Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, October 25, 2013.
Listen now!
or Download for mobile devices!
One can imagine that large quantities of Tums and Prilosec OTC are being consumed at the White House of late. The first year of President Obama’s second term has not gone well. The latest manifestation of the president’s second term blues arrived October 1 in the form of massive dysfunction surrounding the website that serves as the portal to Obamacare – the president’s signal first-term legislative accomplishment.
While the president would have us believe that it’s simply a matter of deploying a “tech surge” of the best and brightest cyber minds to tackle the problem, evidence suggests that the president’s problems are much more deeply rooted.
In May of this year, the Gallup organization conducted a poll asking Americans to rank their list of priorities as it comes to public policy. Not surprisingly, given the sluggishness of the economic “recovery” that followed the 2008 recession, creating more jobs and helping the economy grow stood at positions one and two on the list.
Rounding out the top five were making the government work more efficiently, improving the quality of education received by American schoolchildren and addressing the financial problems of Medicare and Social Security.
In other words, Americans want to work rather than receive welfare, they want the economy to grow so that wealth may be created, they want a smaller, less ambitious, less intrusive government, they want their kids to get a decent education and they don’t want Medicare and Social Security to bankrupt the country.
Seems pretty much like the America I’ve always known.
So here’s the question. In the past five years, what of substance has the Obama administration done with respect to any of these priorities? Aside from wasting close to a trillion dollars in “stimulus,” which failed to create jobs or grow the economy, where has the administration proposed anything that would even begin to streamline the government, fix the schools or forestall the coming bankruptcies of Medicare and Social Security?
Why has the administration spent so much time and energy pushing gay marriage, abortion rights, immigration and gun control? None of these issues makes the top ten on the list of what most Americans are concerned about.
And with full acknowledgment that reducing the costs of health care and improving access to health care come in at position numbers six and eight respectively, when did a majority of Americans ever demand sweeping legislation such as that embodied in the 30,000 plus pages of regulations spawned by Obamacare?
Obamacare never enjoyed the majority support of the American people and now the fiasco surrounding its implementation is making some its one-time most ardent supporters run for cover.
Whether articulated in these terms or not, what we are seeing is what happens when a small number of elites presume to impose upon us their priorities at the expense of those of the majority.
When you pass a massive piece of legislation totally along party lines and without majority support of the people who must live under it, things had better go well or a stiff price will be paid. Things are definitely not going well with respect to Obamacare.
The debacle surrounding the rollout of the Affordable Care Act is a symptom. The disease is that the government’s priorities are not our priorities. The Gallup survey makes clear that our representatives are not representing us.
The growing realization of that fact, rather than technical “glitches” plaguing the Obamacare website, is what stands at the root of the extreme case of heartburn now afflicting the second term of the Obama administration.
First off, obama never cared a wit about what us American’s thought about anything. If he had, we would NOT have this failure called obamacare rammed down our throats! Since this person stepped into the Whitehouse, we have known NOTHING but what has been bad for America in everything obama has done. The stimilus packages he rammed through, another thing the American’s did not want, has never been accounted for as to where they went. They certainly did not go to stimulate the economy in any productive way. Perhaps, it went to stimulate his support for his fellow muslims?
Yes, obamacare is a symptom of everything that has gone wrong since this person stepped into the PEOPLE’S House. There is no way that anyone will ever know the full extent of what all was snuck into the “affordable care act”, but we can be sure of one thing that is NOT included into it and that is HEALTH CARE! People were warned about and congress KNEW about the death panels, the price hikes that would come with this monster and knew the sum objective of the whole thing was to put everyone except those in power under a one payer system. This is just one of several nails that have been nailed into the coffin of American freedom as we knew it! One thing we have learned in all this is just who are really Americans and who CARES what happens to us Americans. The gop has failed miserably being lead by the likes of mccain and his rino bunch! Yes, obamacare is a symptom of the CANCER that is eating away at American at an alarming pace by this administration!!!
Bless your heart, you keep writing things that do not take into account that Obama has told us that he hates our history of “evil’ White men, the founding fathers were wrong, there are too many wealthy people who have gained their goods from stealing it from others and that he will re-distribute things so that our country isn’t a SuperPower.
He has shown extreme deference to Muslim leaders, little deference to our historical allies . our Veterans & Armed Services.
Wants to open our borders for a raft of new citizens who have a different culture they wish to keep & do not want to adopt USA culture.
Hmmm.
Could it be that he
doesn’t like the USA and wishes bad things for it???
Logic says the signs are there.
Looks like it
“The disease is that the government’s priorities are not our priorities.”
When the government is overwhelmingly infested with self-serving politicians that campaign “to represent us” with the slickest of promises and then later secretly conspire to deceive us with laws that enslave us further with their bureaucratic regulations, how can we fix this?
My solution is to strip the government to the bare bones of its regulatory authority by closing every major Executive Department except for the DOD and ripping out the Progressive Tax system and let the “free enterprise system” come back to life, if it is not too late. The bureaucratic inertia of Washington is impossible to tame without drastic measures and we have had NO representatives (except for a precious few) with the fortitude to tackle this task. The corruption and graft in the Republican Party is bad enough, however it is 10 times worse in the Democrat party.
We are perilously close to reaching the point of no return where half the population is wholly dependent on welfare to survive. Representative government will never work when half of the population votes for politicians that promise even greater handouts. This is the essence of corruption run amok. Corporate cronyism is just as guilty as the welfare recipient. It is clear that the Obama regime has perfected this partnership to shun competition and personal responsibility with the shield of “government aid and bail-outs,” all in the name of emergency rescue of the economy and fighting poverty.
I believe there is no way that government can fix itself no matter how much it may match my priorities and my desire for representative government that keeps its promises. The bureaucratic cancer infesting Washington is terminal. It is going to take a nasty and hateful battle of Truth against a blanket of Lies that covers the entire nation by the Democrat propaganda machine and its Republican allies.
BIG Government can’t solve anything. No matter how much is tries “to represent us” – something the Republicans are unwilling to accept. Only the small government that follows the Constitution can cure this bureaucratic cancer.
My only hope is a NEW Ronald Reagan with the ability to energize the Conservative remnant and expose the corruption in Washington will rise from the American heartland and recreate a NEW Republican Party that is willing to rid itself of weakness and cronyism and resurrect the American free enterprise system. Otherwise the nation’s wealth will be squandered on the utopian dream of the Marxists to buy as many votes as possible until we reach a bureaucratic dictatorship driven by poverty, the Marxist goal in the end.
Paul, that the ACA is only a symptom of a more severe underlying problem is an excellent discussion point, and one that many do not want to face. Montrose, Lewis, and Miles all make very good comments, all of which I completely agree. My comment(s) are directed at the bolts and nuts of how we arrived at such an inefficient and bloated bureaucracy. First, let me apologize to the small portion of the federal workers who are actually competent and are dedicated to a good work ethic. However,our federal government for the most part is an employment agency for the unemployable; most of whom could never be employed in the private economy, and if they were hired, would be fired in short order. When you hire by quotas, affirmative action and so many other politically correct reasons, the mess that we have in our government is exactly what any rational person would expect. Additionally, when you protect this incompetent job performance with unions, civil service laws, and political patronage, how in the world could you have anything else? A private industry with this manpower system would be completely non-competitive and out of business; but no, our federal government perpetuates this by just raising our taxes to pay for more of this nonsense. Until we elect politicians with the courage to put the federal workforce on the same salary structure, job security, holiday schedule, benefits, qualifications, etc., etc., it will only get worse.