Ephemeral dreams of an ideal society

Can Americans trust the claims of temporary politicians who promise that their grand dreams and intricate plans will solve humanity's most vexing issues?

Consider their track record...

Social Security

THEN: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 14 August 1935, Washington, D.C.:

Today, a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, had tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what will be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last...

...This social security measure gives at least some protection to 50 millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions, and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health...

...It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness...

NOW: Social Security Is Failing Even Faster Than We Thought:

In last year's Trustees Report, the Social Security Administration warned that the program's trust fund was likely to run out of money in 2036, leading to deep cuts in benefits. If that weren't bad enough for anyone expecting to be alive then, a more recent projection from the Congressional Budget Office paints a much worse picture.

This year's CBO report forecasts that by the end of this decade, the combined Social Security Old Age and Disability Trust Funds will be about $800 billion smaller than last year's SSA projections. That's a very substantial drop -- and a sign that this year's Trustees Report will likely bring another downward revision to the year it expects those Trust Funds to dry up and benefits to be cut.

Medicare

THEN: President Lyndon Baines Johnson, 30 July 1965, Washington, D.C.

...No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years... And no longer will this Nation refuse the hand of justice to those who have given a lifetime of service and wisdom and labor to the progress of this progressive country...

...During your working years, the people of America--you--will contribute ... a small amount each payday for hospital insurance protection. For example, the average worker in 1966 will contribute about $1.50 per month. The employer will contribute a similar amount. And this will provide the funds to pay up to 90 days of hospital care for each illness, plus diagnostic care, and up to 100 home health visits after you are 65. And beginning in 1967, you will also be covered for up to 100 days of care in a skilled nursing home after a period of hospital care.

NOW: Medicare’s Worsening Finances: The Other Shoe Drops:

A week ago, the Medicare Trustees issued their annual report, which showed that the program is on the fact track to insolvency. The 2011 analysis projected that the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund (which funds Medicare Part A) will be insolvent in 2024, and the program’s long-term unfunded obligations—promised benefits that are not paid for—amount to $24.6 trillion...

...[new] across-the-board cuts would cause 15 percent of hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and home health agencies to become unprofitable by 2019. This number would climb to 25 percent in 2030 and 40 percent by 2050.

Obamacare

THEN: President Barack Hussein Obama, 23 March 2010, Washington, D.C.:

...And we have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care...

...I said this once or twice, but it bears repeating: If you like your current insurance, you will keep your current insurance. No government takeover; nobody is changing what you’ve got if you’re happy with it. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. In fact, more people will keep their doctors because your coverage will be more secure and more stable than it was before I signed this legislation.

NOW: Obamacare's Broken Promises:

Hard times continue for the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). The administration has scrapped the law's long-term care insurance program, covering nursing homes and home health care. The program was deemed unrealistic. This is a harbinger...

...Writing in The New York Review of Books, [Arnold Relman, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine] says that "the law does very little or nothing to address some of the most important causes of the high cost of care and its rapid inflation.” Note: Relman isn't a conservative crank. He's a critic of insurance companies and advocates a single-payer, government-run health-care system.

The ACA, Relman writes, doesn't alter fee-for-service reimbursement... [he is also] unimpressed with the ACA provisions intended to control costs: for example, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). It's a group of 15 experts who would recommend changes if government health spending rose too rapidly... Relman also dismisses "accountable care organizations” (ACOs) that supposedly save money through coordinated care by doctors and hospitals. The regulations governing ACOs will be so complicated that there won't be many of them, he writes.

...Many of [the ACA's] promises rest, like CLASS, on unrealistic assumptions. Disappointments loom, and the needed debate is deferred.

We are living in Ameritopia

Mark Levin explains:

The reason I say that liberalism is the philosophy of the stupid is because we can look at what's going around in the country today. If, in your own lives, you were pursuing policies that were destroying your own home ownership, that were destroying your own job, that were creating a massive, impossible debt for your family and your children in particular, you'd stop it. You wouldn't keep doing it!

And yet for the liberal, if it's imposed on you -- and they feel that they can be immune from it -- they're for it. They wouldn't do to themselves and their own family what they're doing to you, and your family, and the whole nation! Take Barack Obama. Does Barack Obama conduct himself in his own, personal affairs, in his family's affairs, as recklessly as he conducts the affairs of the nation? No. Would he run up the kind of relative personal debt that he's running up for the nation? No way.

...So they do to us -- and they do to our society -- what they would never do to their own families. They do not live in their own lives as they seek to have the rest of us live. Or as they seek to have our society conduct itself.

The only question that remains is whether the country can be saved. 2012 may be our last, best chance to save this Republic from the Utopian Statists, whose pursuit of impossible, narcissistic dreams have set the country on a course for national fiscal suicide.