Redistribution Of Common Sense

I was going to take down Byron York's latest craptastic op-ed disguised as a "news article" but marindenver of the Rumpies beat me to it.  York breathlessly claims that Democratis Senator Max Baucus has admitted that Obamacare's real purpose was...the Marxist redistribution of wealth! (lightning, scary organ music, perhaps a few bats).

Health reform is "an income shift," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said on March 25. "It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans."

No, that's pretty much Byron's entire argument right there.  Take it away, marindenver (emphasis mine)!

Caught.  Guilty as charged.  Yes, it wasn’t about building a safety net for 35 million uninsured Americans, saving the lives of the estimated 40,000 Americans who die each year because of lack of affordable coverage, doubling the number of public health clinics, providing meaningful incentives to small business owners to provide insurance to their employees, bringing preventive care to millions of people who now end up in emergency rooms raising costs for all of us.  No, it was all a nefarious plot to SPREAD SOCIALISM!

Yes indeed, and all because Max Baucus suggested that health care reform “is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans.”  LOWER INCOME, MIDDLE INCOME he said.  Note that.  Because in Byron York’s halting, jumbled frame of reference that translates to:

people overwhelmingly believe it will lead to an increase in middle class taxes, and we do know that people are concerned that it will hurt their own quality of care, so I think their gut instincts point in that direction.

Nothing in the new law will lead to an increase in middle class taxes.  Yes, there are some Medicare tax increases in the bill.  Which will not kick in for a couple of years and which will kick in on people earning $200,000 a year and up.  People “overwhelmingly believe it will lead to an increase in middle class taxes” because the Republicans have been saying that since day one.  Without a shred of evidence.

And now here’s this *pundit* pundificating that quotes taken out of context by Democrats which indicate that health care reform will benefit lower and middle income Americans somehow are really meant to indicate a massive sucking of wealth FROM the middle class to . . . who?  The poor?  Not really.  Most of the benefits of the bill that affect lower income Americans will come from Medicare savings and increased Medicare taxes on higher income taxpayers.  No, I fear it’s not the middle class our pundity pundit is so worried about, because the middle class overall should end up better off under the bill.  No, my suspicions are that our Byron simply prefers the other kind of wealth re-distribution.  The GWB kind wherein all wealth flows upward.  The ObamaCare kind of re-distribution, which flows downward to help our poorer and more vulnerable citizens simply is outside his ken.

And there's the problem.  All I hear from the right is "Wait until the middle class sees all the new taxes and fees and huge lines at the doctor's offices and they will revolt and the Republicans will have 300 seats in the House and 70 in the Senate and the White House in 2012 and they can roll back the last century in socialism AND IT WILL BE THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES!"

Except nobody can really tell me what those new taxes and fees and death panels are, because...they don't exist.  Not on the middle class.  Obama just gave the middle class in this country the largest tax cut in history off payroll taxes.  Does Obama get credit for this?  No, he's an evil Marxist.

There's a reason I keep coming back to racism and bigotry against Obama as the truth behind the tea party anger.  The "principled opposition" arguments just don't hold up under scrutiny.