One of the things that drove me bananas about the late Senator Ted Kennedy was that he was always taking bows for the wonderful things he’d provided for his fellow citizens—only it was the rest of us who had the thankless job of actually paying for Mr. Kennedy’s “generosity.”
No, Senator Kennedy did the promising,but we paid. Neat trick, no? Kennedy may even have smart tax lawyers who ensured that his own fortune was relatively unaffected by Mr. Kennedy's singular largesse.
When politicians make generous promises today about what government-run health care is going to provide, they won’t be the ones writing the checks either. In some cases, if Obamacare is allowed to stand, it will be people who are as yet unborn who'll be footing the bills for the "generosity" of the likes of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.
Christopher Conover, a research scholar at Duke University's Center for Health Policies and Inequalities Research, has a chilling piece on The American about how Obamacare could affect U.S. citizens 75 years from now.
To support what is being promised now, Conover writes, taxes that year would have to be 175 percent higher than now. Conover writes:
Ask all your friends how comfortable they would feel imposing such punishing tax levels on their grandchildren. And if there’s no public sentiment for raising taxes by the gargantuan amounts required, then why are today’s policymakers making such promises?
And if there’s no credible way we can tax our way out of this mess, why hasn’t the president offered a bold plan to substantially dial down on our promises (e.g., increase the Medicare retirement age) or fundamentally reform Medicare? The economy assuredly is a critical issue in the upcoming election. But well-informed voters also should be demanding that those wishing to inhabit the Oval Office answer some very tough questions about health entitlements as well.
Seventy-five years may seem so far in the future that it’s silly to give it a thought. Glad the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution weren’t as cavalier about us as our leaders are about future generations.
And, of course, we don’t have to wait 75 years to start paying more than we can afford for Obamacare. A steep increase in premiums is imminent.