Our ongoing debate about government’s role in health care is proving worthwhile because it forces people to focus on the real tradeoffs in a system mandated — if not directly operated — by government, rather than one selected by individuals or their employers.  Today, our system is a dysfunctional hybrid. (more…)

It’s becoming a ritual at the State Capitol: a committee is meeting to study the competing pressures of spending mandates and spending limits on the state budget.  Like those before them, this year’s panel has heard from a litany of experts and special interests, almost all of whom will complain about the Gordian knot in which the state budget is entangled.

Yes, Colorado’s budget is complicated and elected officials are often asked to make difficult, sometimes incoherent, fiscal choices.  Like it or not, the people of Colorado have, in exchange for their tax dollars, insisted on external checks and balances which sometimes become unbalanced themselves. (more…)

Impending mortality tends to focus the mind, and looming elections tend to focus politicians’ ears on vox populi.  But just as theologians debate the sincerity of “deathbed conversions,” voters should be skeptical of lawmakers who find religion as elections near.

Although 15 months remain until the 2010 elections, Democrats are learning — just as Republicans discovered after their 2004 victory tour — how quickly the political winds can shift for the party in power. (more…)

Listening to President Obama explain “his” health care plan, I can’t help but wonder if he actually believes his own words.

Maybe it’s been so long since the adoring press corps has held him accountable for his innumerable exaggerations, omissions and misstatements that he believes he can create a new reality simply by speaking it into existence.

However, for anyone who’s been paying attention, the President’s recent health care pep rally disguised as a press conference was littered with statements that just don’t square with reality: (more…)

Once climate-change regulators strangle the economy and carbon-counters turn gas, oil and electricity into expensive luxuries, perhaps American farmers will recognize how “our friends” in Washington, D.C., sold us out in the name of political compromise.

Last week, Capitol Hill’s agriculture lobby had a choice:  withhold support from the Waxman-Markey climate control bill or agree to a compromise that provides cover to rural district Democrats who support it.

Without those rural votes, Waxman-Markey was bound for the shredder.  With those votes, it garnered just one more vote than the bare minimum needed for passage. (more…)

Grappling with declining state revenues makes for some very unpleasant budget choices, as Governor Ritter and the Democrat majorities in the state legislature learned over the past 12 months.

It’s fair to criticize those choices, including the governor last year denying for several months that a problem existed.  Yet anyone who has shouldered the responsibility of balancing a budget during a recession understands that learning from your own mistakes is inevitable.

Learning, however, is essential — both to sound fiscal policy and to political credibility.  That’s why it was astonishing to hear Governor Ritter and leading Democrats dismiss the need for a special session of the legislature on the very day they acknowledged that the state will start the new fiscal year nearly $400 million in the hole. (more…)

America’s health care system certainly has its share of problems — of which most emanate from politicians’ tinkering, tempting frustrated consumers with promises of better benefits at someone else’s expense.

So the prospect of President Obama and Congress remaking American health care in their own image should scare the pants off anyone who looks not merely at the existing problems but at government’s abysmal record as a problem-solver. (more…)

President Obama claims to “have no interest” in running General Motors.  He does so with a straight face — and the same monotonous cadence that he employs whether condemning North Korea for nuclear explosions or joking with Jay Leno.  But his actions, as well as his words, betray him.

The significance of the bankruptcy and restructuring of General Motors isn’t that it happened but the way it happened.

His protestations notwithstanding, this is Barack Obama’s General Motors.  Just read from his statement earlier this month: (more…)

President Obama says he seeks “empathy” in a Supreme Court justice.  His first nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, says a “wise Latina woman” would generally make better decisions because of “the richness of her experiences” than a white man.

Those views reveal the extent to which political and personal agendas have supplanted the rule of law in selecting nominees.

If “rule of law” sounds cold and callous, remember that the alternative isn’t “rule of empathy” but “rule of men” — the hierarchy most prevalent throughout human history. (more…)

If Democrats in the 2007 General Assembly were devious for passing Gov. Ritter’s infamous property tax hike without voter approval, the current crop plunges to new depths.

In an act of sheer arrogance, this year’s Democrat majority poked taxpayers in the eye just for spite. (more…)