The U.S. has spent trillions on the War on Poverty since 1964 and poverty still remains.
Socialized health care has been a progressive dream for over 70 years in the United States after FDR progressives spent decades trying to pass it, but the American people rejected it. However, liberals came up with a different plan. In the 1960′s the American left gave us Medicare, a ponzi scheme that makes Social Security look like the picture of solvency.
Liberals believed (and they’ve been proven correct) that if they incrementally introduced socialized health care it would eventually take hold. Medicare has never been solvent. It never will be solvent. No nation in the world has come up with a socialized heath care system that works in the long run. Every system spends too much, wastes too much, and delivers too little care. Health care eventually has to be rationed and the quality of the health decreases.
Those aren’t spurious claims or wild predictions. They’re the indisputable facts. The citizens in the United States who are collecting Medicare benefits today are collecting way more than they put in 30 years ago. The world pushes towards bankruptcy. Europe is already ahead of the United States. That continent’s lust for entitlements coupled with slow economic growth is a recipe for the return of the dark ages.
The United States follows slowly behind. In the United States no one even considers the thought that Medicare should be abolished. Politically, it’s worse to be labeled anti-Medicare than to act like there’s not a problem. Plenty of Democrats insist there’s nothing to worry about. Heck, plenty of Democrats believe we should be spending more and that ObamaCare doesn’t go far enough. One could chuckle if this kind of willful ignorance was a vocal minority, but indeed the great majority of the left lives in fiscal denial. It’s a safe haven of fiscal dissidence.
The most extreme budget presented by Republicans is Paul Ryan’s own version of Utopia called the Path to Prosperity. The Daily Plunge hopes Ryan runs for president, not because he has the answers, but because his answers are the least moronic. Ryan is naive that Medicare can be saved. Oh, it can be saved for tomorrow, or next week, next year, or the next 50 years, but eventually it ends. Andrew C. McCarthy at the National Review has more on the subject.
Reformers such as Representative Ryan always ignore this inevitable trajectory of entitlement politics. They rationalize that they can make a government-sanctioned bribery system run better, or at least preempt Democrats from making it run worse. Hoping to stave off Medicare, congressional moderates in 1960 passed a bill to provide means-tested medical assistance to the elderly. It only greased the wheels for not only Medicare but Medicaid. In Massachusetts, Romneycare was another well-meaning attempt to install a compulsory statewide health-insurance system that would be less autocratic and costly than the one the Left would have imposed. It is, predictably, a disaster that tends toward ever-more-suffocating government control.
The mountain of evidence against entitlements is staggering. No reasonably educated person who looks at this objectively can come any other conclusion. If well-intentioned programs to help a few people ultimately end up harming everyone why insist that it’s a good intention any longer?
The challenge of our society isn’t to create the perfect government program to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves. The challenge of our society is to take responsibility for the disadvantaged ourselves. It is the individual who should be responsible for their loved ones, their neighbors, and the poor. A cynical person may insist that that isn’t enough. They would be correct; however, the government isn’t the solution either and it’s pushing us toward economic calamity. Both solutions are imperfect. We live in an imperfect world. Faced with two choices the answer is clear.
Sadly, too many people already feel entitled. They are our friends and family. They are Republicans and Democrats of all ages. We have educated generations of people who are unable to see the forest for the trees. Entitlements are the closest thing eternal life on Earth. I can only hope that I don’t live long enough to witness where this economic road to ruin ends.
