A steady stream of harebrained notions bubble out of the Nobama campaign. At regular intervals, the bubbles burst as a Republican or conservative thorn pricks them. Barack Obama steps out of the cloud, stares at the ground reality and realizes that he has to swing to the opposite end of his belief system. After a momentary encounter with the world we are familiar with, he is back to propogating the same old poppycock. We see this spectacle of reverse movements, a bizarre dance happening over again.
If Obama does not makes these corrections from the holy progressive path, he will simply be seen as insane. This happened when he finally signed the bill to grant immunity to telecommunications companies who share terrorism related information with the Government without a warrant. We know how FBI was unable to take action against suspected terrorists following the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Tower; the process of obtaining a warrant from a court was way to cumbersome to take action in real time.
One of the latest such notions is that money can be saved from defense expenditures to pay for social programs. That defense expenditures are rising so rapidly that poor folks don't have enough anymore for medical treatment, education and social security. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ross Perot has assembled figures in a very user-friendly presentation about government revenues and expenditures. The remarkable fact is that the share of defense expenditure has been halved since the Vietnam war. On the other hand, medicare and medicaid expenditure is growing by more than the three times the rate of the GDP. Obama is suggesting more of the same--a universal care system which is not much different from medicare and medicaid.
The only reason medicaid and medicare expenditure rises is that there is no in-built price mechanism to put any check on the growth of these expenditures. Nobama refuses to acknowledge this simple reality. The guy is so blind to economic facts that the dance is going to continue when he is in office. I have seen this happen before in India whenever the Janata party came to power. A bunch of crackpots came to some twisted conclusions and disrupted the daily life of people. Nobama's dance is all the more surreal as it is happening in a society that is otherwise sane if nothing else.
