Tighten Up on Student Loans

Shortly before Elizabeth Warren dropped out, a man confronted her about forgiving $1 trillion+ in student debt. “My daughter is getting out of school,” he said. I saved all my money. She doesn't have any student loans. Am I going to get any money back?”

“Of course not," Warren said.

“So you're going to pay for people who didn't save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?” he said.

As The Washington Free Beacon reported it: “Warren told the man her policy would not disadvantage him, but he described how he and his daughter sacrificed to avoid going into debt, while others spent money on cars and vacations. ‘My buddy had fun, bought a car, went on vacations. I saved my money," he said. "He made more than I did. But I worked a double shift, worked extra—my daughter worked since she was 10. So, you're laughing.’”

“No, I'm not,” Warren said.

“Yeah, that's exactly what you're doing," he said. “We did the right thing, and we get screwed.”

I could identify with that guy and so could millions of other Americans — and not just fathers. Anyone who has struggled for years, decades even, to pay off student loans would be pissed at being forced to pay off other people’s student loans through higher taxes.

While I wasn’t among them, there are people who know exactly what they want to do after graduating from high school and they follow that career path for the rest of their lives. A week before classes started in September I enrolled in a community college that September but had no idea about what to major in, so I dubbed around liberal arts courses for a couple of years. State-subsidized tuition was very reasonable and I could pay all my expenses with a part-time job during school and working full-time over vacations and summers. Classes were easy and I did the minimum. With no particular goal other than maintaining a student deferment (the draft was still on), I dropped out after Nixon reduced American involvement in Vietnam enough that getting drafted became unlikely.

After working various jobs for a couple of years I decided to become a teacher, so it was back to school for a couple of more years while continuing to work full-time. After obtaining a teaching position, I attended graduate school and paid for that myself as well by working additional jobs during summers. I never took out any loans and never got help from parents either. As a husband and father, I took out loans to help my children to go to college and they took out loans as well. Then my wife decided to go back to school and she took out loans. It took years to pay them all off.

As an undergrad I rushed off after class to work the 2nd shift while many of my fellow students went partying. Some of them had prosperous parents. Others had taken out loans. I graduated with no debt, lots of work experience, and time-management skills. Too many of my fellow students just prolonged their adolescence four more years, and not a few took six or more years to finish because they partied so much. Should their student debts be forgiven? Certainly not.

Unless they’re in STEM majors, today’s students are indoctrinated by leftist instructors, graduate with negative views of capitalism, and are more likely to vote for socialist candidates according to polls cited by salon.com. They’re taught to believe old white guys like me are enemies of everyone else and responsible for virtually all of the world’s historical ills — especially any suffered by women and minorities. Some still work their way through as I did, but most do not. They’ve become over-reliant on government assistance in the form of grants and loans. Should their student debt be forgiven? Certainly not.

They’ve also come to view college as a “right” just like “free” medical care. They think a lot of things should be free because they haven’t learned that nothing is free. They believe Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren when they claim that all we have to do is raise taxes on “the rich” and on “Wall Street” and it will all be paid for. They’re not taught that “the rich” are not only paying their “fair share”; they’re paying the vast majority of all income taxes collected each year. Neither do they learn that 50% of Americans aren’t paying any at all. Not only do they pay nothing, they actually get checks in the form of Earned Income Tax Credits.

Colleges charge more and more for teaching less and less to students who think themselves entitled. Grants and loans should be tied to performance by students in majors that guarantee employment after graduation. Those in majors like Art History, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, and other dubious subjects should pay their own way.

Left & Right September 11, 2019

Occupying the left chair for this show is my old friend, Jim Wilfong. He's a Democrat former Maine state representative, a selectman in Stow, Maine, a former Small Business Administration official in the Clinton Administration, a former trade advisor for the Bush and Obama Administrations as well as other titles which you can see at the beginning of the show. I hope he'll come back for future shows as well.

The first question from the producer asked if we think it was appropriate for President Trump to have the Taliban on US soil during the week of 9/11. Jim did not and neither did I. From there, we discussed Afghanistan both historically and today. We discussed where each of was on September 11th.

We discussed how some aspects of the long Cold War between the US and Russia continue. Jim claims our #1 export is weaponry, which was surprising to me. We discussed the positive and negative aspects of that.

From there we discussed the Democrat field of candidates for president, and I recalled Jim's early support in the 1980s of Joe Biden. Now he's intrigued by Andrew Yang and Elizabeth Warren. Yang because of his discussion of technology's impact on employment, especially in the future. He likes the way Warren is critical of Wall Street and big business, him being a small business guy.

Jim goes into the feasibility of alternative energy sources in light of the importance of fossil fuels in developing third-world economies.

I call attention to the rise of socialism in the Democrat Party, especially polls showing a majority of young Democrats favoring socialism over capitalism. I cite Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's election and Democrat chairman Tom Perez saying she's the future of the party. I cite her chief of staff's claim that the Green New Deal is primarily a vehicle to take over the US economy, and not a remedy for climate change.

Jim says the future direction of the Democrat Party remains to be seen, that political winds shift quickly. I hope he's right, but I'm not so sure. He's optimistic about young entrepreneurs he's working with and sees them as capitalists with a concern for their community. I take that to mean that believes free enterprise will prevail among the young so long as small business survives as a big part of our overall economy.

We reflected on the benefits of teaching for a long time in the same community. We get to meet with them and hear from them as they become adults and work in the community.

We end with me citing recent New York Times news-shaping strategies as revealed by a transcript surreptitiously recorded and published in Slate Magazine. We speculate about what news outlets come closest the ideal of straight news sans opinion.

Left & Right September 3, 2018

Mark Guerringue again defends the left. We begin with the McCain funeral. Mark was a big fan of McCain and thought the funeral was inspiring. My take is that it was overdone, that it seemed to go on forever. That leads to a discussion of the 2008 campaign where Obama defeated McCain and I suggest that the media liked McCain when he criticized Republicans, but not when he opposed Obama. Mark disagrees. From there we again discuss leftist media bias which Mark still denies and I still insist is rampant -- and a big driver of the Mueller investigation. I make the case that Trump is right when he calls it a witchhunt. Mark says the Mueller indictments prove there's something to it. We discuss further developments in South Africa with government expropriation of farmland from whites and their murders by roving hordes of bandits. I point to a Gallup poll indicating that a majority of Democrats now view capitalism unfavorably and socialism favorably. Mark says Democrats don't want socialism. Bernie Sanders was a socialist before he said while running for president that he was a democratic socialist. I ask what is the difference between democratic socialism and socialism, but Mark doesn't know. The producer prints out definitions for each but, while the definition of socialism is clear-cut​, that for democratic socialism is very vague. It seems no one does. We discuss Democrat support for abolishing ICE. I say it's a dog whistle for open borders. Mark insists the Democrat Party is against open borders.

Socialist Dreamers Still With Us

As a boy, I recall noticing something in the eyes of older people. It was a kind of acceptance, a wisdom, often a kindness habitually bestowed on kids like me because I reminded them of their own children and grandchildren. Growing up, we were taught to respect our elders, but that usually came naturally. Unlike people my parents’ age, they had time to talk, to answer questions. They had patience. They’d had children, grandchildren, and sometimes great-grandchildren, but average life expectancy was lower then and it was relatively rare to know one’s great-grandchildren.

My grandson Riley with his great-grandfather

As an adult, when people my parents’s age were elderly, that respect continued. They were the World War II generation, all of them touched by that war in some way whether they were in uniform or worrying about relatives who were. They’d known deprivation during the Depression as well as the suffering of war. They’d had decades to reflect on all that and it showed in their eyes. They’d long ago come to accept that the world was imperfect and always would be. They were proud of their country and grateful to have been born here.

As an older person myself now, I still see that elderly wisdom in some of my contemporaries, but not nearly to the extent I did in previous generations. Too many have carried an adolescent petulance through adulthood, middle age, and well into retirement. They have not accepted the world as it is and continue to carry a peevishness because they haven’t been able to make it perfect. They blame “corporate America” and “the rich” and “the Republicans,” thinking if it weren’t for them, we’d all be living in a utopia by now.

Many in my generation eschewed parenthood because of the commitment and the sacrifice it involved, because it cut into their endless quest to “find themselves.” They’re old, bald, pot-bellied, wrinkled and gray now. The look in their eyes mirrors a hollowness, a sense they have not found themselves after a lifetime of looking, and now lack the energy to continue the search. They seem to lack the serenity and wisdom I perceived in the eyes of most of the elderly when I was a child. They don’t take to children easily because they chose not to have any. Some who did had only one for whom they didn’t set up a stable household, drifting from partner to partner and dragging the child along. They’re responsible for many of the 55-60 million abortions in America since 1973. Some of them did finally grow up, but too many others did not.

They lived in a country that protected individual freedom enough for them to indulge nearly every whim, but they have little sense of history. They don’t seem to realize or appreciate that they lived most of their lives in a time and place of unprecedented security and prosperity during the post-WWII Pax Americana. They’re oblivious to the barbarity prevailing in the Middle East, north and central Africa, and just across our border in Mexico, not realizing such chaos has been more the norm than the exception for most in the world throughout history. To preserve their freedom, their fathers fought National Socialism in Germany, then endured the Cold War during which the communist dictatorship that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics murdered 40-60 million. Communist China killed even more — during the lifetime of narcissistic baby boomers. Did they learn anything from all this? They don’t appear to have.

Their historical ignorance disposes them to magnify flaws in their own country, onto which they project their own. They voted to reelect the closet socialist President Obama who would continue to “fundamentally transform” the United States. Now they flock to the rallies of Senator Bernie Sanders because he “came out” as a socialist long ago. Despite the horrific record of socialist governments elsewhere in the world before and during their own lifetimes, they still believe socialism can work if only the “right” people run it. In the imagined utopia they expect will result, they hope to finally “find themselves.”

The Big Rock Candy Mountain

Will they? Not according to the evidence, but their endless quest will continue to weaken the country they disdain, because for them the perfect is the enemy of the good. They cannot accept that there will never be a perfect world this side of heaven. Their grandparents’ generation my have sung “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” along with Burl Ives, but they didn’t actually believe it existed. They accepted that neither human beings nor any political system they fashioned would be flawless. Baby boomers, however, continue to look for “the land of mild and honey, where a bum can stay for many a day, and he won’t need any money.”

Time To Pare Back Government

Been spending a lot of time up on a ladder lately, scraping and painting. State and federal regulations dictate that only the homeowner may scrape, repair and paint over any house built before 1978 unless he’s willing to fork over lots of money to a government-licensed contractor. That contractor would have to take needlessly-extensive, government-required measures which drive up costs enormously because our South Portland house was built in 1920 and could, therefore, have lead paint on it. It’s covered with aluminum siding except for window frames and soffits, but it has a hip roof and a two-foot overhang all around that I don’t think had been painted for thirty years. There was a lot of scraping to do.

When I told my wife that I’d be doing it she pressured me to hire someone. “You’re too old to be going up that high,” she said. “You should get my brother to do it.” When I pointed out that her brother is three years older than me she said, “Yeah, but he does it all the time.” Still, he’s a painting contractor without the special license the feds require and he’d be liable to a huge fine if he were caught working on our house. So, I did it myself.

It’s mindless work, and I spent several days high up there to think about how much I resented our huge, intrusive government. Then I used my iPod to listen to talk radio, specifically Rush Limbaugh and Howie Carr on the local WGAN AM. On Sundays they broadcast audio from NBC’s “Meet The Press” followed by ABC’s “This Week,” both of which parroted Democrat spin on why the federal government was shutting down. I’d listened to Limbaugh and Carr excoriate Democrats and praise Senator Ted Cruz as he railed against our huge federal bureaucracy. The more I listened, the angrier I got. Trouble is, the streaming signal cut out every ten minutes or so. I couldn’t reset it without reaching into my pocket and manipulating the iPod and my hands were full. One held the scraper or paintbrush and the other held tight to the ladder twenty-five feet up.

So, I switched to downloaded audiobooks which didn’t cut out. I listened to a biography of Saint Paul, then “Intellectuals and Society” by Thomas Sowell, and finally David Stewart’s “Summer of 1787,” this last about the men who gathered in Philadelphia and created our government. Stewart relied on James Madison’s accounts of how state delegates took special pains to limit federal government power. Here it was 226 years later and federal power was out of control. That’s why I was up on the ladder.

The more I listened, the more pissed I got. Delegates agreed that all money bills had to begin in the House, which most closely represented the people - more than the Senate. They called it “The People’s House” and intended that it check and balance the power of both the Senate and the President. If those entities wanted something to pass the House, they had to negotiate. Under Harry Reid and Barack Obama, however, they were refusing. The Mainstream Media - especially David Gregory and George Stephanopoulos - were either ignorant of how the Constitution came to be, or they were willfully misrepresenting the shutdown by repeating Democrat talking points.

Mount Chocorua in the White Mountain National Forest

I finally finished the job and last Saturday my wife wanted to explore a smokey quartz mine on New Hampshire’s Moat Mountain. Driving over there, it occurred to me that it was in the White Mountain National Forest and the National Park Service had been shutting down access to parks. They had barricaded the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC - an open-access facility that previously anyone could walk into 24-7. They closed highway pull-offs from which people could view Mount Rushmore. They even tried to close off access to the ocean in Florida. All this to follow an Obama Administration directive that they make the shutdown as painful as possible for ordinary citizens. And closing the National Mall to citizens and then opening it up to illegal aliens to demonstrate? That's going to piss off a lot of Americans. So I’m thinking: what if we get over there and they tell me the National Forest is closed? Well, I decided, then there’s going to be some civil disobedience perpetrated by your’s truly.

But it wasn’t necessary. Going up an access road, I noticed a ranger’s SUV behind me so I stopped in the middle of the road, walked back, and asked him if the mine was nearby. The uniformed young man behind the wheel smiled and said, “You’re headed in the right direction.” Then he told me to take a left at the next fork which would take me to the trailhead. A nice kid.

After hearing about those WWII vets that went through government barricades in Washington, DC last week, I was ready to do something similar. Something is brewing out there. Can you feel it?

Redistribution

After passing back weekly US History quizzes on World War I, I paused a few minutes for the “whad-ja-gets” - students asking each other about their scores.

When they were done I said, “I have a good idea.”

“What?” said a girl.

“Many of you are doing well on these lately, getting hundreds and nineties, but others are still doing poorly - getting only thirties and forties.”

They all knew that after the whad-ja-gets.

“I’m thinking about redistributing grades - taking thirty points from those of you who got hundreds, and giving them to the students who got thirties. That way, the kids with hundreds would still have seventies, which is a C- and not that bad a grade, while those with thirties would then get sixties, which is D- and passing. This way, things would be more equal. How does that sound to you?”

Several looked at me blankly. Some had their mouths open. Students I knew had been studying extra hard were wincing.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said one.

“Okay,” I said. “Does anybody like the idea?”

Only four raised their hands.

“Who else doesn’t like it?”

All the rest put their hands up.

“Alright, why not?”

“We worked for those grades,” said a boy. “It’s not fair to take our points and give them to someone who didn’t study. They shouldn’t get points for not doing anything.”

“Yeah,” said a girl. “If you did that, those kids who don’t study won’t ever do anything. They won’t have any reason to.”

“Plus, other kids wouldn’t want to work so hard if the points they earned were just going to be taken away and given to someone else,” said another boy.

“Well,” I said. “It’s just an idea at this point,”

“Not one of your better ones,” said a boy.

“I haven’t made any decisions yet and I’ll let you know when I do. Meanwhile, would you open your books to page 888 please?”

They did.

“I’d like someone to read the 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913 - almost a hundred years ago. Any volunteers?”

A boy read aloud: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

“Thank you,” I said. “There had been a temporary income tax during the Civil War and a few times after, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, so passage of the 16th Amendment was necessary to resume it. The tax was only on people who earned the most money - an amount that would be equal to around $80,000 per year or above today. Soon it turned into something called a “graduated” or “progressive” income tax.”

I drew charts on the board illustrating that with a flat tax of 15%, someone making $10,000 per year would pay $1500 in taxes while someone making $100,000 per year would pay $15,000. So the wealthier would pay more, but the percentage would be the same. Then I explained how under a “graduated” or “progressive” tax structure, the percentage went up enormously for wealthier taxpayers to the point where government took most of what they made above a certain amount. In the 1940s, 50s and 60s, government took over 90% of their earnings. I passed out charts showing the top marginal tax rates since 1913.

“Wow,” said a boy. “There would be no point in working hard if the government takes it all away.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“This is what you were getting at with the quiz grades, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

Finally, I explained that the top half of American workers paid just about all the income taxes, while the bottom half paid almost nothing, or government gave them money under something called the “earned income tax credit.”

“That’s like what the communists did in Russia,” said a girl. We had watched “Dr. Zhivago” to learn about World War I, the Communist Revolution in Russia, and the rise of the Soviet Union.

“Similar,” I said, “but not as drastic. There are other taxes the bottom half of Americans pay so nobody escapes paying some kind of tax, but the rich pay for most of what the federal government does. And - the bottom half figured out that they can vote in congressmen and senators who will give them things somebody else has to pay for.”

Think Health Care Is Expensive Now? Wait Until It's Free

Recently I asked students how much it cost for a doctor visit. “My mother pays fifteen dollars,” said one.

“Fifteen dollars? I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what she paid.”

“Okay,” I said, “But is that all it cost?” I pointed out that the average doctor visit costs between $95 and $265.

“She has insurance,” he said, “and they paid the rest. I didn’t know it cost that much.”

Many adult Americans don’t either and that’s our biggest problem with health care reform. I explained that people sometimes have a small “co-pay” and the rest comes from somewhere else. Those with insurance pay monthly premiums whether they get services or not. The poor, and people claiming to be poor, may have a small co-pay, and government uses our tax money to pay more, but it still doesn’t add up to the total cost of the visit - or the surgery, or the therapy, or whatever. To make up the deficit, providers charge patients with insurance more than the cost of their services, products or procedures - that’s why an aspirin can cost $13 at the hospital. Some doctors or dentists won’t take patients who won’t pay themselves or who don’t have insurance, because they can’t afford to make it on what government pays. Hospitals, though, have to take everyone. There’s no such thing as free health care, but more and more consider it their right.

It would be simpler if we all paid out of pocket, and that’s what 90% did before World War II when, according to economist Thomas Sowell, only about 10% of Americans had insurance. When government took over the economy during the war it imposed wage controls, so if a company wanted to woo an employee, it offered health insurance as a fringe benefit. That’s how employer-provided insurance caught on. However, many small businesses still can’t afford to offer it - especially lately. Huge, third-party government bureaucracies, and private ones too, add enormously to the cost of health care.

If we pay $95 or more out of our own pockets for doctor visits, it won’t be for frivolous reasons. We certainly wouldn’t pay $1000 for an emergency room visit unless it were a genuine emergency. However the poor, and those claiming to be poor, pay nothing for a such visits - or for an ambulance to drive them, so they’re much more likely to go for frivolous reasons like hangovers or gas pain, driving up costs enormously. Central Texas hospitals report that 82% of emergency room visits are people on “Medicaid or SCHIP.” According to the Austin American-Statesman:

In the past six years, eight people from Austin and one from Luling racked up 2,678 emergency room visits in Central Texas, costing hospitals, taxpayers and others $3 million, according to a report from a nonprofit made up of hospitals and other providers that care for the uninsured and low-income Central Texans.

If President Obama mentioned anything like this in his big speech to Congress, I didn’t hear it.

Notice I keep saying “or those claiming to be poor”? Many can hide how much they make, appear poor to government, and be eligible for “free” medical care. What percentage of the “poor” are really poor? A minority? A majority? Impossible to say. But we can safely conclude this: If we think health care is expensive now, wait until it’s “free.”

If more go under Obamacare, the deficit between what government pays and the actual cost of the services will also grow, forcing doctors and hospitals to pass along those costs to patients with private insurance - driving up premiums even faster. Then, unbelievably, Obamacare would actually tax those private plans. Don’t believe it? Check out studies by both government agencies like the Congressional Budget office, and private studies like one by PriceWaterhouse Coopers. This is what Democrats call “reform.”

Congress and the White House are determined to impose government-run medicine on Americans in the model of Canada and the UK. Economist Thomas Sowell sheds a little light on what Americans could expect:

In Canada, according to a provincial government website, 90% of Ontario patients needing hip replacements waited 336 days. In Britain, the wait is a year. As for technology, a 2007 study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed that the number of CT scanners per million population was 7.5 in Britain, 11.2 in Canada and 32.2 in the United States. For Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) units, there was an average of 5.4 MRIs per million population in Britain, 5.5 per million population in Canada and 26.6 per million population in the United States.

That’s why people in Canada wait about six months for an MRI. Dogs in Canada, however, can get one the next day because government doesn’t control veterinary care.

Had Enough Yet?

How many people protested Obamacare in Washington last Saturday? Twenty thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? Two million? The Washington Post said there were “tens of thousands.” So did the New York Times. They got the memo from Democrat leaders worried that if 1-2 million showed up it would be a major PR victory for the right, so they did what they could to play numbers down. The UK’s Daily Mail said there were up to 2 million protesters there.

Watching the demonstration on C-SPAN, I was struck by who I was seeing. They looked like ordinary men and women 40-70 years old, some younger, some older, but they didn’t look like demonstrators I’ve seen there for decades. There were no dreadlocked anarchists, no angry minorities, no fat feminists, no flamboyant homosexuals. These were efficient, mind-your-own-business people who quietly keep everything running while others demand favors from government. I wondered what caused them to make signs and journey to Washington in huge numbers. Something’s happening out there. Something different. Something big.

The only thing these people want from government is to be left alone. While liberal baby boomers waxed nostalgic over Woodstock last month, they went to town hall meetings to question their congressmen and senators, worried that their government planned to take away their health insurance plans and force them into a government-controlled system. Unlike their hippie contemporaries, they didn’t go to Woodstock forty years ago to smoke weed and frolic naked in the mud. They went to work instead - bagging groceries, banging nails, mowing lawns, and saving money for their future.

Though Obama, Pelosi and Reid continue to deny it, they know government would ration their health care when they get older. They know a younger gangbanger or illegal immigrant would get treated before they would when they were 65, 75, or 85 even though they’re the ones who pay the bills. They know Obama lied in his speech last week when he said his alleged reforms “would not apply to those who are here illegally.” When they heard Congressman Joe Wilson shout back “You lie!” they jumped up in front of their television sets and cheered him.

As part of its effort to demonize Congressman Wilson, CNN sent a reporter to the demonstration, but it backfired. Marchers didn’t trust CNN and wouldn’t be used as stooges for left-wing propaganda, so they gathered behind the reporter and shouted “Tell the truth!” over and over. The anchor back in Atlanta was exasperated when her reporter in the field said: “There are people who very strongly support Congressman Joe Wilson - and many of them are right here.”

They were there all right - over a million of them - and they don’t get their news from CNN and the other alphabet networks. They get it online and from talk radio because the mainstream media doesn’t have complete control of news anymore.

These are people who know they’ve been paying higher premiums on their private health insurance plans for years because hospitals charge them more for health care. They haven’t liked it, but they’ve paid anyway. They pay because they know hospitals cannot otherwise function when government pays much less than it costs to deliver health care to poor and elderly patients on Medicaid and Medicare.

These are people who pay on both ends - with their taxes and with their premiums. They know that if Obamacare passes with a “public option,” the private health insurance they’ve been paying for will disappear and they won’t have any more choices. Government will decide what health care they get - and don’t get.

These are people who have been planning for their retirement while others have been living fast and loose. They know they can’t depend on Social Security or any other government program. They watched the “War on Poverty” waste trillions and paid the taxes that financed it. They watched their money go down the drain while they worked in PTAs, Scouts, Rotary clubs and churches without government assistance. They are the real community organizers - quite unlike the government-funded ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) types caught last week scheming to fund child prostitution with taxpayer money in Baltimore, Washington, DC, New York City and San Bernardino. Because President Obama did legal work for ACORN, CNN and the alphabet networks continue to ignore the story. Demonstrators, however, know about it anyway.

These people are the ants who worked, who took care of themselves, who laid up food for the winter while their grasshopper contemporaries flitted about “finding themselves” at Grateful Dead concerts and the like. Now they’re envisioning their old age as government would force it upon them, not as they planned it and worked for it all their whole lives. Obamacare is the final straw for them. These people have had enough - and there are millions of them.