There were many stories from the 2014 election, such the disillusionment of the Democrat base that stayed home coupled with a motivated conservative base.
In my view, there were two reasons for the GOP victory, from the state level to Washington, D.C.
The first reason was the incomprehensible nature of Obamacare, or a law so complex that not even those who supported it understand what's in it, how it works, or how it will impact the very same people they were hoping to help.
In fact, there are now serious people like John C. Goodman saying that the law is actually hurting "low-income workers," the biggest irony of all:
The primary purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to make health insurance affordable for people with modest incomes. Yet as the employer mandate begins to kick in for 2015, the law is already hurting some of the people it was intended to help.I believe that this is why the law hurt the Democrats who voted for it. In fact, half of the Democrats who voted for Obamacare are not around anymore.
By this time next year, we may find that many workers who earn within a few dollars of the minimum wage have less income and less insurance coverage (as a group) than they did before the mandate began to take effect.
This is the conclusion I draw from my survey in December of 136 fast-food restaurants (franchisees) that employed close to 3,500 workers. Before 2014 about half the employees were “full time” as defined by ObamaCare; that is, they worked 30 hours or more a week.
The potential cost to the employers of providing mandated health insurance to their full-time staff would have been about $7 million a year.
But by the time the employers took advantage of all their legal options they were able to reduce their cost to less than 1% of that amount.
The second reason is that more and more Americans are coming to the conclusion that big government is just plain inefficient. In other words, it's not the size of government, but the fact that it's burdensome (paperwork), intrusive (EPA), and scary (IRS targeting taxpayers for political reasons).
I agree with William Voegeli:
What’s changed is that a growing portion of the electorate has come to suspect that the Democrats, while still the party of government in the sense of advocating government intervention as the solution for many, many problems, has become the party of government in other, more disquieting ways.Again, it's not big government. It's inefficient and intrusive government.
It seems strongly committed to the idea that government should do more, but not that it should do it well.
The party of government demands more responsibilities for government, but can’t or won’t demand consistently high performance from government.
Let me repeat. I think that you will see many Democrats join the GOP in 2015 to significantly curtail or perhaps even replace the Affordable Care Act, especially now that everyone's concluded that there is nothing affordable about it.
P.S. You can hear CANTO TALK here & follow me on Twitter @ scantojr. We discussed this and other issues on Sunday's "The week in review with Bill Katz, the editor of Urgent Agenda":
Check Out Politics Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Silvio Canto Jr on BlogTalkRadio
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