And Even With Demonstrations To The Contrary, They Still Support It...

Universal health care, paid for by mandatory taxes.

Gigantic stimulus bills, paid for with inflation.

Bank "bailouts" that don't address the toxic mortgages, paid for with increased taxes on an already creaking economy.

And yet, they stick with it.

Massachusetts, the first state to pass - at a state level - a "real" universal healthcare plan, is looking at having to turn of the funding faucets sooner rather than later; thier current estimates are that if they don't get healthcare spending under control, their ENTIRE BUDGET will become "unsustainable" within 5 years.

What that means is that within 5 years, they won't even be able to PRETEND they're not bankrupt. Their spending will have outpaced their actual revenues by such a vast amount that no accounting tricks can possibly hide the magnitude of the shortfall, and then they will all be thrown out of office.

So, they're scrambling.

In fact, they're scrambling so hard, they're ALREADY talking about cutting total healthcare spending - not just revamping payment systems, but actually cutting the dollar values for care themselves - which will lead to...

...Wait for it...

...Rationed care!

Yayyyyyy!!! Not only has Massachusetts proven openly that commie medicine doesn't work, they've done it so fast the President hasn't even had a chance to float his bill - to do the same thing to the whole country - past Congress yet!

Rationed care, if you're curious, is where the government decides that whatever's wrong with you, whatever medicine or treatment you need, you've had enough of it, because it costs too much to continue, and cuts you off, without any option or recourse. See, when the government provides your healthcare, there's nowhere else to go when the government gives you the finger, which is inevitable, since somehow, some way, they MUST pay for it.

Which means, you'll see cancer patients with incomplete chemotherapy.

Kidney patients cut off from dialysis because of rising costs.

Death.

Massachusetts is already realizing something that I fear the nation is set to realize on a much grander scale in just a few short years: Government healthcare is murder. Because when the balance sheet is more important than the patients, well, who cares if they die? And they will.

But that's not enough; no, the President's agenda is going to get practice rolling with the punches indeed.

One of the world's most outspoken proponents of the welfare state, and an economist who has perpetually supported Democrat faith-based economics, Paul Krugman, just published a column not only bashing the Geithner "bank rescue" plan, but calling it an "abject failure."

It must suck to get called out by your own allies.

What Krugman is talking about here is the fact that the Geithner plan is, essentially, sticking your fingers in your ear and saying "la la la, the mortgages REALLY ARE worth something, la la la," which doesn't even work when you're five. Rather than taking steps to clear those toxic assets from the banks' balance sheets, the Geithner plan assumes that they REALLY DO have value, and are simply misunderstood - they seriously use that exact term - and as a result they will be able to find buyers for them if they can just keep the flow of money into the banks for long enough.

Unfortunately, as is common for liberals, this has no relationship whatsoever to reality. Investors aren't going to forget that those mortgages are worthless; it doesn't matter how long the Geithner - Bernanke circle jerk goes on, it won't magically reinflate those toxic mortgage assets into something with sale value, because there is a crucial principle of market economics that seems perpetually to escape the left; things are only worth what you can convince someone to pay for them.

And if you cannot find a buyer, because no-one will touch those toxic mortgages that already sank the economy once, then they are, and will remain, worth nothing.

I realize that reality is a harsh, often brutal place; but in life, you have to learn - you HAVE TO - that the only real way to solve problems is to first and foremost examine the actual problem. If you cannot confront the reality of the problem, then you cannot fix it, period.

In this case, the problem is that there are billions of dollars of "assets" that are in fact worth nothing. The way to fix the problem is to write them off - straight-out write the goddamn things off. Foreclose ALL those houses - you don't have a "right" to a house, especially one you cannot afford - and try to find people to sell them to that can actually pay something for them.

Propping the banks up as long as possible in the forlorn hope that these worthless mortgages will somehow magically Viagratize with value again is, simply put, galactically stupid.

Canada is approaching this correctly. Their mortgage market hasn't collapsed - largely because their government didn't strongarm the banks into loaning money to people who cannot repay it - but it's starting to totter a bit, considering the impact from across their southern border. So, they're already putting programs in place to allow shaky homeowners - people whose circumstances have changed since they bought their homes - to come in and renegotiate their loans to more repayable terms.

This is because the Canadian banks would prefer losing a little short-term profit to catastrophic bank failures when their mortgage portfolios tip over en masse because of inflexible lending practices.

Maybe we should have tried that. I don't know; honestly, the way things look, once the CRA was in place, we couldn't have stopped the bubble bursting in the united States no matter what we would have tried.

What grinds my gears?

That stupid, fucked-up law is still in force; as soon as the banking industry is back on its feet, we will begin the gradual process of building right back into another mortgage collapse.