Rep. Bera, Planned Parenthood Unwittingly Endorse End to Taxpayer Handouts

Maybe it’s my snarky sense of humor, but I greatly enjoy when statists accidentally promote free markets and small government. It seems to happens quite a bit at the New York Times. A New York Times columnist, for instance, pushed for a tax-hiking fiscal agreement back in 2011 based on a chart showing that the only successful budget deal was the one that cut taxes.

The following year, another New York Times columnist accidentally demonstrated that politicians are trying to curtail tax competition because they want to increase overall tax burdens. In a major story on the pension system in the Netherlands this year, the New York Times inadvertently acknowledged that genuine private savings is the best route to obtain a secure retirement.

But it’s not just people who write for the New York Times.

The International Monetary Fund accidentally confirmed that the value-added tax is a revenue machine to finance bigger government and heavier tax burdens. A statist in Illinois tried to argue that higher taxes don’t enable higher spending, but his argument was based on the fact that politicians raised taxes so they wouldn’t have to cut spending. And a journalist at Mother Jones accidentally showed that lower levels of government spending are correlated with greater job creation.

Now, we have something else to add to the list. Some advocates of federally subsidized abortion inadvertently and unwittingly have endorsed the notion that there shouldn’t be any taxpayer handouts to the nation’s largest abortion provider. I don’t know if either Planned Parenthood or Rep. Amerish Babulal “Ami” Bera, D-Calif., are oblivious, entitled, or mendacious, but this retweeted quote really deserves some sort of prize. They obviously want to promote the status quo of federal subsidies for the organization, but the call to “take gov’t out of the exam room” accidentally makes the libertarian case that government money shouldn’t be involved.

What makes this especially amusing is that Congressman Bera is a doctrinaire statist, receiving an “F” on his spending record from the National Taxpayers Union. Needless to say, both the congressman and Planned Parenthood obviously do want the handouts. They simply don’t want any oversight or attention on how the money is spent. But it’s nice that they both inadvertently endorsed the right approach.

P.S. Let’s shift gears and look at another example of “gov’t” in action. I’ve previously written about the fiasco at the Veterans Administration. Not only did the bureaucracy maintain secret waiting lists, but they awarded themselves bonuses.

Well, we now have some data on the horrific consequences of the bureaucracy’s disgusting behavior.

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Inspector General on Wednesday confirmed that more than one-third of the people thought to be seeking eligibility for VA benefits are deceased, and said many of them have been dead for more than four years. …The OIG’s report…said 307,000 names on the VA’s list of pending enrollees were deceased. That’s 35 percent of the 867,000 people on the list as of last year.

Wow, many segments of the population that have been disadvantaged by ObamaCare, including ones that deserve sympathy, such as children, low-income workers, and retirees, as well as those that don’t deserve much sympathy, such as congressional staff, IRS bureaucrats, and Harvard professors. But I think we can safely say that America’s veterans clearly have suffered the most because of government-run healthcare.