Government Trickery becomes Mendacity
Democracy and Power 108: Obfuscation
Wherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true. Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity. – Hans F. Sennholz
Knowing their constituents are rationally ignorant, and fearing legislated failures, the politician’s speech is seldom precise or logically reasoned. Seeking a favorable image, the politician talks in generalities, exaggerates and obfuscates.
Government Trickery becomes Mendacity
Virtually hidden in the ObamaCare legislation is a new entitlement – long-term care insurance know as CLASS, which will start providing benefits in 10 years. Those of us who work to support our families, also known as the rationally ignorant public, CLASS will start collecting “premiums” in 2012.
Concealing this new entitlement during the legislative process is immoral, but Obama, Pelosi and Reid misused the $70billion of “premiums” to offset the cost of ObamaCare. Accordingly, Obama, Pelosi and Reid, deliberately concealed the cost of ObamaCare. Thus, obfuscation becomes outright deceit and mendacity.
Charles Krauthammer explains in National Review Online:
ObamaCare does not create just one new entitlement (health insurance for everyone); it actually creates a second — long-term-care insurance. With an aging population, and with long-term care becoming extraordinarily expensive, this promises to be the biggest budget buster in the history of the welfare state.
And yet, in the CBO calculation, this new entitlement to long-term care reduces the deficit over the next ten years. By $70 billion, no less. How is this possible? By collecting premiums now, and paying out no benefits for the first ten years. Presto: a (temporary) surplus. As former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and scholars Joseph Antos and James Capretta note, “Only in Washington could the creation of a reckless entitlement program be used as [an] ‘offset’ to grease the way for another entitlement.”
This deceit is so blatant that Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, a Democrat, has called CLASS, “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.”
As the CLASS mendacity becomes known, the Obama administration and Health and Human Service Director Kathleen Sebelius have adopted the same mantra concocted by their political spin masters to ObamaCare: The law isn’t perfect but it does much good. Now we need to improve it.
Here is Sebelius latest spin as reported by the Wall Street Journal: “The law, while the structure in the statute wasn’t perfect, provided ample flexibility to make sure that Class is successful. . . . We at HHS are committed to using that authority to making sure that both the program meets people’s needs while remaining fiscally sound.”
In other words, first they concealed the new entitlement, next were devious and untruthful about the cost of ObamaCare and CLASS, and now they will bureaucratically and undemocratically rewrite the law. This moral degradation is diminishing our exceptional nation.
To restore a moral and just system of government, Americans must demand the repeal of ObamaCare in total.
