Photo Credit: Affordable Pharmacy Action
In this new age, presidents are now being interviewed by Youtube stars. One serious question among all the silly questions that were asked by the Youtubers stuck out, as well as the answer by Pres.Obama. The question was about whether or not the government has the people's interests at heart, or only serves special interests.
Here is how the conversation played out with this wonderful question from Youtuber Hank Green:
Green: "So you use the phrase middle class economics in the speech which I think is an idea that we needed a phrase for."
Obama: "RIght."
Green: "But when I first told people I was going to come talk to you, a lot of them expressed that they felt like the government was never going to have their interests at heart because the government existed to protect the interests of corporations and business, The prime example of this is taking former industry leaders and putting them in positions where they're regulating the industry's they use to be in charge of. Is that a legitimate concern and do you understand where those people are coming from?"
Obama: "Yeah, you know look, I understand peoples skepticism and cynicism . . . on the other hand think about a buncha stuff the government does do, I mean, since I've been in office we've been able to take away, money that was being siphoned off by banks in the student loan program and billions of dollars are now suddenly going directly to students to make it easier for them to finance their student loans. Ya know, simple stuff that we often take for granted like, Social Security or Medicare, in the case of many of your viewers, their grandparents.That's a government program that a, helps a lot of people. What is true is that too often lobbyists and special interests are able to block efforts to make the systems fairer, and to make it work better, but our history shows that when people get involved, when they get engaged, when they vote, that in fact, change happens, it doesn't always happen 100%, it doesn't always happen immediately, but it happens."
Hopefully the government has done a lot more than just diverted money raised by increasing income taxes. The entire student loan bill simply allowed students to refinance their loans at a better interest rate, which is good news, but still needed to be paid for.
Someone always has to pay for things that are free or reduced. Liberals will learn this someday I assure you.
President Obama's second example, Medicare and Social Security were the other two examples of "projects" the government does well.
Medicare is a disaster of a program that is over 100,000 pages long and has the government playing the role of a private insurance company. Medicare is unsustainable and everyone knows it. There are the hundreds of Special Interests in the medical field that contribute campaign dollars to the congressmen that keep passing the buck down the road to the next generation, you know, the generation Obama is speaking to on Youtube.
"But what makes Medicare different is the vast amount of money involved — the program now spends over half a trillion dollars a year — and the complexity of modern medicine, which makes it difficult for opponents of waste to identify and eliminate it. Political scientists describe this state of affairs as a "public-choice failure" — a situation in which the political incentives all point toward waste, and focused interest groups are rewarded at the expense of society as a whole." Public Affairs
Now, does Social Security involve any special interests that get in the way of fairness? If fairness is satisfying special interest and voters with money that isn't available to get reelected then yes, social security is very fair only to the people getting the current benefits. Obama diverted Social Security benefits (2% lower) for one year before the 2012 election which made people happy, and vote for him one more year. That didn't exactly help the funding of a program that will soon have 2 workers for every 1 receiving benefits. The waste and abuse of this program is well documented by congress, everyone knows.
Obama ends by basically saying change for the sake of change is a great thing. When people get together and vote, do they expect the people they vote for to work for them, or for themselves? The bigger the government gets, the messier the programs get, the more corruption there is, the worse the outlook is for those watching Obama talk to their Youtube stars.
Watch his interviews hereif you are really bored. This particular question is at the 4:00 mark.