At the risk of echoing Andy Rooney (one of the few celebrities who's survived the last couple of weeks), don't you just hate it when political candidates get elected then forget what they said back when they were candidates? As if it were so long ago that they assume we'd forgotten?
I mean, I don't want to sound like some na?ve first-time voter either, but I remember just a few months back – before the wheels fell off the economy (American-made, right?) and swayed the election more than any vice presidential pick ever could have – when candidate John McCain talked about phasing out employer-paid benefits (or at least taxing them to death) while the more liberal candidate Barack Obama actually took the more conservative tack by arguing for the sanctity of the tax-sheltered employer-paid benefit model.
At the time, it seemed to a lot of people, everything else aside, that a vote for employee benefits (as they exist today) meant casting a vote for Obama. Strange, I know.
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But over the last couple of months, a staple of Obama's mandate to Congress has been levying a tax on most employee benefits to pay for health care for all. Although we should probably be grateful that at least this time he's at least looking for a way to actually fund one of his new government programs, this is clearly not the direction we want to take.
So, as former funnyman Al Franken arrives in D.C. to shore up the Democrats' 60-vote majority in the Senate, at least there are signs that the Democrats see this folly for what it is, since they're already softening their stance on this once-rock-solid position.
Obama's turnaround is so blatant, though, that it almost boggles the mind. Does the administration think we all have such short memories? Or are they just counting on us being so preoccupied with celebrity funerals and double-digit unemployment that we won't notice the government's fist reaching into whatever paychecks we have left?
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