So the Obama administration claims it's found someone to come in and clean up the disaster that is the ObamaCare website aka HealthCare.gov.
He's Jeffrey Zients, Obama's new Director of the National Economic Council whom Obama has employed as "fixer" for other dysfunctional Obama websites like the one for Cash For Clunkers.
That raises a bigger question: where do we get a "fixer" to repair the other, much bigger glitches this administration has caused?
Where do we get a "fixer" to repair the other, much bigger glitches this administration has caused?
Because the whole furor over the HealthCare.gov website, including why everyone involved, including the president, didn't know it was going to be a fiasco, has missed the vital point: the root of the problem isn't software but Big Government liberalism.
The ObamaCare website is just the latest illustration of how liberalism promises to fix problems if we just spend enough money, but actually leaves a bigger mess than when it started.
The fact is Big Government liberalism is crashing all around us, not just in America but around the world (just ask anyone living in Greece or France or Venezuela).
When a computer system crashes beyond repair, it produces what software programmers call the "blue screen of death."
We are now living in the era of Blue Screen Liberalism, and this website debacle epitomizes the Obama administration's record on virtually everything else.
For example, unemployment. People point out that after spending $634 million, ObamaCare still can't get a website that works.
After spending almost a trillion dollars in economic stimulus, borrowing trillions more from the Chinese and others, and three waves of printing money disguised as quantitative easing, we all got an economy that so far this year barely registers growth over 1% , with the lowest employment participation rate since the 1970's–a far better guide to what's happening to the job market than the formal unemployment rate.
In fact, under Obama for every three Americans over sixteen earning a paycheck there are two who aren't even looking for work–90 million of them and counting.
Then there's Obama's record on income inequality.
After four years bemoaning the widening gap between rich and poor, and raising income taxes and expanding programs for the poor including food stamps, fully ninety-five percent of the income gains during the Obama years have gone to the top 1 percent of earners–that's compared to 65% during the Bush years.
At the same time we've got 2.7 million more Americans living in poverty than in 2009, and fourteen million more on food stamps–the most in American history.
Finally of course there's the looming train wreck of ObamaCare itself, that was supposed to cost less than $900 million but now, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will cost double that over the next decade, or $1.8 trillion–and don't be surprised if that estimate doesn't continue to roll upwards.
And that's just the beginning. The numbers of people getting kicking off their employers' health care plans and dumped into the exchanges is going to soar once the moratorium on the employee mandate ends next year, and millions more are going to find out that the "affordable" health care options ObamaCare gives them will cost far more than they were ever told, with deductibles of $6,000 and more.
So forget the ObamaCare website. What we really need is a solution to Blue Screen Liberalism, one that fixes a permanently broken app for governance, namely Obama's, and hits the "Refresh" button for the American dream.
Historian Arthur Herman is the author of "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II" (Random House May 2012) and the Pulitzer Prize finalist book "Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age" (Bantam, 2008).
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