What are Republicans for? Dept.

April 17, 2013

By John Seiler

You might have heard the term, “Me too Republicans.” It’s similar to the more recent term, RINO: Republican in Name Only.

A Me Too Republican’s main function is to raise taxes to pay for such Democratic socialist programs as the New Deal and Great Society, while enacting even more such programs.

The latest:

“House Republicans are moving quickly on a new bill to strengthen ObamaCare’s temporary insurance plan for people with pre-existing conditions. 

“The Helping Sick Americans Now Act (H.R. 1549) was introduced late Monday and is scheduled for a mark-up Wednesday in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”

But the very definition of insurance is that it’s not for people with “pre-existing conditions.” You don’t give life insurance to someone who’s going to die tomorrow. Otherwise, the system would go broke and there wouldn’t be any life insurance.

The same thing with people with severe pre-existing medical conditions. Any insurance program for them quickly would go broke.

With health care, the way to deal with pre-existing conditions is the way we used to before LBJ began socializing medicine with his Medicare Act in 1965: Through charity. In those days, doctors and hospitals chipped in to help the needy. Badly run, frighteningly expensive and wasteful government programs weren’t needed.

GOP sellout pattern

This follows a pattern of Republicans. After attacking new Democratic socialist programs to get votes from the GOP “base,” the Me Too Republicans then sell out by embracing and extending the programs.

In the 1950s, Republican President Eisenhower did not eliminate New Deal socialist programs. Instead, he consolidated them and made them slightly less inefficient. For example, he created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to consolidate numerous bureaus.

The next Republican President, Richard Nixon, consolidated President Johnson’s Great Society socialist programs and raised taxes to pay for them. Then he created some of his own, including the jobs-killing Environmental Protection Agency.

Even President Reagan got into the act. He was elected in 1980 on pledges to eliminate the Department of Education and the Department of Energy, which predecessor Jimmy Carter had created. Reagan never got rid of them. Then he created the cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs, even though veterans — including yours truly — already were being helped by the less grandiloquent Veterans Adminstration.

After World War II, the VA took care of 15 million veterans, the most in our history; yet for some reason Reagan thought making it a separate department with an even bigger bureaucracy would make things better.

Yet if one looks at recent headlines, such as, “Veterans Die Waiting for Benefits as VA Claims Backlog Builds,” things have not gotten better, but worse.

Bush

Then there’s President George W. Bush, who vastly increased government more than any president since Democrat Lyndon Johnson. Bush gave us the No Child Left Behind expansion of centralized education control, almost doubling the size of the Department of Education. He imposed the new Medicare Part D prescription drug welfare program, which already has added $16 trillion to the government’s unfunded liabilities.

In panic after 9/11, Bush created the German-sounding Department of Homeland Security and its passenger-molesting Transportation Security Administration.  When experts were saying that 9/11 happened in part because U.S. intelligence agencies were too bureaucratic, Bush responded not only with the DHS and TSA, but by creating the new Director of National Intelligence; who replaced the Director of Central Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, a post renamed the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Not to mention there’s still the Director of the National Security Agency, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Director of the United States Secret Service, etc.

Only a dumb government would create so many “intelligence” agencies tripping over each other like the Keystone Kops.