UPDATED
In response to the passage by the House of Representatives of the Senate's health care reform bill on Sunday, Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page today:
With the president signing this unwanted and “transformative” government takeover of our health care system today with promises impossible to keep, let's not get discouraged. Don't get demoralized. Get organized!
We're going to reclaim the power of the people from those who disregarded the will of the people. We're going to fire them and send them back to the private sector, which has been shrinking thanks to their destructive government-growing policies. Maybe when they join the millions of unemployed, they'll understand why Americans wanted them to focus on job creation and an invigorated private sector. Come November, we're going to print pink slips for members of Congress as fast as they've been printing money. . . . .
The three statements I have highlighted above are
false. The first two points are familiar Fox News/GOP spin. But the third falsehood seems to be a Sarah Palin original. It's that ludicrous.
First, is Obama's health care reform package really
unwanted? Most Americans either support the Obama health care reform bill or believe it isn't liberal enough. This is apparent when you look at the latest poll results closely, as
Greenwald has done:
A new CNN poll today finds that Americans oppose the current health care plan by a margin of 59-39%, but a sizable portion of those opposed -- 13% -- oppose it because "it is not liberal enough" (see questions 20 and 21):
Thus, a majority of Americans either support the plan or believe it should be more liberal (52%), while only a minority (43%) oppose the plan on the ground that it is too liberal.
Second, what
government take-over of health care? Obama's health care reform bill -- more accurately described as health
insurance reform -- promises to
provide the health insurance industry with 29 million new customers by 2019.
Third, is the
private sector shrinking thanks to government-growing policies? The stimulus spending bill passed in 2009 -- which Sarah now opposes -- did not shrink the private sector. It has had the opposite effect. Some spending went to contractors in the private sector. To the extent stimulus spending saved the jobs of public sector employees, it also bolstered the private sector. In a capitalist economy, when you save a public sector worker's job, you also save the private sector jobs of those who supply these workers with homes, entertainment, groceries, transportation, etc. Of course, a large part of the stimulus bill went toward tax cuts. What some economists have, in fact, argued is that government spending will raise the deficit, lead to inflation, and thereby have a detrimental effect on the private sector growth
some number of years in the future. Paul Krugman, among other economists, does not share this concern. Anyway, this was not the point Sarah Palin made. Her assertion, that "government growing policies"
are responsible for having caused the "shrinking" of the "private sector," is utter nonsense.
Palin's latest Facebook entry provides further support for the
already overwhelming case that the former governor of Alaska is either recklessly ill-informed or willfully disingenuous about the critical public policy issues of the day.
UPDATE: Two points of my critique suppose that Palin adheres to a conventional understanding of terms like "private sector" and "government." Because I have heard nothing from Palin to suggest otherwise, my critique likewise adheres to the conventional distinction.
Conventionally we think of "government" to be an entity distinct from the private sector, and we refer to an industry such as the health insurance providers as "private sector." Yet it is potentially misleading to speak of certain industries (banking, military-industrial, health insurance, energy) and various branches of the US government as if they were independent of one another. From this convergence many of today's problems arise.
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