04/07/10 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Much ink has been spilled over the health care bill in the past few weeks… and rightly so, as it’s “one of the costliest pieces of legislation, potentially, of the past 40 years.” However, an article by Bill Fleckenstein sheds new light on the debate, and suggests that it’s actually Greenspan’s mistakes since the 1990s that are largely to blame for making its passage a reality.
His actions caused American public anger to build up so much – and eventually boil over — in such a way that even a bill this expensive was made possible to pass despite the country’s dire financial straits.
From MSN Money:
“To probably no one’s surprise but against the hopes of many, the House has passed one of the costliest pieces of legislation, potentially, of the past 40 years [...] Over time, this bill is going to be an epic financial disaster. And the accounting by which the Obama administration claims to pay for it sets a new low in financial honesty…
“…Thus, at a moment in time when the country has immense financial problems, we’ve now got another gigantic one — funded, such as it is, by another intergenerational rip-off. I don’t know how folks can advocate the pursuit of these policies and look young people in the eyes, telling them we’re doing the right thing. Of course, you can also ignore the next generation if what you’ve got is not a conscience but a heavy-duty case of crony capitalism.”
Fleckenstein goes on to quote one of his savvy readers who, for him, hits the nail on the head…
“‘I personally blame the greedy fake capitalists (Greenspan, CEOs and their lobbyists, and the Wall St. marketing machine) that have been running this country into the ground since the mid-90′s. . . . Had the pendulum not been allowed to swing so far out of balance, there wouldn’t be such a high degree of anger to tap into and you couldn’t sell these sorts of things to a normally conservative public.’”
Perhaps, one day, the pendulum will swing back again. In the meantime, maybe it’s time to start searching for Brazilian, Russian, Indian, and Chinese spouses online… and hopefully you’ll be lucky enough to gain citizenship in their respective booming countries. Just kidding… sort of.
You can read more details in MSN Money’s coverage of the great health care bailout.
Best,
Rocky Vega,
The Daily Reckoning
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.
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Most expensive bill????
how about the continual wars? the unrelenting invasion of other countries and their goverments??? Iraq, Afganistan, Viet Nam, South America, soon to be Iran…..that spending dwarfs anything domestic. at least we might get something for our money here.
potentially is the key word,
now a trillion later ten…
Margaret, I hate to disappoint you. As much as I dislike war in general, the simple fact is that the spending of the Defense Department is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on entitlement programs.