The Vote on Obamacare Repeal Shows America's Vibrant Democracy

This week the US Senate held its vote on the Obamacare repeal bill that was passed overwhelmingly in the House.  The bill failed in the Senate as it was expected to.

This is precisely what was expected to happen - there was no way the Democrat dominated Senate was going to vote against Obamacare, and then even if it did there was no way it was going to be signed by Obama.  This had led a number of commentators to condemn this move as a political stunt.

Those commentators are incorrect.  What this move shows is how incredibly vibrant and responsive America's democracy is to the will of the people.  So many people believe that a democracy is really just an elected dictatorship and this vote shows that, in America at least, such a thing is not the case.

Obama was elected in 2008, and the response to his agenda has been overwhelmingly negative.  Although his personal approval remains stubbornly in the 40's, approval of his agenda is enormously low, and it is clear that most people want Obamacare repealed.  Within two years, the Senate and House of Representatives had been cleared of those who were enforcing the Obama agenda and replaced with those who wish to begin rolling it back.

Although the government cannot immediately repeal what has happened over the last few years, American democracy has allowed the people to slam the brakes on the Obama agenda. The House controls the purse strings, and so the unpopular spending policies of Obama have been stopped within the space of two years.  If the American people wish it to be so, in another two years they can begin actively overturning the damage done between 2009 and 2010 by electing a Republican President and Senate.  For now, they can at least stop it from going any further, and that is precisely what they have done.

In Britain, the electorate will usually have to wait up to 5 years before even being allowed to use their vote to stop the agenda being driven through Parliament.  Americans have to wait less than two years to stop the agenda, and begin putting pressure on for the agenda to be reversed.  While some may be dismayed that they are not able to repeal Obamacare and the rest of the Obama agenda just yet, the fact that the American people have been able to stop this destructive agenda in its tracks and start working to reverse it, all within two years of Obama's election, does great credit to the American system of democracy, and it is something that we in Britain can learn from.

Americans Should Take Note of Cameron's Attempts to Reform the NHS

It may seem that in the last week or so I have been rather harsh to Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron.  Certainly I am frustrated by the fact that we seem to have a Conservative Prime Minister who appears to be scared of conservative principles, but at the same time he is significantly better than the previous few incumbents.  Indeed, there may be an argument to say that he is the best Prime Minister that we have had since Margaret Thatcher.

So I was cheered somewhat by the announcement today of the new offensive against the NHS, designed to reform the monolith of our National Health Service somewhat so that it offers either better service, or costs less - preferably both.

The problem that Cameron and the Tories have is that reforming the NHS by introducing market principles is like trying to make an elephant do ballet - it is simply not in its nature.  You can have a privatised system or a nationalised system, trying to get a nationalised system with privatised efficiency is just dreamland, not reality.   In addition, the NHS is a government controlled, unionised monopoly, with enormous amounts of public sector special interests who have vested interests in the status quo.  That means that whenever there is even the slightest mention of reform, those vested interests cause hell.  It is for this reason that Thatcher was able to defeat the Soviet Union, she was able to defeat the Argentinians, she was even able to defeat the Scargillian uprising - but she was not able to defeat the vested interests in the NHS.  They are simply too powerful, and have been since the 1940's, when the NHS was started.

We have seen a similar result today.  Cameron's major speech today on the issue has already been hijacked by those claiming to be "outraged" after Cameron (rightly) described the NHS as "second rate", which has been declared to be an insult to "millions of NHS staff" by Labour and the rest of the union cronies that follow them around.  This is the common tactic used to smear anyone who fails to follow the dogma that the NHS is the greatest, besterest everest system of healthcare in the entire world!!! (except for Cuba of course!)

Unfortunately Cameron has already backed down and has apologised for describing it as "second rate", instead modifying it to say that patients should not be given treatment that is "second best".  Cameron has fallen into the left's trap.  The problem Cameron has is that he is trying to work within a government-run, nationalised monopoly, which ultimately will never be efficient, and he is trying to do it with the co-operation of vested interests.  He has chosen not to tackle the fundamental problem of the nationalised system, and is instead trying to make the existing system less inefficient.  But the vested interests have no interest in making the system more efficient, and therefore attempts at diplomacy will fail.  If Cameron wants to reform the NHS, he must fight.  If he is not prepared to fight, then he will fail.

Already we have seen that reform of the NHS may prove to be an almost impossible task, and this is something for Americans to take note of when it comes to the effects of Obamacare. Once you have nationalised health care, it is impossible to revoke.  Attempts to make it smoother will mostly fail, and any attempt to modify the system in any way will be met by a tide of anger from vested interests keen to preserve the status quo.  Every smear from "you are insulting nurses" to "you want poor people to die on the streets" will be aimed at you.  From a political perspective, this makes it impossible to touch, and this is why the British Conservative Party has been unable to propose any significant NHS reforms time and time again.  So, if Obamacare is allowed to be established, America will never get rid of it.

It is for this reason that repealing Obamacare as soon as possible is the highest priority for Republicans and conservatives in America.  Boehner and co are right to make that their main target, and it should also be the focus of the 2012 Republican Presidential Campaign.  Because if this thing gets settled, you will never get rid of it.  Look at Britain, we have had the NHS since 1945, and we still have the same problems now that we had back in the 40's!  If America does not want to still be struggling with nationalised health care in the 2070's, then it needs to repeal Obamacare - fast!

Rosie O' Donnell Stunned By The Reality of Obamacare

It's always interesting to see an Obamacare supporter forced to see the reality of life under nationalised health care.  As a resident of Great Britain, and having had experience of the British National Health Service (NHS), it has amazed me to see Democrats and the left in America claim that nationalising healthcare will make it quicker, cheaper and more efficient.  One does not need to be a scholar to know that that claim is completely and utterly in the land of fantasy!  Yet they still argue it!

A beautiful example of this took place this month on the Rosie O'Donnell show.  A Canadian caller was speaking about her inability to get a gastric bypass, and mentioned that it had taken several years for her to see a surgeon for it under the Canadian universal health care system that hardcore leftists like O'Donnell think is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  O' Donnell's inability to even comprehend the fact that this woman had waiten years to see a specialist for a non urgent op is hysterical.  Take a listen to the call.




The best moment in this for me is when Rosie asks the caller if she couldn't have just "asked" to be moved up the waiting list!  Yeh, because it is that simple Rosie!  Even here in Britain, waiting times have been reduced but they are still extremely long.  Admittedly seven years is a long time, even for a government run health system, but I was listening to Labour leader Ed Miliband on the radio this morning saying that Labour's biggest achievement was to make sure that "most" people do not have to wait longer than 5 months to see a specialist!  5 months! And that is an achievement that has required unprecedented amounts of money pumped into the NHS for decades!  He doesn't even mention what happens to people who don't manage to get in under 5 months, or how long it takes to actually get the operation itself!

In fairness to Ed Miliband, waiting times used to be a lot longer than that, but the fact that a 5 month waiting list for "most" people is seen as an achievement for a heavily funded nationalised healthcare system should be a massive klaxon for American readers who might be being swayed by the leftist arguments that health services will get better not worse under Obamacare, and that it will get cheaper in the process.

What is scary is that there are so many loud mouthed activists for Obamacare like O'Donnell, who will talk about how wonderful we Brits have healthcare, and how amazing the Canadian system is, and (laughably) how good the Cuban system in, and yet they don't have even the slightest clue as to how these systems work in reality.  Yet they are still quite happy to enforce this system on the American public.

Make sure it doesn't happen - repeal the damn bill!

New York Times: To cut or not to cut in Britain?

Apologies for the lack of updates - it was my birthday last week, so the updates have been infrequent.  Back now though!

The New York Times has a peculiar article, where it can't seem to make its mind up on the subject of spending cuts in Britain, but it doesn't prevent the article from being an interesting one in fairness to Hell's Bible.  The title, "Amid Austerity, Britain Keeps Welfare for Well Off."  You smell an agenda?  Me too!

Lets take a look at the article - my comments in red.

LONDON — Every week without fail Lucy Elkin, a comfortably middle-class mother [boo hiss!] of two small children, receives a £33.20 child benefit payment, or about $52, from the debt-plagued British government. [Would they use that term to describe the Obama government?]

“It’s useful and it helps pay the bills, but it is not as if we are struggling to put food on the table,” [Give it back then!!  Don't take it, then bitch about it!] Ms. Elkin said as she led her children from the park to their house on the leafy fringe of Hampstead Heath, one of London’s most desirable neighborhoods.

Ms. Elkin, 40, is a freelance writer. Her husband is a computer programmer. Along with more than three million middle- to upper-income British families, they are among the recipients of £11 billion ($17.2 billion) a year paid to mothers with children here. It is a universal benefit that not only costs taxpayers about twice as much as the total for unemployment payments but also represents the largest chunk of the estimated £30 billion ($47 billion) the government pays each year to Britons with above-average incomes.

“It is one of those things that is quite hard to justify,” Ms. Elkin said. [Agreed, but don't take the benefit.  Also, can you imagine the fuss that lefty papers like the NYT would make if the Tories revoked such a benefit?  Also, I get the impression that people like Ms Elkin would then start moaning about how hard it is, now she doesn't have the "valuable benefit."  Such people moan whatever you do!]

She is not alone in thinking that Britain can no longer afford such generosities. [She is not alone, I agree with her, but then I am not collecting benefits!] But even as civil servants and ministers are preparing to drastically cut most categories of government spending to help close Britain’s budget deficit, the government is so worried about alienating middle-class voters that it is proceeding very cautiously in limiting the subsidy for having children.

“There is a long history of universal welfare schemes here,” [and they have pretty much all failed, just as they are doing in America] said Patrick Nolan, an economist for Reform, a free-market-oriented research organization that has issued a report claiming that as much as 16 percent of total welfare benefits go to those who do not need them. “But it has become a very expensive luxury when hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs.” [Exactly, and lengthy welfare payments cost jobs due to the launch of taxes that such payments require - and taxes costs jobs.]

The debate in Britain highlights an issue that other advanced industrial countries are also beginning to grapple with: Who should bear the burden of the coming wave of austerity? 

Unless politicians are prepared to dig into the pockets of middle- and upper-income families [Excuse me, but I think you will find that that is going on quite enough as it is.], experts say [who?  This is pretty poor reporting], the demands from bond market investors to get government finances under control can be satisfied only by cutting back even further on benefits for the poor and needy [This is silly, what benefits under what circumstances to what people?  "Poor and needy" is vague and political, a weasel word to sneak socialism in most of the time.] But any serious effort to curb long-established middle-class entitlements risks setting off a public reaction that few political leaders are eager to face. [This is true, once you put a benefit in, it is difficult to get it out again.  This is one of the dangers of Obamacare.]

In Britain, the quandary is particularly stark. The social safety net that has been an essential feature of British life [Wrong!  It has been more than a safety net, it is a suffocating duvet, and it only benefits certain groups, AND it not an essential feature - we could live without a great deal of it.  There are many in the middle classes who do NOT get any benefits, but pay through the nose in taxes.] since World War II ended has been built largely on providing similar benefits to all, like health care [Which has been an absolute disaster.  And it does not "provide benefits to all", it forces people to pay for a low standard of healthcare for themselves and for everyone else, if they are lucky to earn anything more than scraps.] and home heating allowances for the elderly, regardless of income. 

Those earning up to £37,400 a year pay income tax of 20 percent per year. [That does not remotely begin to cover it.  As you do and earn more in England, there are so many stealth taxes that nail you. Plus we have a 20% sales tax - wow!  Even New York doesn't have it that high!]

All told, about a third of Britain’s 61 million people claim either a child subsidy or winter heating allowance. [That does not surprise me.]  Together they represent a formidable political bloc of families and senior citizens that Prime Minister David Cameron was loath to alienate during last spring’s election. [Yeah, being soft didn't exactly work out did it?  Now we are in an alliance with the commie Lib Dems]

That helps explain why Mr. Cameron promised not to “means test” the child benefit by limiting it to the poor. He said that payments to the elderly to subsidize television license fees, along with bus fare and heating allowances, would not be touched, either.

Lately, though, the government has begun to signal a harder line.

At the Liberal Democrat’s party conference in September, Mr. Cameron’s coalition partner, Nick Clegg, made the strongest call yet for cutting middle-class benefits, telling delegates that he would be willing to give up the £2,450 ($3,850) in annual child benefits that he and his wife, who is a corporate lawyer, receive for their three children. [Isn't that brave of him?  The problem with Clegg is that he is always looking at a way to punish the middle class - he is the classic socialist.  Now, I don't support giving benefits to anyone but those who actually need it, but I can see Clegg's move as part of a wider attack on the middle class - I have written about Clegg before...]

It remains unclear whether the government will follow through on that suggestion. But there is little question that social protection [or redistribution of wealth], as it is labelled in government accounts, has been the locomotive behind the 53 percent increase in overall outlays, adjusted for inflation, over the last eight years. [Thanks Labour and Gordon Brown!]

This spending spike was driven by previous Labour governments supplying the extra padding to make the British welfare state one of the most accommodating in Europe. [Accommodating isn't the word I'd use.  Bloated, exaggerated, socialist, job-killing, poverty-inducing - use any of those.]

Cuts for the middle class are now on the table throughout Europe, as governments struggle to close budget deficits and reduce debt levels [All while the Bamster keeps increasing deficits and debt levels] that now average 84 percent of gross domestic product. In France, the government is planning to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62; in Greece, public-sector pensions have been sharply cut, and in Ireland government wages have been reduced by more than 10 percent.

But with protests mounting, most governments have said that any further cuts in benefits to the middle class were unlikely. And in the United States, where demands are rising from the right to cut government outlays, none of the advocates have proposed reducing such sacrosanct middle-class benefits as the tax deduction for interest on home mortgages or the tax breaks for pensions and retirement savings. [Scummy.  Tax deductions and breaks aren't spending.  The problem is not how much the governments are bringing in, it is how much they are spending.  To see cuts and breaks in taxes as "spending" assumes that the government has a "right" to how much they normally collect - they have no such right.]

As for Britain, while universal child benefits are common in Europe, total payments to families here — including child tax credits and maternity allowances — are the third-highest among the 33 affluent countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, trailing France and Luxembourg. [Not exactly countries we want to be modelling ourselves on, are they?]

The child benefit pays £20 a week to the oldest child and £13.20 for each additional child until they reach the age of 20. The only requirement is that they continue to attend school. [Yes Americans - we bribe our kids to stay in school!  That's how bad it is!]

Research [What research?] shows that, although payments are promoted as a direct and simple means to allay child poverty by putting money into the hands of needy mothers, nearly half of the payments go to families with above-average incomes.

According to a soon-to-be-published study by Ian Walker, an economist at Lancaster University, well-to-do families that received the benefit were more inclined to spend it on themselves, not their children — with alcohol and tobacco among the most notorious substitutes. [Explains why it hasn't worked.]

These findings make a “good case for means-testing the benefit,” Mr. Walker said. “It’s clear that a number of universal benefits look vulnerable.” [All while Obama is trying to increase universal benefits - he really is a bit backward!  NYT fails to notice this glaring conclusion.]

But many poverty experts [which poverty experts are these?] strongly defend universal payments, arguing that, despite the excesses, the largest portion of the money goes to those who really need it and that paying benefits across the board is the best way to preserve political support for such programs. [Yeh - thats a GREAT reason to keep it up!  Who are these whacko 'experts'?  Do they even exist, or is this the NYT going "Trust us!  These are experts!"]

The British government, apart from pensions, pays large sums to the elderly, much of which ends up in the pockets of more affluent citizens. The government spends £2.7 billion ($4.24 billion) a year to provide a winter heating allowance to everyone over the age of 60. It provides £1 billion for free bus passes for those senior citizens and devotes £575 million for complimentary TV licenses for people 75 and older. [Hmm, these aren't exactly the schemes that have been breaking the bank - funny that they focus on these instead of the welfare handouts, the bloated public sector, and the stimulus]

Opposition to spending cuts is already building, and unions [who are full of socialists and communists, and who nearly destroyed the country in the 70's and 80's] across the country are banding together, promising a series of strikes.  They are expected to culminate in a mass protest on Oct. 19, the day before the government makes public its spending review.

Still, while the fear and anger about the coming cuts are certainly palpable here, there are signs that many Britons are reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the fairest way to deal with the need for austerity may be to bring the era of universal largess to an end. [Yes most people can see that the whole thing is, and has been, entirely unsustainable for years.  Unfortunately, a lot of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic can't see that.]

“It would be nice to give everyone a nice slice of the cake,” [Would it?  Wouldn't it be better to allow everyone to provide their own cake for themselves, and just give cake to those who couldn't afford it?  Why do we have to have these pointless universal benefits that make people pay more for less - as is always the case with government spending] said Clare Drew, an unemployed mother of two, who has just moved back to London from Ireland and is staying at her mother’s until her housing and child benefits come through.

“But with the economy this way, you just can’t do that,” she continued. “The benefits are going to be decreased.” [Good!]

As I said above, the bias is clear, but the article is interesting.  Its main point - that we are paying a hell of a lot of money out to people who do not need it, is certainly true.  It is also the case in America, and a Republican House in November will need to start working on that.  As for Britain, it is time to get rid of the Liberal Democrats, and make sure we have a government with the balls to implement the cuts to their full extent, without hiking already high taxes through the ceiling.

Obama has a Tantrum - Part XII

For all the chatter about how angry and hateful the Tea Party are supposed to be, we are seeing the anger amongst Democrat politicians rise and rise as November elections approach, and popularity plummets.  Today we have seen a fresh outburst by none other than the President.

I have always said that the President is an angry man.  Read Dreams of My Father, and you will see a great deal of anger about America come through, and this has been seen various times throughout his Presidency.  His political ideology comes not from love, or a passion for something good - instead coming from a hatred towards certain people, groups and countries (including the UK.)  It is mostly concealed, but comes out occasionally, especially when he goes off-message.

According to reports, he gave an interview for Rolling Stone magazine, where he by and large stayed on message.  He finished the interview, left and then burst into the interview room again, sat back down, and proceeded to rant about Democrat supporters who were unenthusiastic about November and who might not vote in the upcoming November elections.

He proceeded to blast his own supporters as "inexcusable" and "irresponsible", telling them to "buck up" and vote for him - failing to account for the fact that they might not want to vote for him.  Such a rant shows not only that the pressure has got to Obama, but also that he fails to understand just why he is so unpopular.

The reason people who voted him in 2008 are now unenthusiastic isn't because they are lazy, or stupid, or bored.  It is because they didn't get what they voted for!  He claims that they should stop bitching as he got 70% of his agenda through so far.  But that is precisely the point - people didn't vote for his agenda, they don't want it!  The reason they don't want to vote for him is because he got 70% of his hidden agenda through.

In the 2008 election, voters were fed a great deal of fluff about "hope" and "change", and how with Obama there would be no more red state and blue state, how he would reach across the aisle, and basically how he was the perfect moderate.  Stir in with that a widespread dislike of Bush, a fawning media, and the race card being played as often as it could be laid upon the table, and that is really the short story of how Obama was elected without ever really revealing  his hard-left tendencies.

However, in his arrogance, Obama seems to have thought that he persuaded America to turn into a socialist nation, and that because he has managed to proceed with 70% of a socialist agenda, Americans should somehow be grateful and turn out to vote for him again in their droves.  In his arrogance, I don't think that it has crossed his mind that people don't want it all.  They don't want Obamacare, they don't want a weak foreign policy, they don't want higher taxes, they don't want outrageous spending and they don't want mass nationalisation of industry.

The fact that he doesn't get that, and chooses instead to blame his own supporters for his problems shows just how "incredibly intelligent" the prodigy really is.  However, the fact that he doesn't get it and lives in his own little make believe world is a very positive sign for the Republicans in the November elections.  Because if Obama starts turning on his own supporters, and failing to take responsibility for anything that he has done, then the Democrats are really screwed - both in November, and in 2012.

So in the meantime...more tantrums please Mr President!