I'd like to add a brief footnote to my previous post about the U.S. health care debacle. In this article, I explained that the massive public scrutiny being given to our government's health care reform effort is due to the Obama administration's agenda to increase federal funding of and expand public access to abortion. This is certainly a major reason for this scrutiny, as a result of the fine public awareness efforts of Cardinal Justin Rigali and our Catholic bishops. However, I neglected to fully account for the massive public
opposition to President Obama's health care plan expressed at town hall meetings across the country in recent weeks. The foremost reason why Americans are rejecting the health care bills is that
they would have to pay for them--and right now, they can't even afford to pay their existing taxes.
We Americans don't want a system of socialized medicine. Yet our Democratic representatives in the House, Senate and White House have been attempting to build just such a system by marketing it to us as "reform" of the current system. However, the American people are not fools. They understand that a government-run health care system costs money. The hundreds of millions and billions of dollars that federal health care would cost is going to have to come from somewhere. Where will it come from if not from the pockets of the American people and their children and grandchildren? In the long run, the only way to support any new federal government program is through tax increases. The economy is on eggshells as it is. If the Obama administration dares to raise taxes on the American people, the economy will grind to a halt.
Of course, many Americans have fortunately wised up to the fact that Democrats (before elections) routinely talk about lowering taxes, and then (after election) break those promises and raise taxes. I would like to ask President Obama: Where is the tax cut you promised for 95 percent of working families? Before election, then-Senator Obama remarked that "the folks out on Main Street" need a hand, and government should extend them a hand with a stimulus package. That much-vaunted stimulus package appears to have instead been a temporary stimulus for Wall Street. Sorry, but I and most other Americans would rather have the government extend us a real, true helping hand--not the greedy open hand of Uncle Sam, but a hand in the form of generous and permanent tax cuts.
One year ago, then-Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin said:
We do need tax relief and Barack Obama even supported increasing taxes as
late as last year [2007] for those families making only $42,000 a year. That's a
lot of middle income average American families to increase taxes on them. I
think that is the way to kill jobs and to continue to harm our economy.
I couldn't agree more, and I think this statement rings even truer now.
Americans in general are opposed to abortion, but they are more strongly opposed to any expansion of it, and they are overwhelmingly against it when it is to be funded with their own hard-earned tax dollars.
My next post will be about a different topic--I promise!
