BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
22 House Democrats joined with just about every Republican to delay the individual mandate included in the massive Obamacare law still being implemented three years after it was signed by the President.
House Republicans scheduled a vote on the mandate delay shortly after the President decided to delay the mandate on the business sector on his own accord.
If a mandate is good enough for the business community, the reasoning goes, it ought to be good enough for Generation Y.
And the fact of the matter is that the individual mandate is going to hit young adults the hardest. They are the ones who will be forced to buy insurance they don’t want and can’t afford.
Younger Americans voted overwhelmingly for President Obama in 2008, and while the ardor cooled a bit in 2012, they still helped push the President over the top in his reelection bid.
But since Obama has been President, what exactly has he done for young folks?
College is still pretty much unaffordable for most kids, which requires them to take out massive loans, that they hope to pay off when they hit middle-age.
The deficit and the debt will hit 20 and 30 year olds hardest, as they get older. The debt becomes a drag on economic growth. When you have to take a bigger chunk of your budget to pay off debt, you don’t have money to invest in other things, like scientific discovery or new highways or better schools. And eventually, when the debt become so big, you have to pay everything to service the debt, and you can’t afford anything else, even the military.
Young people have that kind of future to look forward to, thanks to the President’s out of control spending.
The President’s inability to focus on economic growth and job creation has hit younger Americans the hardest. In many ways, this is the lost generation. By not being able to get jobs out of college, they have lost critical years of building up long-term wealth. In other words, these kids are never retiring.
Because the President refuses to lead on Medicare and Social Security reform, younger Americans will continue to see a massive wealth transfer from their pockets to the cushy retirement of the baby boom generation. We spend way more money on old people than we do on young people in this country. That is a sign of a dying civilization.
So, the President promised hope and change. And what he delivered was a requirement that young people subsidize the health insurance costs of older people, a massive wealth transfer from young Americans to baby boomers, a huge debt that will make future spending on research and infrastructure more difficult, unaffordable college costs that require these kids to take out huge loans that they will never ever be able to repay and a stumbling economy that makes it difficult for these young people to start creating long-term wealth.
Other than that, the President has been really great for the dreams of younger American adults.
That’s probably why 22 House Democrats voted with the Republicans to delay the individual mandate. Either that or those Democrats are worried that they are going to get their butts kicked in the next election.
Editor’s Note: John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. Feehery is president of Quinn Gillespie Communications. He is a contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com.