An excellent editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal points out that Joe the Plumber and Donald Berwick, newly appointed to run Medicare and Medicaid, early on grasped something that the rest of the nation refused to see.
As Dr. Berwick put it: “any health-care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must-must-redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate.”
Yes, many people believed the debate was about improving medical care for U.S. citizens. It wasn’t. The Wall Street Journal explains:
We are also learning that “spreading the wealth,” as Mr. Obama famously told Joe the Plumber in 2008, is the silent intellectual and political foundation of ObamaCare. We say silent because Democrats never admitted this while the bill was moving through Congress.
But only days after the bill passed, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus exulted that it would result in “a leveling” of the “maldistribution of income in America,” adding that “The wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle-income class is left behind.” David Leonhardt of the New York Times, who channels White House budget director Peter Orszag, also cheered after the bill passed that ObamaCare is “the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality” in generations.
Margaret Thatcher famously said sometimes you run out of other people’s money. The current administration may run out of people making $250,000 or more. Their policies are built on the notion that wealth is stationary and not that it is created through effort. I know a lot of folks who’re giving themselves tax breaks in the coming years by working less. The Wall Street Journal grasps the end product of redistributionist policies:
The great irony is that this sort of enforced egalitarianism imposes higher taxes and other policies that reduce the total stock of wealth and leave less for Dr. Berwick to redistribute. Economic growth has been by far the most important factor in improving health and longevity, especially for those whom Dr. Berwick calls “the poorer and less fortunate.”