Not In My Back Yard

Today's Boston Globe features a front page story about proposed cuts to Massachusetts teaching hospitals under a bipartisan proposal to reduce the federal deficit by reigning in Medicare costs:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/07/08/medicare_cuts_may_fall_hard_on_boston_teaching_hospitals/.

This sensible initiative has provoked the usual howls from the usual suspects.

Even were we experiencing an era of prosperity, by what twisted moral calculus do we justify taking tax dollars from hard working farmers in Iowa or fishermen in Alaska or coal miners in West Virginia and sending the money - after a night out on the town in Washington, D. C. (business expense) - to a Commonwealth whose hospital costs are already 56 percent above the national average?

But we are no longer prosperous. As a result of decades of mismanagement by our political and business “leaders”, and improvident spending at all levels of government, America has entered a new Era of Civic Impoverishment and Diminished Expectations, so that there is less justification now than ever for this sort of federal largesse.    


Who is so isolated today from the burdens of his countrymen that he does not recognize the terrible day of reckoning that is at hand? (Answer: Senators Kerry and Schumer, for two, caviar collectivists living in the past who are blindly and reflexively fighting the proposed cuts, thus providing an additional reason to support them.)


The way out of the mess begins with recognition and application of one of the iron rules of economics: unless people pay for what they use, they tend to use too much.  

This rule applies to Massachusetts teaching hospitals as surely as it does to the beneficiaries of farm, tobacco, ethanol, and gas and oil subsidies that we in New England correctly deplore. Instead of selfishly circling the wagons to protect subsidies to our own bloated special interests, we in Massachusetts should be practicing what we preach to the rest of the country, and setting a good example to boot.