In Fundamentally Transforming the United States, Phyllis Schlafly explains how the Democrat party voter base is founded upon those who get (or hope to get) their livelihood from the federal government. It goes much further than Chicago-machine patronage politics writ large; the federal government is deliberately destroying the family structure so as to make people more dependent on the federal government and the Democrat party. Unmarried mothers are a key part of Obama’s voter base. Thus, it is in his interests to discourage men and women from getting and staying married.
How do the Democrats go about attacking the family structure? The attacks go much further than promoting gay marriage and abortion on demand, or free condoms and salacious “sex education” in the public schools. Detrimental as those things are, at least they are visible. It’s the progressives’ stealth jihad against the family that I’m talking about here.
Check out this hidden zinger in Obamacare:
Marriage Penalty in Health Care
A huge marriage penalty is hidden in Obama’s Health Control Law. This law is another federal program providing financial incentives to subsidize marriage avoidance and illegitimate offspring.
Even though all evidence shows that marriage is the best remedy for poverty, lack of health care, domestic violence, child abuse, and school dropouts, federal welfare programs continue to discriminate against marriage and instead give taxpayer handouts to those who reject marriage. This isn’t any accident; it is a central part of the Democrats’ political strategy that produced 70% of unmarried women voting for Obama for President in 2008.
Here is the approximate cost in the Health Control Law for an unmarried couple who each earn $25,000 a year (total: $50,000). When they both buy health insurance (which will be mandatory), the combined premiums they pay will be capped at $3,076 a year. But if the couple gets married and has the same combined income of $50,000, they will pay annual premiums up to a cap of $5,160 a year. That means they have to fork over a marriage penalty of $2,084.
The marriage penalty is the result of the fact that government subsidies for buying health insurance are pegged to the federal poverty guidelines. Couples that remain unmarried are rewarded with a separate health care subsidy for each income.
When the Wall Street Journal reporter quizzed the Democratic authors of the health care bill, they made it clear that this differential was deliberate. The staffer justified the discriminatory treatment because “you have to decide what your goals are.” Indeed, the Democrats have decided what their goals are. They know that 70% of unmarried women voted for Obama in 2008, and the Democrats plan to reward this group with health insurance subsidies.
The House staffer told the Wall Street Journal reporter that the Democrats can’t make the subsidies neutral towards marriage because that would give a traditional one-breadwinner married couple a more generous subsidy than a single parent at the same income level. Horrors! The Democrats certainly are not going to allow traditional marriage to be preferred over couples who just shack up!
Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously and accurately explained the disastrous results of welfare back in 1965. The welfare system created a matriarchy with millions of children lacking their father in the home. It’s no wonder illegitimate birthrates are soaring and unmarried mothers now give birth to 4 out of every 10 babies born in the United States.
Means-tested welfare programs already cost taxpayers close to $1 trillion a year (even more than national defense!), and Obamacare is projected to add another $2.5 trillion after all its provisions take effect. There’s no end in sight to the increasing costs of these entitlements. In one year, the Obama Administration will spend more taxpayers’ money on spreading the wealth to non-taxpayers than George W. Bush spent on the entire Iraq war.
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a liberal firm that consults for clients such as Bill Clinton and John Kerry, admitted: “Unmarried women represent one of the most reliable Democratic cohorts in the electorate . . . leading the charge for fundamental change in health care.”
It used to be that a husband was responsible for the financial support of his wife and children, but the feminists’ agenda calls for replacing husbands with Big Brother Government. The feminists call their movement “women’s liberation,” and Obamacare is one more way to help them achieve their goal.
Feminists keep tightening their control over the social policies of the Democratic Party, and Obamacare will be his third payoff to the feminists. The first bill Obama signed as President, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, enables women to sue employers years many years after any alleged workplace discrimination (when no one is still alive to defend against allegations), and the second payoff was getting Obama to give the majority of taxpayer-paid Stimulus jobs to women even though men have suffered the big majority of job losses.
The scavenger hunt is on
I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant nor a “policy wonk” (whatever that is supposed to be). Sorting through the huge pile of paperwork that makes up the Obamacare bill, or for that matter, the recent financial regulatory bill, and piecing together the hidden “zingers” that are poised to harm each sector of our economy and society, is beyond my capabilities. This is not a one-person job. I would like to urge everyone who is able to do so, to help complete this task by researching how those bills will affect their community and their sector of the economy, and submit that information to 2.0: The Blogmocracy.
The scavenger hunt is on, and the only prize is preserving your freedom.
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