Obama's Hostile Takeover

"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. "

Federalist 10, James Madison

In the late 1990's I managed a large portfolio for a German re-insurance company. I loved visiting my client in the quaint city of Cologne. Church bells, spires, street markets with handmade goods including colorful steins and wooden nutcrackers, baked goods that looked like works of art in shop windows. Though I was working I felt like I had been transported to a surreal fairyland. Except for one thing. The persistent double-digit unemployment.

I asked my client about the cause of Germany's relentless unemployment. His reply? Why would business hire when we are forced by government to provide enormous benefits and little flexibility in firing poor performers? He explained further that it was better to hire consultants or temporary workers to fill in the gaps.

Over a stein later that afternoon he shared a personal story about his sister who was one of the permanently unemployed. She would have it no other way, he confided. Why would she? She received health care benefits and a monthly check from the government and she didn't have to work.

Looks to me like that is where we are headed. In 2007, according to the National Taxpayers Union, an independent, non-partisan organization, the top 1% of earners paid 40.42% of all taxes. The top 50% paid 97.11%. In other words virtually 50% of all American households paid no income tax. 50%. Yet they vote. And they vote regularly on the local level and through their representatives on a federal level on the question of taxes. This is exactly what the Founders wanted to guard against when they wrote the Constitution.

James Madison warns in Federalist 10: "The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets." (emphasis mine.)

Enter Obama and his hostile takeover of health care, despite the will of the people set firmly against him. Another effort to take a shilling out of your pocket and put into another--in this case Obama's. The following facts are excerpted from the January 13th speech delivered by Paul Ryan, a member of Congress and a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee.

"In 1966 the cost of Medicare to the taxpayers was about $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that it would cost $12 billion (adjusted for inflation) by 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was nearly nine times that--$107 billion. By 2009 Medicare costs reached $427 billion, with Medicaid boosting that by an additional $225 billion."

"...The federal takeover of health care...would subsume approximately one-sixth of our national economy. Combined with spending at all levels, government would then control about 50 percent of total national production." (emphasis, again, mine)

If that isn't a hostile takeover, I don't know what is.

(for a complete transcript of Ryan's speech, go to www.hillsdale.edu and order your free copy of Imprimis.)