In the latest issue of Virtual Mentor, a journal of the American Medical Association, I try to capture the multiple absurdities that make up ObamaCare. An encapsulation:

During the initial debate over ObamaCare, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) famously said, “We have to pass [it] so you can find out what’s in it.” One irreverent heir to Hippocrates quipped, “That’s what I tell my patients when I ask them for a stool sample.” The similarities scarcely end there…

ObamaCare supporters are ignoring the federal government’s dire fiscal situation; ignoring the law’s impact on premiums, jobs, and access to health insurance; ignoring that a strikingly similar law has sent health care costs higher in Massachusetts; ignoring public opinion, which has been solidly against the law for more than 2 years; ignoring the law’s failures (when they’re not declaring them successes); and ignoring that the law was so incompetently drafted that it cannot be implemented without shredding the separation of powers, the rule of law, and the U.S. Constitution itself. Rather than confront their own errors of judgment, they self-soothe: The public just doesn’t understand the law. The more they learn about it, the more they’ll like it…

This denial takes its most sophisticated form in the periodic surveys that purport to show how those silly voters still don’t understand the law. (In the mind of the ObamaCare zombie, no one really understands the law until they support it.) A prominent health care journalist had just filed her umpteenth story on such surveys when I asked her, “At what point do you start to question whether ObamaCare supporters are just kidding themselves?”

Her response? “Soon…”

(For more proof that ObamaCare supporters can draw from an apparently bottomless well of denial, see this article by Politico.)

ObamaCare–The Way of the Dodo is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cato Institute scholars Daniel J. Mitchell and Chris Edwards evaluate the plans offered by Republicans for lowering federal spending using a so-called “Cut, Cap and Balance” proposal that would make small cuts to federal spending in the short run, cap federal spending, and balance the federal budget using a tax-limited balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

‘Cut, Cap and Balance,’ the Debt Ceiling and Federal Spending is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• “Collective bargaining gives unions the exclusive right to speak for covered workers, many of whom may disagree with the views of the monopoly union.”
• “Which two have done more to improve your life — Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, or Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi?”
• “A temporarily frozen debt limit could instead signal U.S. lawmakers’ resolve to get our fiscal house in order. It may even reassure investors about long-term U.S. economic prospects.”
• “What makes Americans exceptional is our ornery resistance to being bossed around.”
• Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) spoke recently at a Cato forum on fiscal policy about the CAP Act–here’s an excerpt of his remarks:

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation has a good post today dissecting Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s recent press release on DC school vouchers.

If anything, Burke goes a little easy on Rep. Pelosi, comparing the maximum value of the vouchers  ($7,500) with the published figure for DC public school spending ($17,600). As it happens, the public school spending figures published by the Department of Education (and the Bureau of the Census) are always badly out of date. That means they don’t take into account the continuing trends of rising overall spending and falling enrollment in DC public schools (let alone inflation). When you break down the DC K-12 education budget for the 2008-2009 school year, as I did in this Excel spreadsheet, it comes out to just over $28,000 per pupil. It’s almost certainly higher today.

What’s more, the average voucher amount is closer to $7,000, so DC schools are underperforming the private voucher schools while spending four times as much per pupil.

Despite this, Rep. Pelosi, President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and over 90% of Democrats in the House and Senate oppose the DC voucher program. It’s almost as if politicians care more about special interests and ideology than they do about kids and reality.

Burke v. Pelosi is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

During the initial legislative debate over ObamaCare, a reporter asked (now-outgoing) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) whether the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to compel Americans to purchase health insurance. Pelosi responded, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Today, a federal court answered Ms. Pelosi’s question when it declared ObamaCare’s individual mandate unconstitutional.

Here is Pelosi’s statement responding to today’s court ruling in Cuccinelli v. Sebelius:

Pelosi Statement on Affordable Care Act Ruling in Virginia District Court

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued the following statement today after a District Court judge in Virginia ruled one provision of the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. The judge refused to freeze implementation of the law during the appeals process, meaning Americans already benefitting from health insurance reform — or set to benefit soon — will not be affected:

“Today’s court ruling stands in stark contrast to 14 similar challenges to the Affordable Care Act — in two, federal district judges strongly upheld the law; in the other 12, the challenges have been dismissed.

“Since its enactment, health insurance reform has delivered concrete benefits to millions of Americans. Among provisions already benefitting the American people, it has offered small businesses a tax break to cover their workers, allowed young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, and provided assistance to seniors struggling to pay prescription drug costs. These changes are good for our middle class, and will not be impacted by this court’s decision to overturn a single provision of the law.

“There have been and will continue to be a wide range of attempts to weaken this law. But as in previous court rulings across the country, I am confident that the Affordable Care Act will ultimately be sustained and will keep benefitting our middle class, our families, and our businesses, indeed every American. In Congress, we will stand firm against attempts to roll back the law, including the Patient’s Bill of Rights and the critical consumer protections enacted by health insurance reform.”

SOURCE Office of the Speaker of the House

Note that Pelosi does not address the constitutional issue.

Yes, Madam Speaker, We’re Serious is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Bloomberg’s Caroline Baum has a great column on ObamaCare.  It leads off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s oft-repeated remark, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Truer words were never spoken.  Heck, ObamaCare gives HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius so much arbitrary power to reshape the health care sector that Congress had to pass the law so that Pelosi could find out what is in it.

Baum explains why such discretionary power is dangerous:

Discretion may be the better part of valor, but it’s not something businesses can rely on for planning purposes. Corporations are already hunkered down because of (take your pick) weak demand, hurt feelings as a result of presidential persecution, or uncertainty over future health-care costs and tax rates. It won’t help business confidence to learn the HHS secretary can make and break rules on a case-by-case basis.

“The secretary can decide what you have to purchase, but if you are in a presidential swing state, the secretary has the authority to undo everything she just did,” Cannon says.

Wait, how’d that last sentence get in there?  Anyway, read the whole thing.

Pelosi Had to Pass ObamaCare So She Could Find out What’s In It is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Is Alaska Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller correct to suggest that the federal minimum wage is unconstitutional? And beyond that constitutional question, is this a wise political strategy?

My response:

Joe Miller is absolutely right: The federal government has no authority under the Constitution to set a minimum wage — or to do so many of the countless other things it does today. When Nancy Pelosi was asked where in the Constitution Congress was authorized to order Americans to buy health insurance, she responded, “Are you serious?” That’s a mark of how little America’s political elites today understand the document they take an oath to uphold.

James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist 45 that the powers of the new government would be “few and defined” – a far cry from today’s Leviathan. How did the change happen? In a nutshell, the ideas of the Progressives – in particular, wide-ranging rule by elites — were incorporated in “constitutional law” (not to be confused with the Constitution), not by constitutional amendment but by a cowed Supreme Court following Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous 1937 Court-packing scheme. That opened the floodgates to the modern redistributive and regulatory state that so many Americans love so much today. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Rexford Tugwell, one of the principal architects of the New Deal, reflecting on his work some 30 years later: “To the extent that these new social virtues [i.e., New Deal policies] developed, they were tortured interpretations of a document [i.e., the Constitution] intended to prevent them.”

But that’s changing, if the Tea Party movement is any indication. The American people are waking up to the truth: The governmnet gives nothing that it doesn’t first take. It’s not Santa Claus. And whether the taking is in the form of money, property, or liberty, it comes to the same thing. So in answer to the question whether telling constitutional truths is wise political strategy, we’ll see. If the people can’t take the truth, it’s only a matter of time before we go the way of civilizations before us. Fortunately, we still have enough freedom to tell such truths.

Can We Take the Truth? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“US manufacturing grows for 13th straight month” is the headline of an AP newswire story posted around noon today.  This statistic doesn’t surprise me, since I’ve been following developments in U.S. manufacturing for many years now, and have published analyses of public data that refute the myth of deindustrialization and manufacturing decline. 

With the exception of the recession of 08-09, when all U.S. economic sectors took a hit, U.S. manufacturing has been breaking its own record, year after year, with respect to output, value-added, profits, returns on investment, exports, and imports. U.S. factories are the world’s most prolific, accounting for 21.4% of global manufacturing value added in 2008 (China accounted for 13.4%).

But I bring the AP headline to your attention for one reason: so that you can judge for yourself who has any credibility on Capitol Hill, within the executive branch, in the media, among organized labor, in industry, in the think tank world, and within the international trade bar, as Nancy Pelosi tries to stuff a ruinous anti-China trade bill down our throats in the name of supporting our floundering manufacturing base.  Look for the columns, the op-eds, the press releases, and the floor statements between next week and November.

Who among them will continue to cite our suffering manufacturing sector as the justification for protectionism?  They should never again have any credibility.

The Rumors of Manufacturing’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I went back home to Kentucky to attend the Fancy Farm Picnic last Saturday. It may be the biggest political event in the state; it takes place every August, 10 miles from where I grew up, and somehow I’d never attended before. It was time. I got there just in time to hear Senate candidates Jack Conway and Rand Paul give their 7-minute speeches. (There are lots of speakers, and timekeepers are strict.) There were plenty of advocates for both candidates among the 2000 or so people watching. It’s an old Democratic area, but they’re conservative Democrats who now mostly vote Republican in federal races.

It was well over 90 degrees and humid, so both candidates handed out fans:

As I listened to the candidates, my main impression was this: Conway accused Rand Paul of being an extremist, and Paul accused Conway of being a Democrat. The question for November is which charge will stick.

Gov. Steve Beshear, introducing Conway, warmed up the attack: “[Paul] is going to balance the federal budget on the backs of our school children. He’s going to balance the federal budget on the backs of our coal miners. On the backs of our farmers. On the backs of our law enforcement officials,” he shouted. “The entire commonwealth of Kentucky — Republicans, Democrats and independents — ought to be scared to death about Rand Paul!” Referring to last year’s controversy over Conway’s calling himself a “tough son of a bitch” — it’s a church picnic, after all — and the “seven words you can’t say on television,” Paul said, “There are six more words you won’t hear Jack Conway say [on the campaign trail]: President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.”

So which do Kentucky voters dislike more: the national Democratic party’s big-government agenda or the prospect that Rand Paul might actually try to cut the size of government? In a world where everyone gets something from government, it’s not obvious. But so far Paul is holding on to a lead in the polls. In Fancy Farm, I noticed that all the Conway supporters had the campaign’s official signs and buttons, plus hand-lettered signs that had clearly been produced in campaign offices, such as this ”NeanderPaul” sign that I picked up after the shouting was over:

Paul’s supporters, on the other hand, brought a lot of their own homemade signs. Conway’s supporters were more disciplined. You didn’t see any Conway supporters showing up dressed as Abraham Lincoln or a colonial soldier (though news reports say there was a guy dressed as a “neanderthal” holding the above sign), or wearing T-shirts reading “Who is John Galt?” The greater grass-roots enthusiasm for Paul has both pluses and minuses. Clearly he’s appealing to stronger currents than mere partisan politics and generating more enthusiasm. But that means he’s more at risk of supporters doing things that might embarrass the campaign.

Both candidates accused the other of “flip-flopping.” Conway’s team erected a “Rand Paul’s Waffle House” in the familiar yellow-and-black design and claimed he was waffling and flip-flopping on a number of issues. (Are waffling and flip-flopping the same thing? Not really.) Paul’s campaign handed out flip-flops labeled “cap” and “trade” to draw attention to Conway’s alleged backing away from his previous support for the “cap and trade” energy legislation.

One thing you can say about the Fancy Farm Picnic, it’s the best $10 meal you’ll ever eat — Kentucky pork and mutton, fresh-picked tomatoes and corn, and homemade pies and cakes.

And one final thought: They estimate that 15,000 people attend the picnic but that only 2,000 listen to the political speeches, which is a good reminder of reality for us political junkies. And that estimate would seem to be confirmed by my reflection after the weekend that, except for the drive from Mayfield to Fancy Farm, I drove about 500 miles in Kentucky this weekend and I’m not sure I ever saw a campaign sign or bumper sticker. The election is still almost three months away, and politics just isn’t life for most people.

Live from the Fancy Farm Picnic is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This capsizing container ship in the Port of Mumbai strikes me as the perfect metaphor for U.S. trade policy, with Skipper Pelosi at the helm.   Just imagine how many jobs we can create by sending imports to the bottom of the sea.  Heck, think of all the jobs we could create by sinking our own exports and making them all over again.

Senator Schumer, I’m just kidding.

The U.S.S. Trade Policy? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

ObamaCare creates incentives not to climb the economic ladder.  It also creates incentives not to work at all; able-bodied people can quit their jobs, safe in the knowledge that the suckers working man will foot the bill for any health care they may need.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks that’s a not a bug, but a feature of the new law, at least if those able-bodied non-paycheck earners are artists.  (HT: CNS News.)

Repeal the bill.

Pelosi: ObamaCare Helps Artists Avoid Hassle of Working is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

New York Times columnist David Brooks, President Obama’s biggest fan among self-proclaimed conservatives, has been plunged into the depths of despair by the latest machinations of Obama and his congressional allies:

Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?

Yes, I know Republicans have used the deem and pass technique. It was terrible then. But those were smallish items. This is the largest piece of legislation in a generation and Pelosi wants to pass it without a vote. It’s unbelievable that people even talk about this with a straight face. Do they really think the American people are going to stand for this? Do they think it will really fool anybody if a Democratic House member goes back to his district and says, “I didn’t vote for the bill. I just voted for the amendments.” Do they think all of America is insane?

Is Obama Losing David Brooks? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

…are we under any obligation to obey it?  The answer may be no.

Democrats are considering a scheme that would “deem” the Senate health care bill to have passed the House if a separate event occurs (specifically: House passage of a budget reconciliation bill).  That strategy has been named after its contriver, House Rules Committee chair Louise Slaughter (D-NY).  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says of this scheme: “I like it because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill” (emphasis added).

Not so fast, says former federal circuit court judge Michael McConnell in The Wall Street Journal:

Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.

The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the “exact text” must be approved by one house; the other house must approve “precisely the same text.”

Democrats have already hidden 60 percent of the cost of the Senate bill, effected an obscenely partisan change in Massachusetts law to keep the bill moving, pledged more than a billion taxpayer dollars to buy votes for the bill, and packed the bill with an unconstitutional individual mandate and provisions that violate the First Amendment. It’s almost as if, to paraphrase comedian Lewis Black, Democrats spent a whole year, umm, desecrating the Constitution and at the last minute went, “Oh! Missed a spot!”

And these people want us to put our trust in government.

If the House Enacts the Senate Health Care Bill without Voting on It… is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The American people don’t want President Obama’s health care plan (see below). Massachusetts voters don’t want it.

The White House knows that the people don’t want it.  In Ohio last week, President Obama said:

the process has been less than pretty. When you deal with 535 members of Congress, it’s going to be a somewhat ugly process…when you put it all together, it starts looking like just this monstrosity. And it makes people fearful. And it makes people afraid. And they start thinking, you know what, this looks like something that is going to cost me tax dollars and I already have insurance so why should I support this.

Yet Democrats still want ObamaCare to become law, and they are very close to making it happen.  If Speaker Nancy Pelosi bribes enough House members to reach that magic number of 218 votes, she could hold the vote with as little as 24 hours’ notice.  And ObamaCare would become law.  Done and done.  Comments from David Axelrod and other administration officials this weekend indicate that they haven’t given up on the Senate bill, and suggest that they are likely pressuring House Democrats to support it.

On ABC News’ This Week, Axelrod said, “People will never know what’s in that bill until we pass it.”  He was right, though not in the sense that he meant it.  As bad as the American people think this legislation is, they won’t really know until Nancy Pelosi bribes her way to 218 votes.

ObamaCare Could Become Law at Any Time is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today, Politico Arena asks:

The message from Massachusetts

What now for the Democratic agenda?

My response:

Listening to Scott Brown’s long, barely scripted acceptance speech last night, you had the refreshing sense that you were listening to an ordinary American, not to some political cut-out.  Here’s a guy who campaigned in a pick-up truck with over 200,000 miles on the odometer, who listened to the voters and understood that they wanted not simply to block tax hikes but to lower taxes (and the last thing they wanted was for their taxes to pay terrorists’ lawyers bills!), who understood that even worse than the health care bill now before Congress were the back-room deals that brought it about, who’s served proudly for 30 years in the National Guard — in short, here’s guy you’d be comfortable having a beer with because, as he said, “I know who I am and I know who I serve.”

Which brings to mind the famous Rose Garden beer the president and vice president shared with Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley — speaking of (dis)comfort.  And that brings to mind Cambridge, which stayed true blue, 84-15, Walter Russell Mead informs us this morning in his delightfully tongue-in-cheek Arena post.  (“First, some good news for Democrats: the base is secure.”)  As goes Harvard, so goes Berkeley.

But to today’s Arena question.  The Democratic left is predictably outraged that “the people” they so love in the abstract have so disappointed them in the concrete.  Exhibit A is last night’s Arena post by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel.  Railing against “the Tea Party’s inchoate right-wing populism” (if it’s infested Massachusetts, shudder to think of it in Idaho!), Katrina tells Obama to “get tough, get bold, kiss ‘post-partisanship’ goodbye,” and “put yourself squarely back on the side of working people” by “passing the strongest possible healthcare bill as quickly as is feasible.”  And there’s the cliff, Katrina.

Lanny Davis has more sober advice for Obama in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.  To those who are pointing fingers at Martha Coakley, Lanny says, “This was a defeat not of the messenger but of the message” — the unrelenting leftism that has come from this White House and this Congress.  And he points, by way of instruction, to Bill Clinton’s response to the disastrous elections of 1994, though he doesn’t mention Clinton’s ringing, albeit inaccurate, description of his course-change — “The era of big government is over.”  Is it in Obama’s DNA to make such a course correction?  Does he have a reset button?

On health care, Obama and his party are in an almost impossible situation.  If they press ahead, as Nancy Pelosi and others are urging, the cliff awaits them in November.  But if they abandon their project, what will they run on in November?  It’s a mess of their own making, of course, so completely did they misread the election of 2008.  What better evidence of the endurance of principles of sound, limited government that some two centuries later, The Tea Party has come home to Boston.

The Tea Party Comes Home is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Sunlight Foundation cites this tweet, and newspapers confirm, that the House leadership has promised to put the final health care bill online for 72 hours before a final vote.

“The move came after Rep. Scott Murphy, D-N.Y., urged colleagues to join him in asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., for a three-day time-out before any floor vote,” reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Kudos to Representative Murphy for bringing this up. Congratulations to the Sunlight Foundation for organizing the closely related Read the Bill campaign, which is pressuring Congress to post bills online for 72 hours before debate begins.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s unfulfilled transparency promises are beginning to draw derision not only from political partisans but from the mainstream media. For example, the L.A. Times “Top of the Ticket” blog mocked the administration yesterday in a post called, “Joe Biden Update: He Meets on Transparency Today. But the Meeting is Closed.”

[T]oday’s Biden schedule highlight is a meeting with the chief of transparency for economic recovery. But, unfortunately, the transparency meeting is non-transparent, closed to the press… Which makes it — what? — secret openness? Open secrecy?

That post cites this one at a site called Media-ite, where columnist Tommy Christopher bemoans the president’s failure to see through his promise to put health care negotiations on C-SPAN.

Secret negotiations like the one between the pharmaceutical lobby, the White House, and the Senate Finance Committee are the Obama pledge’s raison d’etre. Hours of debate and information are nice, but the real value of transparency is in keeping everyone honest. By meeting with insurance and pharmaceutical industry leaders in private, the administration has shielded the parties most in need of being kept honest, the ones most likely to poison the process.

If you had asked people a year ago whether President Obama or Speaker Pelosi would be the leader in legislative transparency, I don’t think many would have bet on the latter. This is not to say that the process has been transparent enough — the production of the health care bill has been quite opaque compared to what’s possible and desirable. But Pelosi is the current leader on transparency, if only by substantial default.

Health Care Bill to be Online for 72 Hours Before Final House Vote — Pelosi Is the Transparency Leader? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Reason.tv has a characteristically good video about the failure of House and Senate leaders (and the president) to make negotiations about the health care bill transparent.

It’s probably not true, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s statement that “there has never been a more open process…” But even if it is, that doesn’t matter. Technology that can make the legislative process far more open is there, and the audience wishing to use it is there too.

The public’s expectations for open government have risen to what can be achieved—matching past practice is not good enough.

The Real World – D.C. is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.

Copenhagen (CNN) –- In a strange twist, a Washington snowstorm is forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, to make an early departure from a global warming summit here in Denmark.

Pelosi told CNN that military officials leading her Congressional delegation have urged the 21 lawmakers to leave Copenhagen several hours earlier than scheduled on Saturday.

The Speaker said she has agreed to the new travel plan so that lawmakers can get back to Washington before much of the expected storm wallops the nation’s capital.

Washington Post: Before long, we will be buried by several times that amount making this a record breaking December storm. Double digit accumulations have already been reported to our south in central Virginia. This is a dangerous, severe storm with the worst still to come.

…

True enough, as President Obama’s courtiers at Media Matters remind us, one day’s weather doesn’t change the climate. Indeed, they quote Pat Michaels making that point last year in the New York Times:

Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist and commentator with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, has long chided environmentalists and the media for overstating connections between extreme weather and human-caused warming. (He is on the program at the skeptics’ conference.)

But Dr. Michaels said that those now trumpeting global cooling should beware of doing the same thing, saying that the ”predictable distortion” of extreme weather ”goes in both directions.”

Still, I think we know that if it were unseasonably warm this week, there’d be people pointing that out on television from Copenhagen.

I Am Not Making This Up is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If — and it is still a big “if — Democrats pass a health bill, that bill will owe as much to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney as to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. In fact, with the so-called “public option” out of the Senate health bill, the final product increasingly looks like the failed Massachusetts experiment.  Consider that the final bill will likely include:

• An individual mandate
• A weak employer-mandate
• An Exchange (Connector)
• Middle-class subsidies
• Insurance regulation (already in place in Massachusetts before Romney’s reforms)

As to why this will be a disaster for American taxpayers, workers, and patients, I’ve written about it here, and my colleague Michael Cannon has covered it here and here.

Gee, thanks, Mitt.

Health Reform: Blame Mitt is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Nancy Pelosi: “The power of Congress to regulate health care is essentially unlimited.”

• Since August 2008 the monetary base (bills in circulation plus bank credits at Federal Reserve banks) has increased by 137%. If not defused, this bomb will eventually explode into inflation.

• Federal spending  just pushed the government’s debt over $12 trillion. Spending has soared so high that 40 percent of this year’s budget will be funded by borrowing.

• What the NFL can teach us about the War on Terror.

• Podcast: “The Rule of Law and the Fed“

Monday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog