Wednesday, December 01, 2010

When it Comes to the Regressive Policies of Progressives, Let’s Pin the Tail on the Donkey

Let's face it.  The Democrats get away with murder.  They pick an industry; from health care to energy, financial services to mortgages, and set a time bomb to blow it up through taxation, regulation, and or litigation.  It often takes years, maybe even decades to destroy that industry by raising costs of its delivery and by extension, its price tag for consumers.  By the time the crisis within that industry comes to fruition, nobody remembers to pin the tail on the donkey and ascribe blame to those who deserve it.

Worse yet, the Democrats attempt to enforce their "solutions" to their contrived crises.  These solutions usually contain every aspect of the factors which caused the crisis to foment in the first place.  They always include market busting mandates which raise the cost of doing business and purchasing that product or service to the point of unsustainability.  Then, the Democrats quickly swoon in to pick up the dead corpses of the private industry and demand full nationalization ( the auto industry is one of many great examples).

What is the typical Republican response?  Instead of agreeing that there is a problem of high costs to the American people and illustrating how that problem was caused by the very government intervention that was already implemented by the Democrats, they simply oppose the new Democrat "reforms".



Some of the new liberal reforms will be unpopular, thus giving the Republicans a political victory in some or most aspects of that policy issue.  However, inevitably there will be some provisions of the Democrat plan that will be popular with the public.  After all, there usually is a real cost problem associated with that industry as a result of years of democrat intervention and socialism.  These original Democrat policies were implemented with the very purpose of provoking such a response from the American people.  If we fail to pin the tail on the donkey and articulate ad nauseam that it is the very socialist policies of the Democrats that caused this mess in the first place, we will be compelled to support those socialist reforms that are popular.

This is the very communications breakdown that has led the GOP leadership to embrace the "pre-conditions" and "slacker" (covering “children” under 26) mandates of Obama Care.  Throughout the health care debate most of the leadership focused their attacks on Democrat proposals, dubbing them "government run health care".  While most Americans obviously share this disdain for government run health care, they also suffer from the high costs of health insurance.  If we don't educate the voters on the causes of those high premiums and how they are directly related to the very mandates and government programs that already exist, they will not connect the dots on their own.  They will embrace the "good provisions" of socialism that don't appear to be "government run health care" on the surface.

We need to uproot every false premise that is promulgated by the Democrats/media and show how it is these "issuance guarantee" mandates that have caused a spike in insurance premiums and will rise exponentially if we impose a "pre-conditions" and "slacker" mandate.  Instead of letting the Democrats seize the populist card of righteous indignation against rising health care costs, we should pin the tail on the donkey at every opportunity.  Otherwise, we let them get away with murder and are forced to acquiesce to the popular parts of their solutions that caused the problem to begin with.

We must educate voters that that it is the liberals' ownership of Medicare, Medicaid, S-Chip, ambulance chasers, portability regulations, arbitrary benefit mandates, guaranteed issue, limitation of risk pool ratings, and culture of entitlement that have spiked the cost of health care for all Americans.  As the Council for Affordable Health Insurance (CAHI) explains, “Mandating benefits is like saying to someone in the market for a new car, if you can’t afford a Cadillac loaded with options, you have to walk.”  Cantor and Boehner should be articulating how free market solutions that will roll back Democrat socialism and mandates are the only ways to deal with the high cost of insurance.

If we don’t stop the Democrats with health care, they will move on to other issues like energy policy.  For years, Democrats have limited our oil exploration and production, shale, coal, nuclear power, and the building of oil refineries.  In addition, they have implemented every budget busting regulation under the sun, causing high energy costs to producers and consumers. 

What are the Republicans going to do if the Democrats propose a national energy program?  That “free gasoline” subsidy will be awfully popular among many Americans.  Will Republicans support the more popular handouts contained in a national energy bill?  Or will they pin the tail on the donkey and roll back the onerous regulations to create prosperity?  After all, if we don’t pin the tail on the donkey, we will all be pinned between a donkey and a Rino!

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