Herewith two articles from charter members of the elite MSM and one from a female blogger:
First, Tom Friedman, who always has his pulse on the interests and opinions of his liberal, moneyed friends:
More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes?
I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem.
He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.
...
“You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice,” said Sandel, “and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energize the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.”
You can be forgiven if Tom Friedman's article seems somewhat incoherent. After all, his point is that the details of policy (more troops to Afghanistan, more trillions in borrowing for poorly specified programs, more than 1900 pages for healthcare "reform") don't matter. what matters is the mellifluous sound of Barack Obama's voice as he entices Americans to get on board with his plans to expand the government (and the debt) to a size never seen before.
E. J. Dionne gets a little more specific:
The next health care fight has already started. It's the battle to define the bill that President Obama will eventually sign as a victory for consumers, taxpayers and the common good.
You might say this view is premature. Legislation has yet to pass the House or the Senate, there are differences between the two bodies, and some moderates still have doubts.
But barring astoundingly self-defeating behavior by Democrats, a decent bill will get to Obama's desk. He and his party will then own the most sweeping reform of the American social safety net since the passage of Medicare in the 1960s and, arguably, Social Security in the 1930s.
Both parties know this. That's why much of the rhetoric you'll hear in the coming weeks will not really be about whether to pass a bill. It will be designed to shape how the voters who will decide the 2010 elections -- and, ultimately, the fate of health care reform itself -- come to view the new system.
Republicans will try hard to minimize the benefits that will flow from the reform and set themselves up to claim that anything bad that happens to anyone's health care in the next few years is Obama's fault. It will be a bit like those New York City taxi drivers during the late 1960s and early '70s who despised Mayor John V. Lindsay so much that they were prepared to blame him for bad weather.
And since most of the changes don't become effective until 2013, the next few years will be a time of uncertainties and unknowns. Citizens typically want to know what's in this for them, and what they'll get right now.
That's why the most important document House Democrats released last week when they unveiled their bill was a list of 14 benefits that will be created immediately.
Dionne is correct to say that most Americans would be supportive of (many of) the 14 benefits listed. At the same time, a great many Americans must be wondering why it requires 1980 pages of arcana to describe these 14 benefits. And here is the fundamental difference between bloggers, who know nothing and typically sit around in their pajamas pontificating all day </sarcasm> and elite opinion writers shows up. I would wager that neither Tom Friedman nor E. J. Dionne have actually read the healthcare bill(s) that meet with such approval from their wise and lofty position. In this they are no different from the vast majority of democratic Senators and Congressmen who have never shown any inclination to actually read and understand the legislation they propose.
Lofty sentiments are fine but when you are proposing to vastly expand the size sand scope of government, the devil is in the details. And that is the "on the other hand."
On the other hand, there are bloggers who have the intellectual abilities and the curiosity to read the legislation and, not surprisingly, they note that the built-in "unexpected" consequences of the legislation are dramatic. (The consequences are unexpected because of the limitations of curiosity and intellectual ability of our Representatives as well as because many of the unintended consequences are probably fully intended but hidden and obfuscated.)
Consider the difference between the approach of our elite sophisticates and our own over-burdened Southern gal:
I had a bunch of stuff to post on, but I am not feeling well at all, probably due to taking off the flat, putting on doughnut, getting tire fixed, and putting on tire in the cold wet. Most of the time I do pretty well, but either the flu blew something loose internally or this is my old trouble back again, because this morning my muscles had stiffened so badly that I was nearly immobile.
So I decided that since I was in pain anyway, I'd do some research on that 1,990 page health care bill. I didn't get too far even with the summary before I cracked up laughing and did myself further damage. I think I tore something loose in my rib cartilage. So be warned - you might want to exit to safety before reading on. Here is the summary and it is only 11 pages. This has many awesome features worthy of Dilbert, but the one that did me an injury is on top of page 2. The bill contains a mandate to provide coverage for businesses, and if they don't, they have to pay 8% of wages to the exchange. For a lot companies currently, that would be a good deal, so I have always seen this as a severe problem that will shift coverage to the subsidized exchanges.. But this - this takes it a step further:Small business protections. Small businesses with annual payrolls below $500,000 are exempt from requirements to offer or contribute to coverage, including the 8 percent payroll contribution for failure to provide health benefits to their workers. As a result of this exemption, 86 percent of America’s businesses are exempt from any requirement to provide coverage to their employees. The 8 percent requirement is phased in for small businesses with an annual payroll between $500,000 and $750,000.
Well, there are many ways to structure businesses and employment, and I suspect that within three or four years after passage, it will be more than 86 percent. For example, there is employee leasing - the legal structure of which is that your employees work for another business. It would not be difficult for some large employee leasing firm to set up a franchise system in which most employees worked for small units that basically were shell firms below the 500K which would then contract employees to much larger firms for a percentage cut of payroll - say 2%. How much do these DC bozos think the average employee earns? Since one person can own any number of these luscious little profit centers, I think I'll plan to own about 20. It takes paratisization to a new level, but hey, in the land of the crooked only the honest are slaves.
Needless to say, this is going to be like a dagger to the heart of large businesses in the US, because smaller low wage competitors just got handed an 8% of payroll price advantage. The natural result would be to force all businesses to the lowest level of wages, shift employment structures massively, and throw most employees on the exchange.
Roaring with laughter as the light dawned, I shot over to Coyote, who sees the writing on his wall in the form of "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin".The implications for my business is staggering. I have already mentioned in the previous post that it imposes an 8% tax on wages on my business — a business where 50% of revenues go to wages and margins are in the 6-7% range. You do the math.
Worse for us is that nearly all our competitors are ma and pa companies with less than $500,000 in wages a year, meaning that our competitors will be exempt from these taxes, giving them an automatic 4% cost advantage over our company. Great.
Twelve seconds after this thing passes, I will be on my phone to my attorney to figure out if it is possible to break my company into multiple corporations that all fall under the 500,000 wage limit. The paperwork and administration for this would be a huge hassle, but it can’t be as high as 4% of sales.Well, the other option is employee leasing, Coyote. I may have just found my next million-dollar idea. Because damn straight, it's going to be easier and cheaper for you to lease them from multiple businesses that provide a unified type of service than split up your whole company. Call me. We'll go into business together. We'll make millions the first year. That is, we will if I can keep my rib cartilage whole.
It just goes on and on like this; the incentives in this bill are for all large companies to fire most of their employees and shfit their workforce to part-timers and leased employees. Thus, and I was already in pain from convulsive laughing when I reached the top of page three where what to my wondering eyes appeared but:
I will leave tit here and suggest you get on over to M_O_M's post-haste because she has lots more, the kind of detail that can only be gleaned and understood by actually reading the damn bill, something our betters would never deign to stoop to. The level of detail in M_O_M's post (in fact, in all of her posts) which so often includes the kinds of quantitative analysis rarely seen in the MSM, should shame the efforts of the Dionnes and Friedmans, who wouldn't recognize a quantitative analysis if it bit them on the nose. Perhaps if they were willing to read more bloggers' posts they might not be quite so dismissive of our concerns about the size and scope of government.
Our elites, and the technocrats and/or ideologues writing these abominations they call legislation, have come to depend upon a docile population with neither the time, energy, ability, nor inclination to actually watch what they do. Once upon a time it was the business of the elite media to keep an eye on our leaders and bring their excesses and foibles to light. The MSM long ago signed onto the liberal maximalist government agenda (now going so far as to ask to be put officially on the payroll since their business model is crashing and burning around them) and it is only the advent of the internet that has allowed we, the people, the opportunity to see what our leaders have been up to. We, the people, do not like what we have been seeing.
The elections tomorrow will be understood as many things, a confirmation or repudiation of Obama's policies, perhaps, or a signal of whether Conservatives can win running essentially as disguised libertarians (ie, socially liberal, fiscally conservative; in the three most prominent races, the Conservatives have not run on a social Conservative platform and have tried to minimize the impact of social issues); in addition, I would suggest that the results, if the Republicans win, will confirm that an irritated peopel are better served by those who wish to inform us rather than those who wish to tell us what to think.
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