Reagan era “Inequality” needs a sharp remedy and that remedy is “Obamacare” the New York Times opines in what passes for a report. Sen. Max Baucus admitted in an interview that income redistribution was on the primary motivating factors behind the bill. You don’t say…
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) now acknowledges that President Obama’s healthcare “reform” package has been set up to alleviate the “mal-distribution of income.” Free market advocates and discerning policymakers have opposed the legislation right from the beginning are keenly aware of the socialist motivations animating government intervention into the private sector.
With the bill now signed into law, apparently there is no reason for proponents to pretend otherwise. Here is what Sen. Baucus said on Fox News.
“Too often, much of late, the last couple three years, the mal-distribution of income in American is gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy and the middle income class is left behind,” he said. “Wages have not kept up with increased income of the highest income in America. This legislation will have the effect of addressing that mal-distribution of income in America.”
These comments follow on the heels of coverage in the New York Times that celebrates Obamacare’s attack on “economic inequality” as a way to close out the Reagan era once and for all. That the law would fundamentally alter American society is a fair observation in the reporting. But merits of the president’s proposal are very debatable and do not sit well with economists who understand the long, painful history of government price controls.
“The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago,” The Times declares. “Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. “The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.”
“Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction,” the report continues. “This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.”
Very little effort, if any, is made to conceal the policy preferences of the reporter and the editorial staff. Only one paragraph is devoted to the rising costs certain households will be forced to absorb as the healthcare bill becomes law. The rest of “report” editorializes in favor of adding new financial burdens on top of existing ones.
“…the bill will also reduce a different kind of inequality,” The Times declares. “In the broadest sense, insurance is meant to spread the costs of an individual’s misfortune — illness, death, fire, flood — across society. Since the late 1970s, though, the share of Americans with health insurance has shrunk. As a result, the gap between the economic well-being of the sick and the healthy has been growing, at virtually every level of the income distribution. The health reform bill will reverse that trend.”
Just as the left-wing saw the Clinton Administration’s attempted government takeover of healthcare as a repudiation of the Reagan era, the same mindset is at work here.
“Since Mr. Obama began his presidential campaign in 2007, he has had a complicated relationship with the Reagan legacy,” The Times opines. “He has been more willing than many other Democrats to praise President Reagan. `Reagan’s central insight — that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic,’ Mr. Obama wrote in his second book, `contained a good deal of truth.’ Most notably, he praised Mr. Reagan as a president who “changed the trajectory of America.”
“But Mr. Obama also argued that the Reagan administration had gone too far, and that if elected, he would try to put the country on a new trajectory,” the report continues.
Republicans who run on the Reagan mantle should know that sound economics are not likely to find their way into the liberal media. But average Americans who know that the country cannot afford to support a new entitlement program, while other are collapsing are willing to look beyond “mainstream media” outlets for the right information.
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