Anybody see John Stossel's show last week where the state of Louisiana has decided it needs to license and regulate
florists??? How wonderfully glorious it that? You wouldn't believe the amount of
that the guy from the florist association was shoveling to explain why this was a necessity. "Ensure the quality of the product the consumer was getting" was a biggie. Government there now actually employs people to run around and do things like making sure the flowers are in a cooler at the proper temp and that they have water. Of course, you gotta take a state test to get your license.
, right down to using the height of the furniture involved to differentiate the two. Misrepresent yourself and you are subject to a fine of up to $1000 or up to a year in prison. All for our own protection and benefit, according to its proponents. Of course!
Anybody see the recent USA Today study where CAFE standards were estimated to be responsible for 46,000+ deaths due to smaller and lighter and thus less safe cars? Apparently Congress does not yet possess the power to alter the Laws of Physics. There's also the interesting historical note that after CAFE standards were implemented, gasoline consumption went
up. With higher mpg, people could own more cars and drive for less $$$, so the "benefit" of CAFE standards was wiped out and had the opposite effect -- more gasoline consumption, more cars on the road and more wear and tear on roads. Gotta love central planning, don't you know?
I'm not sure I would want to put the Post Office in this list of "successes". How much money do they stand to lose next year? Cutting back on service. Wondrously successful. Probably a harbinger of future Obamacare.
Given the comparisons measuring U.S. public education against those of the rest of the world, it's a bit of a stretch to tout public education as a "government success". Has anybody else noticed that as government gets more involved in education and medical care, those things get more screwed up?
I notice that HMOs are not included on that list. Any Dems want to acknowledge that it was Ted Kennedy who was instrumental in creating that now-reviled concept in American health care? Yet while a creation of government, when problems arose with HMOs, fingers are not pointed at government for the "failure" of that concept nor did people call for them to keep their meddling fingers out of health care, but they called on action to treat the symptom and not the cure.
And why is it that we are still stuck in the "quagmire" of the "War on Poverty"? Forty years of fighting that war and still no signs of victory or no end in sight? When are Dems going to call for an end on
that war?
Why is college not "affordable" by now? Thirty plus years of student loans and grants and yet politicians STILL talk about how they've got more ideas or need more money to make college "affordable"?
For 30 years or more I have heard politicians talk about the waste and fraud in Medicare/Medicaid. Why does it STILL occur? Who wouldn't be an ABSOLUTE FOOL to believe that Obama is going to stop it or that politicians aren't playing us for fools to use the "elimination of fraud and abuse" as a cost reduction measure to mask the horrendous cost of Obamacare?
Why are so many in denial about government's role in the current housing/mortgage crisis? Why no finger pointing to politicians who rewrote the lending rules and gave an implied guarantee that if the banks made loans and they went bad, we taxpayers would back those loans? All the finger-pointing at "Wall Street 'greed'", but next to none at government meddling.
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I'm Ed Thompson, and I approve this message.