Day By Day

Thursday, August 27, 2009

The Politics of Pessimism

At last, a Democrat utters the truth about Obamacare. The Fort Collins Coloradoan reports:
Some people, including Medicare recipients, will have to give up some current benefits to truly reform the nation's health-care system, Rep. Betsy Markey told a gathering of constituents in Fort Collins on Wednesday.

Markey has repeatedly said during the August congressional recess that Medicare spending needs to be reined in to help pay for reforming the broader health-care system."There's going to be some people who are going to have to give up some things, honestly, for all of this to work," Markey said at a Congress on Your Corner event at CSU. "But we have to do this because we're Americans."
Read it here.

Wha? We have to take cuts in Medicare benefits "because we're Americans". Just how does that follow?

In a socialist, zero-sum world extending benefits to some means taking them away from others, but that's most definitely not the American way. That sort of logic may be a dominant feature of European thought, but it runs counter to the mainstream of the American tradition. Zero sum calculations make sense only if you assume that America is entering a prolonged period of stagnation and decline, and it appears that many on the Left, like Rep. Markey, avidly hope or at least assume that we are.