Obamacare has me scared . . .

The massive Obama Healthcare Boondoggle passed yesterday. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Not that everything in the bill was a bad idea, but the size and scope of this bill reminds me of the recent AIG Bailouts (yes, there were more than one). These healthcare “reforms” will eventually be rationalized as too big to fail. They will become a bottomless pit for taxpayer revenue, in spite of Obama’s pre-election promises not to tax the middle class. Speaking for the middle-class, I’m tired of taking it in the shorts when the Democrats are in power.

In spite of Barack Obama’s speeches that the healthcare debate should be played out in open forums, when it came right down to passage he had to make quite a few “Chicago-style” back room deals. Some of them blew up in his face, like the promise to Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska that the feds would pick up 100% of the additional Medicaid costs for Nebraska if Nelson would support Obamacare.

No big deal for Obama. It’s only money. Voters should have seen this coming. Prior to his presidency, Obama requested over a million dollars in pork barrel spending for every working day that he was in office as the Senator from Illinois. Even before passage of the massive healthcare overhaul, in only one year as president Obama has committed the U.S. to a 10-year federal deficit of $9 trillion, which is more than the combined deficits of all 43 U.S. presidents who came before him. In Obama’s world, what’s another trillion-dollar deficit for healthcare that we can give to people who haven’t worked a day in their life when we can squeeze the Medicare benefits from our elderly in a smoke and mirrors grasp at practicality?

If his healthcare plan was so good, why did Obama offer so many bribes to ensure its passage? In addition to bribing Congress with individual sweetheart deals, the government bribed the AARP for their endorsement of his plan, following the AARP’s endorsement of a government check for $18 million in stimulus funds.

Speaking for most non-politician Americans, I’m sick of throwing stimulus money at everything under the sun. Obama has made some high-handed claims about the number of jobs his stimulus packages have created and saved. Forget the fact that they keep revising the numbers with more smoke and mirrors accounting. Under his presidency, unemployment rates have been at 25-year highs. The people who don’t have jobs are not fooled by Barack’s insistence that they’re working again.

Speaking of everything under the sun, we all know how Obama wants to implement new cap and trade requirements for business, because Americans paying much more for electricity won’t necessarily hurt us during this mega-recession. So he slipped a few million in stimulus funds (tax dollars) to promote solar power. In Dallas, the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center is spending over $2 million of our tax dollars for solar panels, which will save $27,500 in utility bills per year. At that rate of energy savings, it will take 88-years to recover the cost of the solar panels. While you might think that there will eventually be a move to the black side of the accounting ledger in the 89th year, you would be wrong. While the sun can rightfully be expected to shine for many more centuries, the life span of a solar panel is about 30-years. Only a Democrat would think that’s a good return on infrastructure investment. In reality, the expenditure-to-savings deficit will continue to grow until the sun does eventually die.

Another recent example of inept government spending is the millions of dollars they’ve spent on this year’s census. How many people really needed a letter from the U.S. Census Bureau telling us that we were going to receive the actual census form the following week? It’s also frustrating to know that the feds spent millions of dollars in advertising to encourage illegal immigrants to fill out the census form. In Texas, we’re told that this will give us additional seats in Congress.

Pardon me if I don’t feel like we need seats in Congress to represent the wishes of illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants should go home and come back when they’re ready to become U.S. citizens. The reason this will never happen is because gaining U.S. citizenship means having healthcare reform forced on them and putting them on the hook for bailing out big business and stimulating the rest of the economy.

It’s a shame nobody ever sent Barack Obama to Healthcare Reform School when he was younger. It might have saved us all a lot of financial agony.