Search This Blog

Sunday, October 15, 2017

What's Actually Happening

From the current crop of news stories, you might miss what is actually happening in the USA and around the world today.  It's not that the stories are mixed into the news reports, but rather that they are totally distorted.

Let's look at an example.  President Trump ended subsidies under Obamacare.  He's trying to destroy Obamacare and make poor people pay more for their coverage.  Right?  That's what is in the news, isn't it?  The truth, however, is something quite different.  When Obamacare was passed, it included a three year "transitional" program that gave subsidies to insurance companies to assist in their making the switch over to Obamacare.  When the three years were up, the mechanism for giving subsidies to these huge insurance companies was still there, but the money appropriated by Congress had run out.  The Congress did not appropriate any more money for the subsidies.  President Obama, however, wanted to continue giving the cash to the insurance companies, and he did so without any congressional action.  It was such an improper act that the House went to court for an order that the subsidies had to stop.  The matter was litigated, and there was an order in 2016 holding that the subsidies were illegal unless Congress appropriated the money.  Clearly, that was the correct decision under the Constitution.  Since the Obama White House said it wanted to appeal, the court stayed the enforcement of its order pending an appeal.  In other words, the court didn't order an immediate cessation of payments.  This week, President Trump announced that the Justice Department had looked at the case and concluded that the court's decision was correct.  There will be no appeal by the White House and the subsidies will therefore cease in accordance with the court order.  That's hardly an "attack" on the poor.  It's the mega-rich insurance companies that won't get their subsidies, not the poor.  And following the Constitution is hard to characterize as an attack.  In this case, it seems the real truth doesn't matter to the media and the Democrats.

And then there's the matter of DACA and the wall.  President Trump listed is conditions for a law extending DACA, one of which is appropriation of funds for the construction of the wall.  The media and the Democrats denounced this as racist and, well you get the idea.  Here's a president who got elected promising to build a wall.  Of all of Trump's promises during the campaign, nothing was more central to his effort than building a wall.  Now the media/Democrats are surprised that he wants to build the wall in exchange for DACA?  Again, the supposed surprise is ridiculous.

The truth is that the media pays too much attention to what the President tweets rather than what he does.  I don't think that the average America feels that way.  Most people don't care what words he uses in some tweet.  They do care, however, about what he does.  Someday, the media/Democrat bubble is going to burst, and when it does and reality enters that world, it's going to be truly fun to watch.

No comments: