I would not vote for Obama if he were the Republican nominee. That explains why I'll never vote for Romney.

By Roger F. Gay

OMG! OBAMA! AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

By now you're familiar with Mitt Romney's argument in favor of himself. He's not Barack Obama. Many people have their doubts. It's hard to imagine two politicians as equal in politics and character. In an effort to overcome this rather glaring problem, his guys are asserting that Barack is a Communist. “At least Romney is not,” they argue. Well, look guys; you can't have it both ways.

Among the dirty and sometimes sad last minute tricks with automatic dialers, the Romney folks have been running the old familiar “I'll repeal ObamaCare” routine, as if we should all have an enormous stake in referring to it as RomneyCare instead. If it were to come to pass, Ms. Clinton would probably defeat Romney in 2016 by holding “a conversation” to remind everyone that it was called HillaryCare before it was called ObamaCare or RomneyCare.

The details, intended to convince voters that Romney's approach to national socialized medicine is substantially different when compared to Obama's approach to national socialized medicine is that Romney will “leave it to the states.” If you've read my articles regularly, you weren't fooled by that. I've described the trick more than once. Let me summarize once again for those just tuning in.

The federal government does not have Constitutional authority to establish or manage any sort of welfare system, including a national health care (or health insurance) system. Through step-by-step “slippery slope” developments, survivor benefits provided as part of military compensation evolved into the welfare state that we have today; but not by allowing the federal government to directly establish or manage any sort of welfare system.

The federal government offers large amounts of money to the states to run their welfare programs; but it's not without strings attached. In order for the states to receive the funding, they must agree to implement “mandates.” This is how federal takeovers work. Politicians and bureaucrats manipulate the mandates and states effectively become administrative units under the control of the federal bureaucracy. And it's a lot of money, more than enough to have invited a vast amount of corruption.

States occasionally resist, but rarely say no. To make federal leverage even more powerful, the funds for a variety of programs are packaged together in “blocs”, and called “bloc grants.” States are then not allowed to choose which of the programs they agree to and which they reject. They must participate in all the programs in the bloc, implementing all the mandates, or receive no funding at all for that entire bloc. States occasionally complain, but never say no.

This is the way that it's done, and it doesn't matter whether the president has a D or an R behind his name. It wouldn't matter in the least whether the project is commonly called ObamaCare or RomneyCare or HillaryCare. It really doesn't matter at all which party succeeds in taking credit. The only difference is in the spin. The Democrats would call it a federal government accomplishment, more proof that consolidation and expansion of central control is always a good thing. Republicans, claiming to be “conservative” (while developing national socialized medicine – how bizarre is that?) will say that they're “leaving it to the states” (sshhh … to implement the mandates).

There is another trick, and one you should know about. Lots of this stuff that the federal government funds doesn't actually do anything good. That's become tiresome for the politicians because geeks like me come along and point out that many of the programs don't produce the advertised results. So, they started releasing states from some of the mandates, “leaving it to the states” to defend themselves. But the states don't need to either. There are no mandates, just money being passed to the states and getting lost somewhere and nobody seems able to find it. Money? What money? Program? What program? What purpose? What goals? (Yes indeed, “earmarks” are not the definition of federal “pork”.)

It's a racket. It's a money machine, pumping 100s of billions of dollars into the hands of political (and business) friends (and into their own pockets). It's not about political ideology or theory. They're just stealing stuff, and it doesn't matter whether there's an R or a D behind their names.

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