I mean, look at the kind of stuff that happens in the UK and ask yourself if we really, really want our health care system to be like that:

Doctors left a premature baby to die because he was born two days too early, his devastated mother claimed yesterday.

Sarah Capewell begged them to save her tiny son, who was born just 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy – almost four months early.

They ignored her pleas and allegedly told her they were following national guidelines that babies born before 22 weeks should not be given medical treatment.

(snip)

Medics allegedly told her that they would have tried to save the baby if he had been born two days later, at 22 weeks.
In fact, the medical guidelines for Health Service hospitals state that babies should not be given intensive care if they are born at less than 23 weeks.

The guidance, drawn up by the Nuffield Council, is not compulsory but advises doctors that medical intervention for very premature children is not in the best interests of the baby, and is not ’standard practice’.

James Paget Hospital in Norfolk refused to comment on the case but said it was not responsible for setting the guidelines relating to premature births.

A trust spokesman said: ‘Like other acute hospitals, we follow national guidance from the British Association of Perinatal Medicine regarding premature births.’

Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what Obama and the Democrats want to bring here to the United States. A panel of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who will set policies and guidelines that literally will decide who gets treated, how they get treated, and when (if ever) they get treated. Now, “death panel” may sound harsh to our friends on the left, but what else would you call it?

Liberals have to know that their vision for America will ruin this country. We have too much debt and too much long-term financial obligations as it is, yet they want to add to it. For all the talk they give about the future generations, etc., it’s quite clear that they don’t care about posterity one bit. I mean, who cares if they’ve mortgaged the future of their children, grandchildren, and great-great-great grandchildren, so long as they get theirs right now? It’s all good, right?

President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary said Sunday he cannot rule out higher taxes to help tame an exploding budget deficit, and his chief economic adviser would not dismiss raising them on middle-class Americans as part of a health care overhaul.

…

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers both sidestepped questions on Obama’s intentions about taxes. Geithner said the White House was not ready to rule out a tax hike to lower the federal deficit; Summers said Obama’s proposed health care overhaul needs funding from somewhere.

“There is a lot that can happen over time,” Summers said, adding that the administration believes “it is never a good idea to absolutely rule things out, no matter what.”

During his presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly vowed “you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.” But the simple reality remains that his ambitious overhaul of how Americans receive health care — promised without increasing the federal deficit — must be paid for.

“If we want an economy that’s going to grow in the future, people have to understand we have to bring those deficits down. And it’s going to be difficult, hard for us to do. And the path to that is through health care reform,” Geithner said. “We’re not at the point yet where we’re going to make a judgment about what it’s going to take.”

Obama claimed he wasn’t going to raise taxes on the middle class. I called him a liar. We’ll see how this plays out, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that within a year, two at the very most, we’ll have a middle class tax increase, or at least an attempt to increase them.

Why am I so sure about this? Democrats — esp. liberal democrats — love higher taxes and higher spending. It’s in their DNA or something.

Remember back in 1992-1993, when Clinton ran for office and won? He ran largely on a middle class tax cut. He announced it in the New Hampshire primaries, if I’m not mistaken, and kept talking about it. When he took office, he brazenly said no such thing was being contemplated and how on earth people got that impression was beyond him. A few weeks into his presidency, he gave a nationally televised speech saying he had hoped he wouldn’t have to raise taxes on the middle class but, darn it, he had to.

So you see, nothing is new with these people. When they say “X”, count on it being a lie. Then watch as they brazenly lie about the lie, saying that they never promised “X” in the first place. You can better believe that when they come for this middle class tax increase in a year or so, they’re going to do an in-your-face lie and say they never promised a tax cut to you folks. In the old days, before the blogosphere and before FOX News came along, they could get away with this. They can’t anymore, and it’s going to make for some interesting blog material.

As always, liberals never understand that it’s not the level of taxation that determines whether or not we have a deficit, it’s the level of spending. You want to balance the budget? Then cut the spending. I said that in 2005 (when I first started to blog), and I’ll say it until the day I die, no matter what Party is in control. It’s not that Washington doesn’t have enough money to do the things it wants to do, it’s that it spends it on crap they shouldn’t be spending it on in the first place!

A key House chairman and moderate House Democrats on Tuesday agreed to a White House-backed proposal that would give an outside panel the power to make cuts to government-financed health care programs. White House budget director Peter Orszag declared the plan “probably the most important piece that can be added” to the House’s health care reform legislation.

But on Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office said the proposal to give an independent panel the power to keep Medicare spending in check would only save about $2 billion over 10 years- a drop in the bucket compared to the bill’s $1 trillion price tag.

Look, it’s quite simply this: no matter what the Democrats in Congress try to do in regards to making sure that everyone has insurance, there’s no way to pay for it. They can tax the rich into oblivion, but that well will eventually run dry. They can cut costs everywhere they want, but there’s no way they are going to save the trillions necessary to cover every single person in this country, not with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and every other “entitlement” program eating us alive year after year. Not to mention the incredible debt we already have and must pay back (the interest alone is killling us).

Back in the 1960s when Medicare was first proposed, the projections were that the program would only run a few million dollars per year. Within a decade, that number had skyrocketed. Here we are, forty years later, and it consumes a large portion of the federal budget. Yet liberals want to sit there and say to us that the same thing won’t happen here. Puh-lease. ANY projection of cost by a liberal will be grossly underestimated, and within a generation this health care scam they’re pushing will bankrupt the nation once and for all, and THAT’S the reason we oppose it.

If Obama and the Democrats want to make sure everyone has health insurance, fine. Cut taxes and let people buy their own coverage. But don’t try and get the government to provide it for them, and stop lying about what you’re really trying to do. The main reason we have so many problems in this day and age is because the federal government tries to do things it’s not equipped to do, things it has no business doing. Providing health insurance is one of those things.

Oh, and for the libs who are taking issue with Representative Fox for saying that all Americans have health care, stop trying to twist her words and acknowledge the fact that she is correct. ALL Americans have access to health care, no matter what their financial situation. Those who choose not to go in, well, that’s their fault. There are plenty of programs and charities out there to help people like them.

And, in my opinion, I think this country and its health care would be better served if more people would stop going to the doctor for every minor sniffle or sneeze they get. When health care is free, people use (or abuse, as the case may be) it more, even though they may not need it. When they have to pay for it, even partially, they may just call in sick, take a cold pill, and then go back to bed. It’s the “free” programs like Medicare and Medicaid which are largely responsible for the skyrocketing costs of health care in this country. There are other reasons, too, but it’s not because the medical industry are greedy bastards, as the left would have you believe.

To be sure, I’m not saying someone with breast cancer or something like that should stay away from the hospital but, c’mon, use your head. You have a cold. It’s not life-threatening, and you sure as hell don’t need to go see a doctor for it.

First, he’s hiding his budget numbers. Second, he’s hiding his spending cuts report. Third, he’s hiding his Gitmo decision.

Does that sound like a man who campaigned on “transparency”? Of course not. But, then again, we conservatives told you he was lying.

First off, Democrats never — EVER — cut spending. It’s against their religion. He’s hiding his report because there are no cuts to be made. He will, once it is released, give the same old lefty excuse, that he looked high and low for cuts and, gosh darnit, there just weren’t any to be had (oh, he might cut a couple of useless items and save a few million, but that’ll be the extent of it).

Second, closing Gitmo just won’t happen. You can quote me on that. I’ve said it a couple of times on this blog, that the left used Gitmo and the war for political gain and now that they’re in office, why, they now realize these people are dangerous and we simply have to keep them in there.

Third, his budget numbers are going to make any — or even all — of Bush’s numbers look spectacular by comparison. Obama’s deficit for just this one year is going to end up around $1.8 trillion! And that’s IF his numbers come in as he expects! If they don’t (and trust me, they won’t), then he’s looking at over $2 trillion in the hole (or down it, rather). And that’s without the massive increase if this health care program gets passed.

If you look at Obama’s numbers (and people have, much to the left’s chagrin), you’ll see just what kind of ideology this man and his cronies are pushing. It’s not a pretty picture, folks.

I knew this man would be a disaster going in. In fact, I counted on it. Our choice in 2008 was between a liberal Democrat and a liberal Republican. I didn’t see any difference in the two, to be frank, except that the damage caused by the Democrat would be slightly more than the damage caused by the Republican. Liberalism is still liberalism, after all.

Let me be clear, here: it’s not that I want to see Democrats discredited and defeated, per se, it’s that I want to see liberalism discredited and defeated. It’s why we are where we are today, and the sooner people realize what it is and what it does to a nation and its people, the better off we’ll all be.

Update: I meant to include this link in this post somewhere, but forgot:

Government Spending Shatters Post-War Records

White House senior adviser David Axelrod said the president won’t rule out a health care reform bill that includes a middle-class tax hike.

“The president had said in the past that he doesn’t believe taxing health care benefits at any level is necessarily the best way to go here. He still believes that,” Axelrod told me on This Week, “But there are a number of formulations and we’ll wait and see. The important thing at this point is to keep the process moving, to keep people at the table, to the keep the discussions going. We’ve gotten a long way down the road and we want to finish that journey.”

I pressed Axelrod on whether Obama will draw a line in the sand and veto any bill that funds health care reform with tax hikes for people making under $250,000 a year — despite a pledge Barack Obama made during the 2008 presidential campaign not to raise taxes on the poor and middle-class.

“One of the problems we’ve had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other. And you don’t get anything done. That’s not the way the president approaches us. He is very cognizant of protecting people — middle class people, hard-working people who are trying to get along in a very difficult economy. And he will continue to represent them in these talks,” Axelrod said.

“But they’re also dealing with punishing health care costs, and that’s something that we have to deal with.”

We’re talking about Democrats, here. When they say they won’t rule something out, that means they’ve already decided in favor of it. When it comes to tax increases, they never met one they didn’t like. So you can bet that before the year is out, your taxes will be going up. And up. And up.

There’s no other way Obama is going to pay for all these pet projects of his. The Treasury is broke, especially after his massive spending spree. It’s rapidly getting to the point where we won’t be able to borrow any money, because our debt has gotten so high and creditors — like China — see us a risky investment.

Obama wants to have socialized health care (I don’t care what he calls it or how he dresses it up, that’s what he’s shooting for) and a host of other things paid for by the American taxpayer. We’re talking trillions of dollars in extra spending, and he’s going to sit there and tell us he won’t raise taxes? Spare us, please, Mr. President. Tax increases are his plan. They always have been and, as a liberal Democrat, they always will be. It’s in their DNA. They never think “Gee, maybe we should cut spending first.” Like a Pavlovian dog, their reflexive instinct is to raise taxes across the board, be it income taxes or other, less noticeable, ones (like cigarette taxes, energy taxes, alcohol taxes, etc.).

Others commenting:

Hot Air
Instapundit
Wizbang

Californians are well known for periodic voter revolts, but on Tuesday they did more than just lash out at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature over the state’s fiscal debacle.

By rejecting five budget measures, Californians also brought into stark relief the fact that they, too, share blame for the political dysfunction that has brought California to the brink of insolvency.

Rightly or wrongly, voters in the special election refused either to extend new tax hikes or to cap state spending. They also declined to unlock funds that they had voted in better financial times to set aside for special purposes.

See, the problem in California is that it’s too easy to add spending to the yearly budget. Whether it’s by the legislature, the governor, or by some ballot measure approved by the voters, it all adds up. And once some special project or program is put in the budget, it’s next to impossible to have it removed (that goes for any state, btw, and the federal government).

Are the voters in California to blame for the fiscal mess in that state? Partially, because they approved a lot of special funding to some “flavor of the month” programs (the article does mention that). But they’re not totally to blame, either. The people they elected have also put up some hefty numbers in the budget as well. The real culprit isn’t the politicians or the voters, it’s liberalism in general. And California is the most liberal state in the nation.

Liberals want free education, free healthcare, free housing, free vacations, etc., yet they never stop to think about who will pay for it, or how. That’s what we’re seeing in Washington right now, and it’s what we’ve seen from liberals since the days of FDR (more so after LBJ). You want to see where liberalism will lead us, you don’t need to look any further than the State of California. If Obama and his liberal pals in Congress get their way, we’ll all be in the same boat as California.

Again, it’s not the level of taxation that produces deficits, it’s the spending. It always is. You can raise taxes as high as you want, but if you keep spending more than you take in, you’re going to have deficits and debt. There’s no way around that simple fact.

Other commenting:

Hot Air
Michelle Malkin
LaShawn Barber
Patterico
Common Sense Political Thought
Stop The ACLU
Sister Toldjah

They’re also thinking about increaing taxes even higher on cigarettes, alcohol, and other so-called “bad habit” products. There’s even the possibility that they’ll start taxing your employer-provided health benefits.

What does all of this mean? It means that conservatives were right about the Democrats, that they know only two things when it comes to government: high taxes and even higher spending.

If you saved all of your receipts, pay stubs, bills, etc., over any given year and took a look at what you paid in taxes — whether it’s sales tax, excise tax, whatever — you’d probably have a stroke. These people are nickel-and-diming us to death. And they wonder why people have a problem with it. It’s not that the government doesn’t have enough money to spend, it’s that they spend too much to begin with.

We’re not asking for much, just that government — whether federal, state, or local — live within its own means and stop fleecing us the way it does. We work hard, we deserve to keep as much of our money as possible and use it as we see fit, whether it’s to pay down our own debt, save for our retirement, or put our kids through college. Is that so much to ask? To a liberal, yes, it is, because they think this is all something government should do for you, which means higher taxes and even higher spending, economy be damned.

We’re just a few months into a Democrat-controlled Washington, and look at all the power- and money-grabbing that has gone on. And we’re expected to just sit here and take it for the next four to eight years? Hardly. The left can laugh and mock conservatives and conservatism all it wants, but come 2010, I think they’re going to be in for a nasty little surprise. We are by no means beaten, defeated, or demoralized as they would have you believe, and I firmly believe that if the Democrats continue down this road, they’re headed for electoral disaster. Conservatism WILL be back. Count on it.

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”

That’s pretty rich, I have to say. After blowing through trillions — not billions, mind you, but trillions — of dollars in taxpayer money or money printed up just for the heck of it, he now sees that it’s a problem. Spare us please, Mr. President.

I had a huge problem with Bush’s deficits and his unwillingness to veto any spending bills in his term, but this guy takes the cake. He makes Bush look like a miser. When he shows us some real fiscal responsibility, THEN he can stand there and give speeches like this. Until then, STFU and GBTW.

Update: Others commenting:

Gateway Pundit
Hot Air (here and here)
Jules Crittenden
Stop The ACLU

President Barack Obama will ask his Cabinet Monday to identify cuts in their budgets as he moves in the coming weeks to eliminate dozens of wasteful government programs.

In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama also announced the appointment of a chief performance officer and a chief technology officer who, he said, “will help us revamp government operations from top to bottom.”

His promise to break “bad habits” in Washington and trim unnecessary programs from the federal budget was a standard line on the campaign trail, and after directing billions of dollars in the first months of his presidency to prop up the economy, Obama needs to show he can trim money as well as he can spend it.

“In this effort, there will be no sacred cows, and no pet projects,” Obama said Saturday. “All across America, families are making hard choices, and it’s time their government did the same.”

No “sacred cows”, eh? What about entitlements? Yeah, those are about as sacred to the left as anything gets. If Obama even ACTS like he’s going to cut one of those, look out. The left will have him backpeddling quicker than you can say “hope and change”.

Look, if he’s serious about this, then great. I would fully support him on that. But c’mon. When was the last time a Democrat cut spending on anything, except the military? Never. And it won’t be any different this time.

Any takers that his cabinet will take a “good look” at their respective budgets and only come up with a handful of programs to be cut that would only save a few billion per year? Thought not. That’s what Clinton and Gore did back in the early 1990s. There are PLENTY of needless projects that we can cut, but nobody (Republicans and Democrats) has the balls to do it, lest some intererst group yell and scream about losing their funding.

If you want to get the deficit under control and get the economy moving again, here’s what you do:

1) Lower taxes on business, corporations, and the so-called rich to promote more investment. This will spur the economy, create more jobs, and increase the tax base (more people with jobs/better paying jobs means more people paying taxes);

2) Cut the spending. Honestly look at what is in the budget and get rid of the stuff we absolutely do not need, things that are wasteful and inefficient, and things that are doing more harm than good. Return a lot of these programs to the state level where they belong. This list can be quite long (and there are people who think these programs are vital and cannot be touched), so we’ll just leave it at that. Regardless, hard choices have to be made. This will require more courage than any current politician has, but it needs to be done. The same thing goes for pork spending and all of these bailouts;

3) Resist the temptations to spend, spend, spend whenever there is a surplus or whenever the numbers turn out to be better than originally planned. This used to be solely the domain of Democrats, but the Republican Party of 2000-2006 did the same thing, and lost because of it;

4) Do NOT add anything else to the budget that we simply cannot afford (socialized health care, for example). These things have a tendency to grow out of control. Indeed, if you really want to be honest about it, they are the main reason we are bleeding red ink year after year.

Will any of those things happen? Under a Democrat administration, it’s not very likely. But if Obama surprises me and does it, then I’ll be the first one to support him on it. But I won’t be holding my breath, that’s for sure.

Monday Morning Update: Oooh, he’s going to order his cabinet to cut — are you ready for this? — $100 million:

President Obama plans to convene his Cabinet for the first time today, where he will order members to identify a combined $100 million in budget cuts over the next 90 days, according to a senior administration official.

Although the cuts would account to a minuscule portion of the federal budget, they are intended to signal the president’s determination to trim spending and reform government, the official said.

I love that spin. They “signal the president’s determination”…pfft! They don’t signify anything, except his willingness to pay lip service to a problem and then offer a token gesture towards solving it. With Democrats, it’s not what they actually do that matters, it’s what they say. And the press just eats it up.