Channeling Enron

http://timnerenz.com/content/channeling-enron



Ever wonder what happened to all the scummy-bears who did the creative accounting at Enron, Arthur Anderson, and WorldCom? I’m guessing they must have all gotten government jobs from the stimulus money.

Because politicians are not smart enough to think this stuff all up on their own.

If you recall, the House version of health care was scored by CBO in July at something over $1.2 trillion dollars. The director of CBO was called on the carpet for the treasonous acts of addition and subtraction.

On Wednesday, Speaker Pelosi announced she had a new Bill with an even more robust public option,. Miraculously this new and improved ShamWoW of a Bill was scored by CBO at less than $850 billion! Did Jeff Skilling get paroled Tuesday? Does CBO outsource work to Leavenworth now?

We won’t know how she managed to make the public option “more robust” while reducing its cost by 40%, because she wouldn’t show us the CBO analysis. But she said she showed it to Senator Harry Reid, as if he were the Good Housekeeping seal.

When Harry wasn’t busy checking Nancy’s math for us, he was running his own Enron-esque shell game over in the Senate, trying to pass the first $257 billion of his own health care plan as a separate measure now, so the rest of it would stay under the $900 billion that President Obama said he would sign.

His first Senate Bill started leaking oil when we found out the only kept it under the $900 billion ceiling by cutting physicians pay 25% and then freezing their wages for 10 years. Obviously, these brick-heads forgot who wears the rubber gloves when it’s bend-over time.

Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow must have had the first appointment (“you might feel a little discomfort, Debbie”), because she rushed right back and introduced a bill to increase doctor’s pay and unfreeze the freeze – but of course her separate bill would not count towards the $900 billion cap. I guess I can see how they think we are gullible enough to buy anything – after all we keep re-electing them.

Next we discover that those 10-year costs from CBO are totally bogus - counting 10 years of new taxes (yes, the T-word) and only 5 years of benefits. In order to make good on their baloney promise to keep health care reform deficit-neutral, they had to push most new benefits back to 2015 to make the numbers fit the lie. Kenny Boy Lay would be so proud.

This, by the way, is exactly what it was that Enron did to land everyone in jail - count multiple years of revenue and single years of expense to mask operating losses. The sub-prime mortgage pimps did the same thing, and apparently it is the only thing Congress learned from either scandal.

In business, we have an effective way of giving connivers, chiselers and serial half-truth tellers an opportunity to overcome their character defects. We fire them. And we don’t pussyfoot around about it - it is a matter of survival, as corrupt organizations inevitably fail, and fail spectacularly.

Enron was a success story for free market capitalism, not an indictment of it. The market took care of Enron and their accomplice Arthur Anderson – they were purged with extreme prejudice.

Call it “ethic cleansing” – it happens every single day in the private sector. But there is no such ethic cleansing in government. All those politicians and regulators who rigged the game in Enron’s favor for a decade are still with us – only now they have seniority and run the joint.

The best part of the Enron story is that when they came to Washington for a bailout with their too-big-to-fail sob story, President Bush said no. Today, the government would have bought Enron; Barney Frank would be complaining about their bonuses in the daytime while Tim Geitner was paying them out at night.

The fools messed up energy, they messed up banking, they messed up housing, and now they have turned their sights on health care.

With a straight face, our Socialists continue to demand a public option to “keep the private system honest”, even though they have lied, cheated, and cooked the books to try to shove it down our throat. And just who exactly will be running this new Department of Honesty – Congressman cash-in-the-freezer, or Senator wide-stance, or Governor taste-of-Argentina, or Secretary tax-cheat?

But no amount of accounting kitty litter can disguise the stupidity of plowing ahead with the dismantling of our health care system by people who either can’t add and subtract or can’t tell the truth. Or in the case of Congress, neither.


These guys can’t run health care; they can’t even run a little tiny fraction of health care. The government has had 6 months to prepare for H1N1 and it is still easier to get a Nobel Prize than a flu shot. In a world run by rational people, that would be the end of it. But these are not rational people, and it is only the beginning.


Tim Nerenz is the Libertarian Party Candidate for U.S. House of Representatives from Wisconsin's 2nd District. To support Dr. Tim's campaign, please visit the campaign website at www.timnerenz.com.