WWRD

As Senate Republicans struggle to reach a consensus on how best to tackle the quasi-socialist Obamacare regime, Fox & Friends this morning asked the question: What Would Reagan Do?

So let's take a little trip down memory lane. The year was 1961. Several years prior, the nation had rejected a nationalized health care scheme proposed by President Harry Truman. But liberals in Congress were at it again, and Ronald Reagan was warning the American people.

Here's a brief excerpt of what Reagan said then:
 

"One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. . . The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it's like telling a lie, and one leads to another. . . pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go, or what they will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do."

In spite of some popular provisions, Obamacare is a collapsing mess.

You were supposed to be able to keep doctors and insurance plans you liked. That was the "Lie of the Year." In reality, more and more Americans have fewer and fewer choices.

Obamacare was supposed to lower premiums. It didn't. They are up 105% since Obamacare took effect.

Yet the GOP can't agree on Plan B.

Well, progressives have theirs. Yesterday Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren declared, "President Obama tried to move us forward. . . Now it's time for the next step. And the next step is single payer."

Right. Because the VA is such a shining model of success.

Folks, Bernie Sanders' home state of Vermont tried this. They abandoned it. Why? According to the Boston Globe, "the cost of the program would nearly double the size of the state's budget in the first year alone."

California considered it. And abandoned it. Why? According to the San Francisco Gate, "The projected cost ($400 billion) far surpasses the annual state budget of $180 billion."

The Washington Post conceded recently that the Sanders/Warren single-payer healthcare scheme "would have an astonishingly high price tag" of more than $3 trillion a year!

For the record, the Tax Foundation reports that in 2014 U.S. taxpayers paid about $1.4 trillion in individual income taxes. So to achieve what Sanders, Warren and the rest of the left are now demanding, taxes would have to double and the Armed Forces would be non-existent.

America would be like Europe. Rationed health care and unable to defend our borders. But that is the left's goal.

More Left-Wing Insanity

While we're on the subject of the left's failed ideas, the "Fight For $15" is back in the news, and not in a good way. The left has made raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour an article of faith in recent years.

So, the progressives in Seattle decided to give it a go. In 2014, they voted to phase in the increase over a period of years. Any conservative could have predicted the results, which are terrible.

But don't take my word for it. Here's how the Washington Post described the analysis of what one MIT economist called a "very credible" study:
 

"Some employers have not been able to afford the increased minimums. They've cut their payrolls, putting off new hiring, reducing hours or letting their workers go. . . The costs to low-wage workers in Seattle outweighed the benefits by a ratio of three to one, according to the study, conducted by a group of economists at the University of Washington who were commissioned by the city. . . On the whole, the study estimates, the average low-wage worker in the city lost $125 a month because of the hike in the minimum."

Jobs For Jihadis?

What should you do when jihadis fighting for ISIS in Iraq or Syria return to their home countries? Most people would probably say "Arrest and deport them." But the progressives in Sweden have a very different idea.

It turns out that several returning jihadis have complained that they can't get jobs because their pictures from the battlefield are all over the Internet. So the Swedish government is giving them a "special status" and new identities. It's like a witness relocation program for returning terrorists.

Alice Kuhnke, the Swedish Minister for Culture and Democracy, says that the returning ISIS fighters "need to be channeled back into our democratic society." But Kuhnke admits the government has no clue how many Muslims still cling to their extremist beliefs or whether they left Iraq and Syria because they became "disillusioned" with ISIS.

I doubt they were "disillusioned" with ISIS. They left Sweden to wage jihad. It is more likely that they left Iraq and Syria because they were getting their butts kicked.

Taking these jihadis back is a huge security risk. As Pamela Geller put it, "This is the very definition of civilizational suicide."

Meanwhile, on the other end of the European continent, migrant relief centers in Italy are on the verge of collapsing as more than 73,000 African migrants have landed on Italy's shores since the beginning of the year. More than 13,000 arrived just this week.

One Italian media outlet described the exodus as "an invasion that the government and the European Union fail to halt."

It is hard not to feel some compassion for the migrants, many of whom are fleeing Islamist violence. But there must be limits. There certainly are limits to what Italy can afford. That's not bigotry. It's common sense.

Thankfully, we have a president committed to controlling our borders. When you combine a welfare state like ours with a world in which 150 million people want to come to the United States, that is a prescription for breaking the American taxpayer and America. Where is the compassion in that?