Representative Shea-Porter, when given a simple solution invariably chooses the more complex one because it does a better job of hiding the true costs and intentions of any given legislative endeavor. Insurance reform is the fine example, but a more obvious choice is Cap and Trade. A basic sin-tax on carbon, like those on tobacco, would accomplish the goal. It is simple. It could be written and passed in a day. It generates direct revenue and begins to reduce consumption (and emissions) almost immediately. Further, a carbon tax could be tweaked or graduated to achieve or maintain the desired result, assuming the real goal was to modify behavior away from a perceived ill for some stated goal.
But what Ms. Shea-Porter went in for was a massive reordering of the energy industry complete with more government, boards, commissions, exceptions, exclusions, and the favoritism evident in hand outs, discounts and giveaways that benefit incumbents and captains of investment and industry at the expense of regular Americans. Government, Big energy, GE, and her Green Lobby supporters get rich while we pay for it all and get managed like sheep.
The House Cap and Trade bill is so purposefully complex that neither she nor anyone likely has a clue what it will do, how it will do it, or how to measure a result—not that it matters. When it fails—as it would—to accomplish its stated goals her response would be the same as every liberal response to every failed policy they have ever fooled the public into accepting; it’s someone else’s fault, but we can fix it with more of your money.
Pick any program, endeavor, plan, proposal, initiative, or a policy, and they all work the same way. Carol just wants more money for government. She wants more control for government. That is the goal. The government decides, and you live with it. States rights and individual rights be damned.
But she can’t come out and say that. She can’t stand before a room full of constituents and say, “the government needs more of your money so that it can control more of your lives, because I believe government can do a better job with both.”
But why not? If that is what people really voted for in Carol Shea-Porter, and she insists they did, why can’t she say it? She can’t because they did not vote for that and she knows it.
The fact is that Carol doesn’t care about your children’s health or education unless it is the government that cares for and educates them.
Carol doesn’t care about seniors. Carol cares about how the government can control them in regards to the cost and function of a health care system she does not trust in the hands of anyone but the government.
Carol does not care about the environment, or energy, or ecology. Carol only wants to figure out how she can spend your money to pick winners and losers that advance the liberal energy agenda under the false notion of some catastrophic danger she cannot clearly define or debate.
The only thing Carol cares about it is her political party, and how she can help it use the fruits of your labor to advance its desire to control everyone and everything with complex legislations and regulations. Carol is a socialist, a central planner, she is what Jonah Goldberg–quoting George Carlin I believe–called a smiley faced fascist.
There have not been many happy faces on the victory lap through New Hampshire’s congressional district one however. No one is throwing roses, or popping champagne.
Could Carol’s few weeks outside the Georgetown bubble, breathing in the uncivilized air of the proletariat, allowed her to glean anything useful about the will of those who elected her? Has dipping a big ugly toe into the filmy surface of the constituents pool provided any clue as to what the political waters hold? Is there something she can take back with her to the mother ship regarding the peoples overwhelming objection to her political course to date? Of course there is. She will go back to DC certain that we the people still do not have the slightest idea what is best for us, or who is more qualified to decide such things. And she will continue to vote accordingly.
Note: in talking with Steve, along with all of the other videos below, recorded Carol Shea-Porter’s opening remarks at the Laconia Town Hall event – there is NOTHING in this video of her opening remarks that would invalidate anything that Steve says above. In fact, it shows two things:
She is really on the defensive for her vote on Obamacare
She truly believes, as most Progressives (be they Democrat or Republican) do, that only bigger Government can solve our problems and must "guide us" to a Utopia of their design
Thanks to Steve for letting put this vid on his post! -Skip
Cross Posted From NH Insider
