The method of Obama

One of the reasons I haven’t written much about our current supposed president is that the sheer unreality of many of his statements puts them beyond my immediate ability or desire to relate to them or critique them. Consider what he said in an interview this weekend, discussed by Rick Moran at American Thinker. The entire AT item is below, followed by my comments:

May 23, 2009

Obama: ‘We’re out of money’

Rick Moran
I wish he would have realized that about $11 trillion ago.

In a Memorial Day weekend interview with C-SPAN’s Steve Scully, the President of the United States told the people of America that their government was flat broke:

SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?

OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.

So we’ve got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it’s putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.

So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don’t reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can’t get control of the deficit.

So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it’s too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can’t afford it. We’ve got this big deficit. Let’s just keep the health care system that we’ve got now. (HT: Drudge )

Scully does a good job of boring in on Obama’s evasions so the interview is well worth the read.

This is a man who hasn’t a clue. Yes, we are in a recession and a financial crisis. So your scare tactics that ratcheted up fear in order to get your stim bill, omnibus spending, and FY 2009 budget passed—a total of more than $5 trillion with interest added—are backfiring and you think you can work your way out of it by spending a trillion more on a health insurance boondoggle?

What planet is this guy from?

[end of Moran item]

I can only echo Moran’s point. Obama and his party have just completed the greatest orgy of spending in U.S. history, and Obama has the audacity to say that the reason for the deficit is that we don’t have nationalized health care?

The last eight years have accustomed us to delusional statements from presidents. But Obama’s remark about the lack of nationalized health care being the main factor in the federal deficit is so delusional I don’t know how to respond to it.

And it occurs to me that maybe that’s Obama’s method of governance: to keep flooding the national dialog with statements of such mind-blowing falsity that everyone’s mental circuits get paralyzed, precluding any intelligent opposition to his program and thus enabling him to enact it.

So let’s not give in to the mental paralysis. What is Obama saying? First, as noted, he’s saying that the main cause of the deficit is not the trillions in spending he and the Congress have just passed, but the inflation in health care costs in the Medicare (for people 65 and older) and Medicaid (for people receiving welfare and other government assistance) programs . Second, he has proposed, as the solution, the nationalization of health care insurance, to be done by expanding the Medicare program so that it covers the entire population.

Got that? The solution to the deficit caused by the ballooning costs of Medicare is that Medicare be vastly enlarged from covering 40 million persons, as at present , to covering 300 million persons.

How can multiplying the size of a deficit-causing program by a factor of seven reduce the deficit?

What do we learn from this? Obama controls the country and seeks to pass his ruinous socialist schemes by means of in-our-face, mind-stunning lies. (Readers may remember that at the time of the Jeremiah Wright controversy in March 2008 I said that Obama was the biggest liar I had ever seen in U.S. politics, bigger than Bill Clinton.) Therefore opposition to Obama must consist chiefly in exposing his lies. This is what the Republicans and the so-called conservative media must relentlessly do every day. But have they been doing that? At least when it comes to national security issues, several commenters have ruefully pointed out that Dick Cheney is the only Republican vocally opposing Obama on anti-terrorism policies. Meaning that the Republicans have generally been silent in that area. I’ve read that the situation is not that different when it comes to Obama’s domestic program. This must change. The way to stop a leader who governs by lies is to speak the truth.

- end of initial entry -

Buddy in Atlanta writes:

You write:

“Obama has the audacity to say that the reason for the deficit is that we don’t have nationalized health care?”

This has been accepted wisdom on the left for awhile: our national economy is at a disadvantage to the economies of countries with nationalized healthcare. I’ve seen it on the loony-left website Pandagon. There seems to be a couple of strains to the argument:

(1) U.S. companies are less competitive because they’re burdened with healthcare expenses that companies in Europe and Japan don’t have. Freed from these expenses, they could offer more competitively priced products or spend more on R&D to create better, more successful products.

(2) U.S. workers are less willing to take the risk of starting their own business or moving to a new job because they’re afraid of losing their current healthcare coverage, especially in cases where the worker has a pre-existing condition. This problem, which also hurts U.S. competitiveness, would disappear under nationalized healthcare.

Argument #1 is based on magical thinking. Moving these costs to the federal government doesn’t solve the problem. The money has to come from somewhere—either through higher corporate taxes or higher individual taxes. Cost reductions and rationing won’t be enough to cover the cost of bringing 40 million uninsured Americans into the system.

As for argument #2, I suspect the impact is small. The type of worker dynamism and creativity that creates new businesses is probably found primarily among young, healthy workers and not the sort of people who are concerned about their health insurance.

LA replies:

I especially like your response to argument #2. How absurd, how utterly leftish, to imagine that the kind of people who have the energy, vision, and desire to create their own business would change their minds and decide not to do so because of a concern about health insurance. But such is the leftist view of humanity. Even when it comes to the quintessentially individualistic and private activity of entrepreneurship, leftists can only imagine it happening by means of state assistance and facilitation.

LA writes:

I want to repeat a part of that interview excerpt, as I missed its full significance before.

SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?

OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.

About which Lee Cary at American Thinker comments :

Enter Straw Man #1: Failure to nationalize health care sometime after Harry Truman first proposed the idea. In other words, it’s not Obama’s fault that “we are out of money.” It’s not the fault of the new health care system he wants. It’s the fault of those who didn’t pass a health care plan earlier.

What is the significance of Obama’s amazing comment that the cause of the deficit is the absence of nationalized health care in this country over the last several decades? It is that, in his mind, government spending is the source of wealth. The production of wealth (you know, that old fashioned activity of producing and selling goods and services) is not the source of wealth , state subsidies are the source of wealth. And since we in America have lacked the largest state subsidy of all, which is national health care, we’ve been lacking the most important source of wealth of all, and therefore we have lacked sufficient tax revenues to support government, and so we have deficits.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 24, 2009 09:17 AM | Send