American citizen will be left holding the bag for debts totaling in trillions

We’re From the Government, and We’re Here to Help

By Daniel Greenfield
Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The best argument against any new government program, is government itself. Were the United States government a corporation, its business model would make Enron, Countrywide and Bernard Madoff look like models of rock solid corporate responsibility. The kind of corporation that goes trillions of dollars into debt, buys wrenches at a thousand dollars a pop and spends much of its budget on kickbacks for the friends of its boards members.

If at the height of the New Deal, liberals were full of optimism about what the powers of an expanded Federal government could accomplish, few liberals today can argue with a straight face that the Federal government is either competent, efficient or even any better at managing money than your average unemployed drunken brother in law. The old rhetoric of the New Deal is there, its proponents have simply learned to completely detach it from the reality that government is doomed to be incompetent and ineffective, compared to private citizens.

The current push for nationalized health care or ObamaCare, ignores the fact that the government has badly mismanaged much smaller health care systems, including the VA system and the Indian Health Service, both of which liberals had been busy denouncing until not too long ago. Meanwhile Medicaid costs have already been rising out of control with states and the Federal government trying to pass the bill back and forth to each other. A problem that is already popping up with ObamaCare as Governors from both parties condemn any attempt by Congress to create unfunded mandates for the states to fill.

The conflict between the states and the Federal government reached a new ugly low, when the Justice Department charged New York State with “knowingly submitting false claims for reimbursementâ€