Government Gone Wild!

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but our new President is anything but old, and he has a lot of new tricks in his bag.  And he seems to be running circles around the old guard in Washington , D.C.  While President Obama campaigns for his euphemistically titled “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” other items on his wish list are shaping up behind the scenes, away from the scrutiny of most Americans.

Gina Parker Ford

Big Brother has lost his mind; and the government has gone wild! Conservative talk show host Gary Bauer describes the enormity of the stimulus bill in these terms: “It is the largest single expenditure in America’s history. It dwarfs major initiatives like the Louisiana Purchase, the space program, the New Deal, and the Iraq war, even in inflation-adjusted dollars.” Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office projects this package of pork will do more harm than good. 

Surely, the democrats in Congress have been drinking! U.S. Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX) describes just how much the trillion dollar plan will cost. He said, “...this plan will cost taxpayers the equivalent of a million dollars a day for the next 3,000 years to fund a long wish list of items that won’t create jobs.”

Not only did they get drunk and go on a spending spree and run up a tab they cannot afford, but they were so drunk that they decided to be peeping toms as well. The bill pours billions of your hard earned tax dollars into the creation of a new agency, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. This agency is responsible for creating a GOVERNMENT electronic database of the personal medical records of ALL Americans. 

There is no way to ensure privacy of these medical records because there will be government officials, employers, insurers, lawyers, and even ex-spouses that will find a way to access this information. Joe the Plumber can tell you about how privacy of records plays out with government databases. The cost to create and maintain a database of the health records of 300 million Americans is astronomical to say the least. 

The bill also provides for a federal coordinating council for “comparative clinical effectiveness research.” This is liberal-speak for scheming up ways to ration health care based on some government bureaucrat’s review of these records.  Beware Grandma could be denied care because some bureaucrat said treating her cancer is not cost effective.

Maybe they inhaled too. Consider this slop. The bill wastes $650 million for the switch from analog to digital TV of which a part of is dedicated to educate “vulnerable populations” that they need to get their converter boxes or lose their TV signals. After all, the democrats cannot create new jobs if you can’t watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

President Reagan must have seen into the future of the Obama administration when he said, “Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

Let us seriously consider the words of President Thomas Jefferson, “I predict the future happiness of Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” We will all have a hang-over when we wake up to the reality of the enormous cost of this “stimulus” bill.

Gina Parker Ford - CEO of Dental Creations, Ltd., a dental manufacturing company, and a successful attorney - is the National Eagle Forum Chairman for Judicial Reform. Mrs. Ford is immediate past chairman of the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. She serves on the American Family Radio Advisory Board (Texas), and she was both the former Republican Party of Texas Treasurer and Associate General Counsel.