The Spending Virus

posted at 3:52 pm on September 12, 2009 by Doctor Zero

House Democrats are said to be mulling over a public reprimand of Joe Wilson, unless he formally apologizes from the House floor for calling President Obama a liar. Wilson and the Republicans should agree to this demand, provided every Democrat who called George Bush a liar follows Wilson in offering an apology to the former president. It would make for a very long session of the House. They could invite the Dixie Chicks to do the halftime show.

Wilson is a representative of South Carolina, but his outburst during Obama’s address to Congress last week has also made him Speaker of the House for Inconvenient Truth. His ongoing passion play is the latest production from that Toho Studios of monstrous hypocrisies, the Democrat Party… because every politician attending Obama’s address knows that he was indeed lying when he said his proposed government health-care plan would not cover illegal aliens. Of course it will. Anyone who tells you otherwise is insulting your intelligence.

It doesn’t matter what the bill actually says, when the President signs it. It doesn’t matter what steps House and Senate committees take to cover their legislative rear ends, after they choke on the sight of a couple million Tea Party protesters clogging the streets of Washington this weekend. They can add any amendment they like, and even build a statue of Joe Wilson triumphantly holding the amendment over his head, right in front of whatever brick-and-glass mausoleum they build to house the new Department of Health Care Hope and Change. It won’t make any difference, because on the day Americans allow the President to sign a health-care takeover bill, the clock begins ticking on the extension of benefits to undocumented aliens. I wouldn’t bet on it taking more than a year.

Every government program expands over time, because the spending virus is the most virulent contagion known to man. The primary purpose of any government agency is to demonstrate that its funding is insufficient, and needs to be increased. The best way to indulge this burning passion is to accumulate more dependents, and take on more functions. I can assure you that the very first meeting held in the Edward Kennedy Memorial Health Administration building will include discussions about how to get more people signed up for the “public option,” or whatever they’re calling it by then.

Remember those 17 million people who were suddenly subtracted from Obama’s ever-changing estimate of the uninsured, during his speech last week? The Democrats don’t want to deny those people coverage. They just know they can’t get away with admitting it now. For the time being, their desire to sweep illegal aliens into their deficit-hardened arms must burn secretly in their hearts… but they’ll be counting the days until they can announce their secret love to the tax-paying chumps that will be expected to pay for the nuptials.

This will not be a one-sided love affair. The illegal alien community will not wait quietly for their government health benefits. The first lawsuits will be filed within weeks of the health reform signing ceremony at Chappaquiddick. By the time Obama runs his first prime-time special, to explain why anyone who would deny government health benefits to illegal aliens is an astroturfing racist bigot on the payroll of big corporations, the first test case of an illegal demanding access to government health services will probably have reached the Supreme Court. How do you suppose Justice Sonia Sotomayor will rule?

Conservatives often speak of socialism’s doomsday equation, when less than half the people pay all the taxes, and the remaining majority can vote themselves more taxes and greater benefits at will. In reality, it takes far less than 50% in the dependency class to begin the collapse of republican government into a socialist black hole. Thanks to progressive taxation, the costs of indulging dependent groups is spread among many taxpayers, and weighted against a very small group of top income earners. Thanks to payroll withholding, the cost of government spending programs is socialized into small increases in deductions that taxpayers barely see, with the really big payments coming from evil rich guys who can easily afford to part with their ill-gotten loot.

Each new spending program counts for pennies added to your taxes, or more likely passed along to you as hidden costs by the people paying the really serious taxes. Perhaps those pennies will be added to the whopping deficit that your children will be expected to cover. In each case, you barely notice another few drops of blood being squeezed out of you… but the beneficiaries of those spending programs will fight like demons to keep them growing, and the political class is anxious to harvest their votes.

We had a small taste of the spending virus in the Cash for Clunkers boondoggle, which Democrats are quick to assure us was a success, because lots of people lined up to get the free money that was being handed out. The budget for this program quickly tripled, to three billion dollars. About 690,000 vehicles were sold under the program, which paid up to $4500 per purchase. There are roughly 138 million taxpayers in the United States… so a little over 137 million of us, who didn’t buy a car during the Cash for Clunkers program, paid three billion dollars to the 690,000 people who did. Every one of those people would be violently angry if you tried to take their four thousand dollar subsidy back, and would consider you a miserly penny-pincher if you complained about the handful of change you paid into the program – especially since progressive taxation ensures the middle class paid only a few cents apiece, while the “wealthiest Americans” ponied up rolls of quarters for their “fair share.”

Government health care will work exactly this way, especially as it becomes a regressive tax against a group that generally doesn’t use its political influence effectively – young people – to disproportionately benefit older people. Of course, when the rationing kicks in, the oldest cohort of Americans will find themselves on the wrong end of those Quality of Life spreadsheets, and their last few letters to the editor of their local papers will express astonishment over the dissipation of their once-formidable political influence. By then, it will be far too late for them to undo the awful mistake of allowing Obamacare to pass.

Anyone who wastes your time arguing that government health care won’t be extended to illegal aliens is guilty of producing unnecessary carbon emissions. There is absolutely zero chance that philosophically consistent Democrats will refuse health benefits to poverty-stricken immigrants, or that politically savvy Democrats will think twice about raising your taxes to purchase the votes of minority groups. The cure for the spending virus is difficult. It begins with bringing your tea bags into the voting booth in 2010, and burning out the infection that raised our national debt to astronomical heights. Once this is done, we can discuss a treatment plan for the much older New Deal pathogens that made us vulnerable to this deadly secondary infection.

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