More Scumbags Against Single-Payer
This is so awesome. Usually moderate scumbags can mask this gross attitude, but Tom Moran of the New Jersey Star-Ledger only tries.
He starts off saying “You know I like single payer but I’m just concerned…” But then he says that Cory Booker has a disease for supporting it, and wishes he could get the old school voucher Cory Booker back. “Sanders virus” he calls it.
The generous take would be that this guy believes what many columnists believe, which is that the combination of centrism and a good economy in the ’90s was the peak of human civilization and can be recreated forever, despite the fact that the economy is very different now and that incremental gains are even easier to roll back than large gains. The generous take would be that Moran sincerely believes in incremental gains, and that the famous world leaders he references did indeed get things done by calculated incremental gains.
Moran uses Abe Lincoln as a model of what a “calculating” politician does to “get things done.” But Abe Lincoln actually tried to free the slaves and succeeded. Tom Moran’s argument that Congress should get everyone cheap healthcare by maintaining our current system of depriving people of cheap healthcare does not really have an analog in Abe Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves. If Lincoln had operated the way that Moran wants Sanders and Booker to operate, he would have exempted Confederates from all taxes in exchange for putting their slaves on a raft and pushing the raft in the direction of Africa.
It kind of seems like Tom Moran just doesn’t support a not-for-profit healthcare system. But, as is often said, political columnists don’t write columns for their readers. They write them for themselves, and for their bosses, and the ones who stick around are the ones who already agree with their bosses.
What Moran and the bosses at the NJ Star-Ledger want is for people to continue losing access to healthcare, but to feel morally superior about it. What they want is to say “If only we had a good healthcare system, but, sigh, we don’t,” as they enjoy their low taxes. When they see homeless people on the street, they don’t feel inspired to give to them, or to look away. They feel an urge to look the homeless people in the eye and say “Aw, I can’t give you a dollar, but I swear, I am a good person.” When the homeless man habitually says “god bless you,” they think, “I deserved that blessing.”
Scum.
