ObamaCare: Wrong Bill At The Wrong Time

Forbes reports:

General Motors and Chrysler--the corporate version of the public welfare state in which unions had negotiated the best wage and pension deals in the free world--have already been forced into a taxpayer-financed bankruptcy. California, America's most European state, is technically bankrupt, thanks to the ubiquitous influence on the state budget of its public unions and its entitlement spending. Meanwhile, the deficits and debt of the so-called European PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain)--the social democracies whose cradle-to-grave welfare policies are the inspiration behind ObamaCare--are on the brink of bankruptcy. Greece, the most vulnerable of the lot, has a deficit of 12.7% of the GDP--not that much higher than America's 10.6 %.

Pushing ObamaCare was an astonishing misjudgment, the domestic policy equivalent of President Bush launching a full-scale preemptive strike against Iran after embroiling the country in Iraq and Afghanistan. But why don't progressives get that this is terrible economic timing? Because this is the moment they have been waiting for since Lyndon Johnson enacted Medicare. Never mind that the economy then, unlike now, was booming. What matters is they have in the White House as sympathetic a president as they can ever hope to get--combined with sizable margins of Democrats in both chambers. Republicans, moreover, have been thoroughly discredited on both foreign and domestic policy having presided over two unpopular wars and a financial meltdown of epic proportions. In short, the political stars have never been--and likely never will be--aligned more auspiciously in the progressives' lifetime, and they will be damned if they'll allow quotidian worries about the economy or anything else to stop them. It is now or never.

A great one from Forbes.