or even how they were dispensed as they were given in quantities and to recipients both of which remain unrecorded for the benefit of all involved and the dignity of the less fortunate. Were the United States to return much of the care for those in need to their religious institutions and charities they might find that would prove to be a superior system and the people who could afford to help would and those who chose not to help would be allowed their greed, in the end it would not matter. Life is funny that way.
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 