Heed This Warning

March 23, 2010

by Al Doyle

The recent Obama health care bill is de facto nationalization of an industry that accounts for as much as 18 percent of the U.S. economy. What could be worse than having a greedy and incompetent government in charge of this kind of capital, not to mention the well being and lives of all Americans?

Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann has been sounding the alarm about a massive - and deliberately secretive - piece of legislation that extends the federal government's control over the economy to almost unimaginable levels.

HR 4173 - which carries the Orwellian title of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 - was approved by a 223 to 202 vote in the House of Representatives in December 2009. The bill was passed with just three hours of discussion and no time to read the text. HR 4173 was proposed and sponsored by Barney Frank, the Massachusetts congressman who went unpunished by his House colleagues when it was discovered that a homosexual prostitution ring was being run out of his home.

At nearly 1300 pages before amendments were added, HR 4173 clearly isn't designed to make life easier or simpler for average Americans. In a interview on Breitbart TV, Bachmann described just what Frank(enstein)'s monster entails.

"We all write checks. We all use credit cards. This will now be controlled by the government, and the government will ration credit," Bachmann declared. "You can't have capitalism with capital. Government will decide who gets capital and who doesn't."

Between trillions in bailouts, the federal takeover of General Motors and Chrysler and the health care mandates (which are being challenged on constitutional grounds by at least 14 states), Obama has taken socialism to a level that his predecessors could only dream of achieving.

"The financial service sector is another 15 percent of the economy," Bachmann observed. "If they succeed [in passing HR 4173 - the Senate has yet to vote on its version of the bill], and if they succeed in taking over the energy sector with the national energy tax, that's 69 to 70 percent of the economy they will have taken over in less than 18 months."

A major negative financial indicator and milestone didn't receive the attention it deserved due to the furor over the nationalization of medical care. The Social Security system has to finally dip into its $2.5 trillion "trust fund" to pay benefits.

The so-called fund isn't a mountain of cash or gold sitting in a bank vault. The entire sum consists of Treasury bonds in a three-ring binder housed in a file cabinet of a government office building in Parkersburg, West Virginia. So did the Social Security Administration sell a bond or two on the open market to meet its obligations?

That's the problem. The bonds are nonnegotiable, which means they can't be sold and have no redemption value. That's because the government spent the money a long time ago. Instead, the debt is "backed by the full faith and credit of the United States." Translated, that means the fiscal integrity of the system rests with the same politicians who stole and spent those trillions of dollars in Social Security taxes.

Breezily displaying a monumental amount of economic ignorance, former Connecticut congresswoman and president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare Barbara Kennelly took the "What, me worry?" approach to the situation.

"Those bonds are protected by the full faith and credit of the United States," Kennelly said. "They're as solid as what we owe China and Japan."