It is interesting to watch the Obama administration’s efforts to control the news cycle much like Donald Trump has been able to manage the news cycle. Former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn plainly said, “Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, that a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why he was saying it (emphasis mine) . . .” As always, the Obama end-game is wealth distribution.
Recently, the Obama administration Justice Department admitted it is considering whether people should be prosecuted for the offense of climate change denial. This “announcement” is part of the left’s wealth distribution strategy. In 2012, the climate change portion of the Democratic Party platform read: “Our goal is an effective, international effort in which all economies commit to reduce their emissions, nations meet their commitments in a transparent manner, and the necessary financing is mobilized so that the developing countries can mitigate the effects of climate change and invest in clean energy technologies.”
In 2001 interview on radio station WBEZ_FM (Chicago), Obama charged that the United States has suffered from a fatally flawed Constitution that does not mandate or allow for redistribution of wealth. American Thinker reported that Obama “wishes to scrap the limits placed on government powers because they get in the way of redistributive schemes.”
In fact, I have written in these pages that Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of climate change/global warming agitators is to change the economic model of the world by destroying capitalism and redistributing wealth: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
Let’s look at another wealth distribution strategy: the minimum wage. The ostensible purpose of the minimum wage is to provide a living wage for lower-socioeconomic families. However, the vast majority of entry-level workers are not the heads of lower socioeconomic families. They are teenagers learning how to work responsibly (see The Myth of the Minimum Wage in this column).
One last comment on government wage controls. If the government can establish a minimum wage, it can also establish a maximum wage. The federal government has attempted to control executive pay in 2014 and even then Mayor Michael Bloomberg (New York City) complained that this is a Soviet style concept. What we really have now is big government National Socialism.
The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is an example of wealth distribution through National Socialistic administrative regulation gone amok. It is a failed instrument of wealth redistribution. The original intent of Obamacare was a single payer system but the political aristocracy in Washington couldn’t accomplish single payer. In fact, the political aristocracy couldn’t even read their own bill.
Obamacare is in a death spiral. Enrollment is falling. Only the sick stay in Obamacare and leave when they don’t need it anymore. Half of the Obamacare health exchanges have gone bankrupt. Health plans are pulling back as they realize losses in the billions of dollars. McKinsey and Company found that in the individual market, which includes Obamacare marketplaces, health plans lost money in forty-one states in 2014 and were profitable in only nine states.
The current year looks worse. The 2016 Obamacare exchange rate requests in six states are seeking an average 18.6% increase in rates (there are only a total of eight exchanges left, most of which are on the verge of bankruptcy). One health plan in Tennessee seeks a 35% increase, another Oregon health plan wants a 23% increase.
CareFirst in Maryland is seeking premium increases of 30% for the 80% of its exchange members.
“About two-thirds of the law’s spending, a little over $1 trillion in the next decade, will be in the form of tax credits for people buying insurance on the new exchanges. About one third, or about $640 billion, finances the expansion of Medicaid. There’s no simple and reliable way to break down exactly how much money goes to people at different income levels . . . And it’s certainly fair to say that a majority of people getting money from Obamacare are in the lower half of the income scale. But that includes an awful lot of people that qualify as ‘working class’ or ‘middle class.’ Remember that the credits are available to people making up to 400 percent of the poverty line, or about $46,000 a year for an individual and $94,000 for a family of four—well above the nation’s median income (Jonathan Cohn, New Republic,
https://newrepublic.com/article/115875/obamacare-redistribution-not-how-republicans-say).
After redistributing hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth since 2010, the vast majority of the uninsured in 2009 is either still uninsured or underinsured. More people lost the health insurance they had, the doctor they had and the hospital they had than Obamacare newly covered. In effect, Obamcare ruined health care for 99% of the population to provide government health care to the 1% uninsured. That’s certainly effective government..