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Democratic Senators, including Sheldon Whitehouse, urge Federal Reserve to cut interest rates to address housing affordability. Concerns rise as mortgage rates hit 20-year highs, impacting both homebuyers and the rental market. The letter emphasizes the need for relief amidst soaring costs.
Here’s another interesting item that Dan McGowan found for Nesi’s Notes this weekend:
So what did Senator Whitehouse think of his big dinner with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump earlier this month? “They live well,” Whitehouse told reporters this week. “Really big house. Very fancy food.”
Ah, yes. Sheldon Whitehouse, man of the people, with his $535,000 annual income and $2.7 million Newport mansion.
I’ve heard it said that there is no class difference so confounding as that between the rich and extremely rich. The appropriate response of the rest of us, though, should probably be to laugh at them all… and insist that they implement policies that empower us to take their money through commerce and competition, not government redistribution that buys them a dependent underclass.
A new process for ensuring highly qualified applicants are sought to fill a Rhode Island court seat is being pitched by a pair of federal elected officials.
How SENATOR WHITEHOUSE & RESPECT for MARRIAGE ACT will DISRESPECT & infringe on religious & constitutional rights
Tyler Rowley joins Sten + Bishop Tobin’s Legacy
SENIORS: Debut of #BoomerZoomers from Charlestown Senior Center
Radical Leftists Including Socialist Bernie Sanders Want to Direct the 87,000 New IRS Agents Against Conservatives The Daily Signal (dailysignal.com) has exclusively reported that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, has demanded in a series of letters to the Internal Revenue Service that the IRS collaborate with the federal Department of Justice in cracking down on conservative […]
Senator Whitehouse’s attack on the Supreme Court shows his cynicism and malleable legal principles.
Retired economics professor Dennis Sheehan had some excellent advice for Democrat U.S. Senator from Rhode Island Sheldon Whitehouse in a recent Newport Daily News:
In that spirit, let me offer Sen. Whitehouse some new ideas. First, stop calling people names. Reading the senator’s speeches, it is all too easy to find people referred to as “thugs,” “liars,” “flunkies,” and “stooges.” He has said “The fossil fuel industry, on the other hand, is neither honest nor decent.” Accusations like this make for good political theater – which might be the senator’s real purpose – but they don’t make for good discussions.
Second, end the hyperbole. As an example, in the Roll Call article, Sen. Whitehouse claims that “he sees weekly full-page ads in his local paper for services to protect homes from rising seas.” If the senator’s local paper is The Daily News, I have to say that I have never seen weekly full-page ads for such services. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction for Newport of a rise of 0.9 feet over 100 years might explain the lack of ads.
Third, rethink the “fossil fuel industry controls everyone” idea. …
One suspects Professor Sheehan is correct that political theater is more the Senator’s objective than actual action, which explains why he would persist with his hundreds of “Wake Up” speeches despite finding that they have little practical effect.
One of Rhode Island’s U.S. Senators, Sheldon Whitehouse, recently illustrated the outrageous level of partisanship that he exemplifies. Asked at a South Providence event “how long we have to wait” for the impeachment of President Trump, Whitehouse provided the following response (captured by RI Future’s Steve Ahlquist).
Sure, the blame could go around on who has contributed to the current atmosphere in the United States, and the argument would become yet another political rabbit hole. Not surprisingly, I’d fault the national Democrats and news media for stoking anti-Bush lunacy, an attitude that Barack Obama perpetuated as a theme of his presidency. But putting blame aside, what struck me is that Senator Whitehouse didn’t even give lip service to responsible rhetoric or patriotic sentiment.
That is a shocking degree of callousness. Until November 2016, we could have expected elected officials to muster at least the sense of responsibility for the health of the republic to express hope that even a horrible president wasn’t proven to have behaved in an impeachable manner and would correct himself in office, rather than drive the country to the point at which kicking him out would be the best option.
But not in 2017, apparently, and not Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
Leave it to our own Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to weigh in on the recent price increase of the EpiPen in a way that is both blindingly insidious and enlightening:
The sky-rocketing cost increase of the EpiPen is just the latest evidence that our regulation of prescription drug pricing is broken. (The) system is rigged by the pharmaceutical industry to allow this price-gouging, and that is what needs to be corrected.
Drug pricing doesn’t have to be regulated; it’s regulation of drug production that’s the problem. Everybody from The Guardian to the Wall Street Journal knows that the pricing of the EpiPen is made possible by the government’s enabling of Mylan’s “near monopoly” (as Whitehouse and other senators characterize the company). A Wall Street Journal editorial explains:
… the steady Mylan rise is hard to read as anything other than inevitable when a billion-dollar market is cornered by one supplier. Epinephrine is a basic and super-cheap medicine, and the EpiPen auto-injector device has been around since the 1970s.
Thus EpiPen should be open to generic competition, which cuts prices dramatically for most other old medicines. Competitors have been trying for years to challenge Mylan’s EpiPen franchise with low-cost alternatives—only to become entangled in the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory afflatus.
Of course, when I write “everybody,” I’m limiting my set to those who are modestly well informed. A little economic understanding helps, too. Let me repeat something I write regularly: Prices are measurements of value. If a price goes up a great deal, especially if it does so quickly, that means people want more of the product than they’re able to get, and it’s a signal to other producers that they should enter the market, even at great expense.
Immediately after a devastating hurricane, it may seem predatory for people with chainsaws and water bottles to charge super-high prices, but their doing so not only forces affected families to weigh the value of the assistance, but also sends a signal far and wide that it’s worth people’s time to invest in tools, supplies, and gasoline and travel to the affected spot. Of course, as a moral matter, we should all approach such situations in a spirit of charity, but by the same principle, we shouldn’t stroke our own moral vanity by insisting that only those with the right intentions can help.
In the case of pharmaceutical gouging, the focus of Congress should really be on creating laws that require smarter, lighter handed, less capricious regulation and therefore allow more companies to offer comparable products at competitive prices. Unfortunately, it’s so much more profitable for progressive politicians to empower unaccountable bureaucracies to manipulate the market and create “near monopolies” that make the politicians’ corporate friends and donors rich and allow the politicians to posture in meaningless poses while grabbing more power to repeat the process.
Mark Zaccaria suggests that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse should back away from his attacks on Constitutional rights and focus on making a positive difference in people’s lives.
Rhode Island Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has repeatedly shown that he’s got no problem using government to go after people and groups he perceives as political enemies. He’s sympathetic to the literal conspiracy of attorney generals to prosecute those who take a different view on the question of climate change, and now he’s coordinating a smear campaign from the floor of the Senate.
Whitehouse’s office circulated assignments for his fellow Democrat senators for a two-day extravaganza of attacking private center-right think tanks and advocacy groups, from the local (Nevada Policy Research Institute) to the national (Heritage Foundation), from the morally focused (Acton Institute) to the libertarian (Reason Foundation).
To be sure, much of this is the pure stagecraft of politics, but it ought to, in any event, make us a little uncomfortable. The senators are using a government podium to embark on a coordinated attack on Americans, dividing the country as if their domestic opposition is the real enemy. One could suggest that it would be incorrect to see Whitehouse as representing all of Rhode Island. He represents a specific worldview, and he’ll use our money and other resources to advance that worldview and impose its conclusions on everybody who live within the borders of his reach.
English has multiple words by which to describe that sort of behavior.
Back when Rhode Island’s Junior Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse led the charge to mandate the audio of television commercials, I suggested that “government regulation of television volume is not likely to signal the end of the republic, but the oppression of ‘there ought to be a law’ is a patchwork, encouraging voters to acclimate to the big government mentality and investing them in its exercise of power.”
Having gone some years without another such coup, Whitehouse is apparently at it again, as Shaun Towne reports:
“There’s a big, it appears, emerging scam of selling people cheap, lousy products that have been misdescribed for purposes of getting their business,” said Whitehouse.
Rhode Island’s junior senator is pushing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to crack down on fraudulent clothing websites. In a letter to the agency, Whitehouse said the websites “…use stolen photographs and deep discounts to lure consumers into buying products that are indeed “too good to be true.”
One suspects laws against stolen photographs and false advertising are already in place, so it isn’t clear what a “crack down” would entail, but is this really the sort of stuff-of-life priority that a U.S. senator should have?
It’s not coincidental that Whitehouse is also arguably the nation’s leading advocate for using innovative legal maneuvers to intimidate and “crack down” on organizations that disagree with his conclusions about climate change. Building on what I wrote in 2011, a public that gets used to having government go after every little inconvenience or example of advantage-taking will produce a weakened backlash when that same government begins taking advantage of the new practice in order to punish political enemies and help political allies (while enriching politicians).
Law professor Glenn Reynolds has an important essay in USA Today, this week, that’s relevant to RI’s former attorney general and now U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and other far-left loons who seek to implement an environmentalist inquisition and prosecute organizations that will not proclaim their unassailable faith in the doomsday wickedness of anthropomorphic climate change:
Federal law makes it a felony “for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the Unites States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”
I wonder if U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, or California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have read this federal statute. Because what they’re doing looks like a concerted scheme to restrict the First Amendment free speech rights of people they don’t agree with. They should look up 18 U.S.C. Sec. 241, I am sure they each have it somewhere in their offices.
One suspects neither the law nor the science nor the long-term fate of the planet is actually a higher priority to such corrupt politicians than their own lust for power. And any journalist or other person who handles these affronts as if they might be legitimate should be doubted if he or she claims to be interested in preserving Americans rights.
Rhode Island’s own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat) led off episode 4 of Mark Levin’s new online show. Reviewing a clip of Whitehouse presenting an obviously prepared line of questioning for President Obama’s Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, Levin draws parallels between Whitehouse’s content and presentation and the sort of government activity we used to expect from the Soviet Union.
Without any specifics — leaving much to the imagination and the insinuation — the senator and the AG discussed criminal and civil investigations of private companies that aren’t fully in line with the required climate change ideology. Levin suggests that the entire performance isn’t meant to enlighten the senator from Rhode Island, but rather to get the message out there in the air, so to speak, that companies should start worrying about an FBI knock on the door. “It’s as tyrannical as is possibly imaginable.”
The idea is to intimidate the public in order to prevent real debate over public policy. In practice, the government doesn’t have to take oppressive action to the extent that people believe that oppressive action is always a possibility. The great majority of people (including business leaders) just want to move along with their lives, and so they’ll respond to implied threats from officials. Then, those who either won’t or can’t capitulate so easily seem like extreme cases and are easy to marginalize in an environment in which everybody else just wants the tension to go away.
This is how freedom dies, and it’s sad to see how large a role even little Rhode Island has managed to play in the process through its electoral choices.
Rhode Island’s own U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat) gets a name check in Josh Gelernter’s article likening the climate change alarmists to the historically infamous persecutors of Galileo:
People tend to think that proponents of an Earth-centered solar system were nothing but intransigent religious fanatics. In fact, they included scientists of Galileo-level genius, like Ptolemy and Aristotle. When their theories were weakened and their opponents’ strengthened, they switched sides — and the “scientific consensus” changed. The intransigence belonged to the government, seated in the Vatican, which refused to accept new data because a deviation from the consensus-ante would have proved politically difficult. …
But our government — or parts of it, like Senator Whitehouse — prefer the status quo. Global warming is (literally and metaphorically) cash in the bank for many of our men in Washington, and a lot of their supporters. They want the new heliocentrists excommunicated and in prison. But remember: The lesson of Galileo’s inquisition is that truth will out.
Progressives have gone pretty far on a logical fallacy. Essentially, they’ve promoted the notion that “the Church persecuted Galileo, and business moguls exploited workers, but we support action through government, and government is neither the Church nor a business.” The fallacy, obviously, is to pretend that organizations in each of those three broad categories are different in a way that’s relevant to the undesirable outcome. Put differently, they pretend such institutions can’t switch roles in the narrative, as if it’s always the prefixes and never the suffixes in “theocracy” and “oligarchy” that make a difference, as if claiming that they have invented a pure, non-prefixed government — a “cracy” or “archy.”
That’s not a sustainable delusion, but progressives have also been very busy buying off constituencies and brainwashing with reckless abandon.
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, from Rhode Island, isn’t backing off his suggestion that government should investigate his political opposition.
I’m with Kevin Williamson on this stunning Washington Post op-ed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. It’s dispiriting to read the very wealthy senator from Rhode Island crossing well into the range of McCarthyism, if not fascism. I mean, look at this:
To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.
The suggestion is clear. Laying the background for the tobacco industry part of the comparison, Whitehouse writes, “Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too.” And “finally, through the discovery process, government lawyers were able to peel back the layers of deceit and denial and see what the tobacco companies really knew all along about cigarettes.” That’s what the senator wants to attempt to do to organizations that express skepticism about climate change alarmism.
To what couldn’t this principle apply? Maybe same-sex marriage advocates have studies showing that children do just as well without their own moms and dads. Start a Congressional investigation! Or maybe the gun industry is conspiring to hide evidence that eliminating the Second Amendment would make Americans safer. Or maybe Grover Norquist has buried a report proving that high taxes are good for the economy and freedom. Or (and here’s the goldmine) internal memos among Republican groups might prove a big-dollar conspiracy to fool the American people into believing that the Democrats have become a party of ultra-wealthy radicals who have no interest in helping average Americans prosper and who lack the competence to achieve that goal, even if they believed in it.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. We’ll never know if we don’t start investigating every conservative organization.
This is not a difficult one. Even people (including journalists) who agree with all of the senator’s political positions should be able to see that. Whitehouse is way off the deep end, here, and he ought to be called on it. (But he won’t be.)
Many readers have likely seen or heard of this, already, but it’s worth putting on the record, here. Bradley Smith and David Keating, with the Center for Competitive Politics, have filed a complaint against several Democrat Senators who, they say, used their offices to try to press the IRS to engage in crass electoral intimidation by targeting conservative groups:
The complaint documents how the senators improperly interfered with IRS adjudications to further their party’s electoral prospects. They pressured the IRS to undertake income-tax investigations of specific organizations, to find that specific organizations were in violation of the law, to reach predetermined results pertaining to pending applications by individual organizations for nonprofit status, and to adopt specific regulatory interpretations and policies to further their campaign goals.
It isn’t surprising to learn that on the list is Rhode Island’s own Sheldon Whitehouse. It also isn’t difficult to imagine the aristocratic Senator seeking to pervert the nation’s tax agency as a campaign weapon.
In the rhetoric, the policies, and the demeanor of Democrats of Whitehouse’s ilk is the unavoidable impression that they believe they’re wiser than everybody else, and when somebody believes that about their countrymen, it’s only rational that democracy should not be permitted to move the nation in a direction that the wise ones know to be incorrect or (worse) gauche.
Last week, Ted Nesi interviewed RI Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about the ongoing problems with the ACA Health care rollout. Said Whitehouse, “I think it’s been a botch, and when you consider that little Rhode Island can get it right, it’s frustrating that the federal government didn’t.”
Today, Erika Niedowski reports that Senator Whitehouse, during some hearings in the Senate, remarked that it’s “‘a little nervy to be complaining that the federal government didn’t do it for you well enough’ when states could have ‘simply saddled up and done it’ themselves.”
Seems like Senator Whitehouse is implying (admitting?) that, just perhaps, smaller units of government are more effective than larger ones, even when it comes to implementing grand schemes.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse offers a succinct recitation of his party’s flawed talking points on Social Security.
National Journal ranking of liberal and conservative legislators points to politics and posturing.
City transit in Newport, Rhode Island, is getting a jolt from taxpayers with a RAISE grant. The $22.3 million project, news of which was shared through congressional news releases on Tuesday, will enable the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority to procure 25 battery-electric buses enabling all Newport-based services to be electric. A release from U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse also said charging infrastructure and facility upgrades are coming.
Doc Skoly update: new lawsuit, wins award
Video: Sheldon Whitehouse says no to FBI on SCOTUS leaker
Abortion issue – creating a NIGHTMARE for RI GOP?
KEN BLOCK legislative & political currents, Coventry election results
Ocean State Current alumnus Kevin Mooney has an American Spectator article highlighting Rhode Island’s role in the vanguard of the inside-government attack on the fossil fuel industry:
In 2018, Rhode Island became the first state to file climate change litigation against 21 fossil fuel producers, a move that directly assaults the free speech rights of those who dared to voice a dissenting opinion on climate policy.
Sheldon Whitehouse, the state’s Democratic U.S. senator, joined with Governor Gina Raimondo and Attorney General Peter Kilmartin to announce the suit at a press conference last July. Rhode Island’s litigation closely mirrors lawsuits that have been filed by 14 municipalities across the U.S.
Although climate change litigants have repeatedly failed to successfully make their case in court, state attorneys general persist in reloading the same arguments.
That’s just the beginning of the sordid tale of political showmanship and lawyers’ fees that makes up this abuse of power.
Mainly for a bit of midweek creative thinking, give a read to Linda Borg’s recent article in the Providence Journal about three members of Rhode Island’s congressional delegation and their hangout session with some local youths:
Only in a state as small as Rhode Island would you be able to corral most of your congressional delegation in the basement of a brew pub.
But there they were — U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, U.S. Rep. James Langevin and U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse — taking photographs and playing shuffleboard with some 65 millennials against the din of pop music. U.S. Sen. Jack Reed had planned on attending the meet-and-greet but got pulled away on official business.
Many of the college-age students were from organized progressive organizations; a couple had either worked for one of the congressmen or campaigned for them. The mood was relaxed, the questions mostly of the softball variety. This was friendly territory for the delegation, with hardly a Republican in sight.
Take note of the very last line of the article: “Sunday’s event was organized by all four members of the delegation.”
The creative part comes in imagining how the story would be presented differently were our delegation made up of conservative Republicans. First of all, the article wouldn’t lead with the misleading impression that some vague “you” had managed to “corral” the politicians together, in a sign of the warm closeness of our small state. Rather, it would start with the fact that the politicians had organized the event. Maybe the headline would be “Party Faithful Get Special Access,” and it would go something like this:
The promise of campaign-funded beer was not enough to fill the booths in the basement of a local brew pub, as Rhode Island’s conservative congressmen and one of two U.S. senators sought to lure young activists into their campaigns.
The absent senator had planned to attend but decided that his time was better spent elsewhere. Those who attended managed to slip in a few softball questions between bar games and to pose for campaign-ready “candid” photos with the three white Republican men.
If you’re a Democrat with substantive questions for your elected officials, you would not have been welcome.
It seems like just last week that we were hearing that Rhode Island has the highest poverty rate in New England. This week, WPRI’s Susan Campbell has noticed that we’re also last in New England for charitable giving and last in the country for charitable volunteering:
The Ocean State ranked 49th overall in a comparison of states’ charitable giving that was conducted by personal finance website WalletHub.
The ranking is based on several factors, including volunteer rate and share of income donated. Rhode Island was last on the list for “volunteer and service,” and 31st for “charitable giving.”
If the charitability measure were money only, perhaps we could argue that some adjustment is necessary due to the state’s relative poverty, but the volunteerism points to something more worrisome. As one of our two U.S. Senators, Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, moves to expand a government employee benefit, with emphasis on the characterization that they “serve their communities,” we might suggest that the Ocean State has cultivated a sense of government as the moral center of society.
Such an attitude isn’t healthy economically or morally, inasmuch as government doesn’t create wealth through its actions nor do a good job balancing competing needs and also drains mutual assistance of its moral component by making it compulsory and filtered through the political process.
Rhode Island’s far-left Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has joined the ranks of his colleagues engaging in (let’s say) enhanced questioning techniques of Christian nominees. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru highlights:
Whitehouse then asks nominee Trevor McFadden seven questions based (loosely) on these facts about his church. Whitehouse asks McFadden whether he agrees with the associate pastor, for example. Several other questions relate to whether McFadden could faithfully apply the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which required governments to recognize a fundamental right to same-sex marriage.
Suggesting that Whitehouse’s line of questioning is inappropriate, Ponnuru draws a distinction between a person’s being a member of a religious organization, like a church, and making statements similar to those that a senator finds objectionable. That approach misses the bigger problem (and hypocrisy) with Whitehouse’s approach.
Progressives such as Whitehouse believe that the Constitution ought to be interpreted so as to adjust to the changing standards of the times, as a “living document.” The only mechanism for doing that in a democratic society would be for the country, through elected representatives, to appoint judges who match their standards and will rule accordingly, even if it means overturning decisions that prior courts have made.
Of course, one suspects that Whitehouse and his ilk don’t really want the Constitution to be interpreted according to the standards of the people at the time. They want it to be interpreted according to the standards of an elite that sees itself as more enlightened than the hoi polloi.
This means that Whitehouse wants the evolution only to go in the direction that he believes to be correct. Those with whom he agrees should feel free to reconsider rulings of the past, while those with whom he disagrees should be kept from the bench.
Some of the responses of America’s tech barons under questioning by Rhode Island’s far-left Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse should raise concerns about the future of freedom in the United States. Of course, we should keep in mind that these are private corporations that can make their own decisions, but they do talk and act as if they’re somehow more fundamental to society than that. And so:
Twitter’s acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, told Whitehouse and other members of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime and terrorism that detecting foreign-based influence campaigns run through phony shell corporations set up as American companies is a challenge. …
All three witnesses also agreed on the threat presented by shell corporations.
“Anything that prevents us from policing the authenticity of our users is a menace,” said Stretch.
It isn’t difficult to imagine freedom — whether explicit in law or simply part of the fabric of American culture — as just such a “menace.”
We accept that people will use freedom in ways that allow them to take advantage of other people because it’s unavoidable, and it would be unacceptable to give government (or oligarchs) the power to set the line between taking advantage of freedom and simply utilizing it in ways that powerful people don’t like. The fact that powerful people didn’t like the outcome of an electoral contest would be a poor reason to pressure tech companies to set up roadblocks to speech.
Instead, we should seek to educate people sufficiently that a few bogus stories on Facebook won’t dupe enough of them to change the course of history. We should also encourage more-respectable purveyors of news to get their bias under control so that they have the credibility to offer objective resources.
Leveraging his own wedding to his fellow WPRI reporter, Kim Kalunian, Ted Nesi filled his weekend column with marriage advice from Rhode Island politicos. Curiously, far-left Senator Sheldon Whitehouse comes closest to the advice that I would offer:
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (married to Sandra, 31 years): “When some little thing annoys you, step back. Remember that marriage is for life. ‘Yes, dear’ is usually a successful end to the conversation.”
In my view, the keystone for a successful marriage — the principal wedge that keeps the entire arch from falling — is the understanding of permanence. Concern for your spouse’s feelings and a drive for mutual care and assistance, as well as a willingness to let things go, are all critical, but a prior imperative is that you have to work things out. Overcoming annoyances and even significant and legitimate grievances will make you a better person and your marriage stronger, but you have to believe that there is no out. (Life happens, of course, and sometimes there has to be an out, but the threshold should be so high as to be unthinkable until the alternative is even more unthinkable.)
This sounds difficult. Even Jesus’ disciples reacted to the permanence of marriage by saying, “If that is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (Matthew 19:10). But the difficulty is short lived and should be periodic at worst. As a general proposition (accepting that some people’s experience will be different), having incentive to get over differences quickly should make life easier than living with a sense of insecurity.
The irony — oft noted in recent years — is that the left-wing politicians who make up the largest part of Nesi’s column (and Rhode Island politics) support and create policies that erode the incentives toward stable families. Therefor, the benefits thereof accrue to those in advantaged classes, for whom social mores continue to support a traditional view of family contradicting their articulated progressive principles.
The rest of us should do as they do, not as they say, and push back on government policies that undermine our ability to build a strong marriage culture among ourselves.
With Rhode Island’s own Democrat congressional delegation, particularly Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, signing on for Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’s single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care plan, Betsy McCaughey’s recent New York Post article is worth a read for its turning of the tables.
Details on how Sanders’s plan would actually work, notably with regard to paying for it, are sparse, but McCaughey teases out some implications of concern. For one thing, according to McCaughey, private health care would be made illegal. Everything would have to go through the government system. Consideration of UHIP and DCYF in Rhode Island and the Veterans Health Administration nationally (to pick just three examples) make that prospect terrifying.
Perhaps even more significant, though, is this:
BernieCare guarantees you hospital care, doctors’ visits, dental and vision care, mental health and even long-term care, all courtesy of Uncle Sam. Amazing, right? But read the fine print. You’ll get care only if it’s “medically necessary” and “appropriate.” Government bureaucrats will decide, and they’ll be under pressure to cut spending.
That’s because Sanders’ bill imposes an annual hard-and-fast dollar limit on how much health care the country can consume. He makes it sound simple — Uncle Sam will negotiate lower prices with drug companies. Voilà. But driving a hard bargain with drug makers won’t make a dent in costs. Prescription drugs comprise only 10 percent of the nation’s health expenditures.
Consider this “hard-and-fast dollar limit” in the context of another national controversy over the debt ceiling and debate of the Senate GOP’s latest health care proposal, which would limit the expansion of government spending on health care, a prospect that Democrats and the media elite (not just news, by the way) are endeavoring to tar as inhumane. How can it be cruel to limit government spending on health care, but just dandy to ration health care generally?
The quick (if specious) answer may be that government spending accrues to the vulnerable and disadvantaged, but that argument dissipates if the wealthy are barred from supplementing their own care. Single-payer simply becomes the government providing care for services that and to people whom it considers worthy.