In an interview way back in 2009, Obama appeared on ABC and fielded a question from a woman about her elderly mother that involved late-in-life and end-of-life medical decisions. A quote from Obama caught my eye:
Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.
This, in a nutshell, is the default modus operandi for our entire government.
Social Security and Medicare are unfunded (I won’t even call them underfunded because that would imply there is some money set aside against future liabilities) entitlements with liabilities that may total over 200 TRILLION dollars. To anyone who cares about the long-term health of these programs, it is obvious that major reforms are necessary, yet few dare to even mention this, let alone try.
Health insurance continues to suffer from the first of many devastating wounds: the preferential tax treatment conferred upon employer-provided insurance 75+ years ago. So much of what has been done by government to health insurance and health care since then can be traced directly to the market distortions caused by that action, yet no real effort other than a mention by Senator McCain during his presidential run has been made to undo that mistake.
Major military weapon system programs sometimes take so long to develop that their original purposes have become obsolete, sometimes turn out to be epic failures of either vision of execution, and sometimes become Frankenstein monsters as more and more ‘cooks’ stick their spoons in the soup. Yet these programs are often impossible to kill off, with politicians and military brass choosing to bandage and reshape rather than acknowledge reality and repurpose that spending to better use.
Major government benefit programs (Head Start is a great example) end up not working as intended or turn out to be utterly ineffective, yet they are fed instead of excised. It’s no surprise that, like tumors, they continue to grow and draw money away from better uses.
Government investments, driven as they are by politics, desires and contributions rather than by sound financial considerations, often go spectacularly awry (Solyndra?), yet warning signs are rarely heeded the way they should be.
Surgery is scary, but it’s sometimes the correct course of treatment. When that is the case, painkillers, bandaids and other stop-gaps serve only to let the underlying problem fester and grow. This makes performing that surgery in the future riskier and more difficult, and if surgery is delayed long enough, the patient may die.
The nation has been in ‘painkiller’ mode for decades, suffering the debilitation that’s a result of progressive/statist policies that began under Wilson and were expanded by many presidents and congresses since. At some point, the nation must get the surgery it needs and be weaned off the painkillers, or it will die. Neither our current president nor most of our current Congress want anything to do with making the tough decision to pick up the scalpel and start cutting.
Loading ...
Active Comment Threads
Most Commented Posts
Universal Background Checks – A Back Door to Universal Registration
COVID Mask Follies
When Everything Is Illegal…
An Anti-Vax Inflection Point?
“Not In My Name”
The Great Social Media Crackup
War Comes Through The Overton Window
The First Rule of Italian Driving
Most Active Commenters