Mountain Views News          Saturday, April 5, 2014

Mountain Views News Saturday, April 5, 2014 
B6OPINION 
Mountain 
Views 
News 
PUBLISHER/ EDITOR 
Susan Henderson 
CITY EDITOR 
Dean Lee 
EAST VALLEY EDITOR 
Joan Schmidt 
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LaQuetta Shamblee 
SENIOR COMMUNITY 
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Pat Birdsall 
SALES 
Patricia Colonello 
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WEBMASTER 
John Aveny 
CONTRIBUTORS 
Chris Leclerc 
Bob Eklund 
Howard HaysPaul CarpenterStuart Tolchin 
Kim Clymer-KelleyChristopher NyergesPeter Dills 
Hail Hamilton 
Rich Johnson 
Merri Jill Finstrom 
Lori KoopRev. James SnyderTina Paul 
Mary CarneyKatie HopkinsDeanne Davis 
Despina ArouzmanGreg WelbornRenee Quenell 
Ben Show 
Sean KaydenMarc Garlett 
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This has been a week rich with events 
worthy of commentary. Many of 
them are sad beyond comprehension 
and as of this writing just too close 
to warrant political commentary. I 
refer, of course, to the second attack 
on Fort Hood, so let me simply offer 
my prayers for recovery for those who 
were wounded and for peace for those 
who lost a loved one. I offer nothing 
for the shooter. 
With that acknowledgement, letme address the topic I did choose. 
Admittedly, I did so because my son 
is directly affected: my very qualified 
and very motivated son (please pardon 
a father’s pride) is having a tough time 
finding a job, or an internship, even 
a non-paying internship. Yes, he’s 
willing to work hard for free and still 
can’t find any takers. He is not alone, 
and so I want to address why they 
can’t find jobs. 
Let’s move away from my son’s 
anecdotal experience. Despite the 
recent White House press conference 
showcasing a beaming President 
claiming success in his signature 
legislation and pointing to signs visible 
only to him of a strong recovery, all is 
not well in the American job market. 
According to the Wall Street Journal, 
today, 57 months after the end of the 
great recession and 32months after 
real GDP surpassed its previous 
high, fewer people have jobs than in 
December of 2007. 
What employment recapture hasoccurred has not been at the same 
economic level as the jobs lost. In 
other words, a job lost at $30,000 per 
year is not equal to a job regained at 
$20,000. There’s more to this than 
just the head count of who’s employed, 
although there are still many millions 
of people who want jobs and can’t find 
them. 
One of the most telling statistics 
is that median household income 
now stands 4.4% lower than when 
the great recession ended. We need 
to let that sink in! The recession is 
over, economic growth has resumed, 
has surpassed where it was before 
the damn thing was broken, and yet, 
median income has continued to fall. 
The President’s defenders, and 
all those left of center, will point to 
the fact that corporate profits have 
risen to postwar highs while total 
compensation has fallen to its lowest 
level in 50+ years. Clearly, they say, 
Obama’s policies have healed the 
economy; it’s the greedy corporate 
profiteers who have chosen to not 
policy makers 
in D.C. If 
greedy corporate 
fat cats have 
decided to cheat 
the workers as the 
economy recovers, 
why didn’t they 
do it earlier? Why 
wait til 2011, or 2012, or 2013 to fire 
the little guy? Why didn’t they do it 
in 2007, or 2006 when the political 
fallout would have been less? This 
isn’t a flippant question. If fat cats 
simply want to take more money, 
doesn’t it stand to reason they would 
have done so during good times when 
the terminations would have received 
less scrutiny? 
Perhaps, it’s not unbridled greed 
or pure spite which motivates them. 
Perhaps the cost and uncertainty 
of employment has increased to the 
point where it is eminently logical 
to use technology instead of human 
labor to accomplish the job at hand. 
Every one of us – white collar, 
blue collar, management or labor – 
is motivated to act in our own best 
interest. If a worker can do a job 
more economically than a machine, 
business owners will hire the worker. 
But if the government steps in and 
mandates an increase in the minimum 
wage – as Obama announced last 
week - above what the worker actually 
produces and/or above the level of 
what a machine costs to do the job, 
then the machine will get the job. 
That’s not mean, spiteful or greedy. 
It’s common sense. 
Add to Obama’s promise to use 
executive order to raise the minimum 
wage 39% the fact that Obamacare’s 
health insurance tax is equivalent to 
the entire gross income of McDonalds 
Corporation, and it shouldn’t be any 
wonder at all that businesses are 
very, very cautious about hiring more 
workers. 
So, we return to my son, your 
children, and perhaps a few of you 
dads and moms also looking for jobs. 
It’s not the employer’s fault. My son 
would take an internship for free, but 
several firms have told him they’re 
afraid of being sued for not paying 
the minimum wage. The reason 
Americans can’t get jobs is because the 
wizard in the White House has made 
it too expensive to hire them. It’s not 
greed on Wall Street; it’s stupidity in 
Washington.
About the author: Gregory J. 
Welborn is a freelance writer and has 
spoken to several civic and religious 
OUT TO PASTOR 
A Weekly Religion Column by Rev. James Snyder 
HOWARD Hays As I See ItLEFT TURN / RIGHT TURN 
GREG WelbornWHY CAN’T THEY GET 
JOBS? 
WHERE HAVE ALL THE MEN IN WHITE 
HATS GONE? 
When I was growing 
up you could always 
tell who the good 
men were by the 
white hats they wore. Bad men always wore 
black hats. That made it rather convenient 
for those of us who were watching so we 
knew who would be winning at the end. 
When you were in trouble all you had to do 
was look for someone wearing a white hat. 
Not only did the good men wear white hats 
but also they were able to solve every crime 
within a 60-minute period. How they did it, 
is anybody's guess. 
Today, nobody wears hats, which has 
introduced a rather confusing element into 
our society. You can never tell the bad men 
from the good men. I know the hat does 
not make the man but it would sure help to 
identify the bad man from the good man. 
I could name them all off. The Lone Ranger, 
Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and John Wayne 
and the list could go on and on. All of 
these men wore white hats and they all 
took care of the bad guys in their own way. 
You could be sure, at the end the good man 
always won. There was a certain sense of 
satisfaction knowing that all those bad men 
paid for their deeds and justice prevailed. 
Of course, today we could never do this. 
There is something called "profiling." And 
people use this term as though it was a 
negative thing. "Oh, be careful so you don't 
profile that person." 
Gene Autry always profiled his men and in 
the end, justice prevailed. 
I look at it this way. If it walks like a duck, 
looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, 
the chances are pretty high I am looking 
at a duck. However, in our crazy world 
of uncertainty it is against the political 
correctness of our day for me to say this. 
According to today's standards, I must 
look at that "thing" and not judge it by its 
appearance. "Why, don't you know, dear 
brother, you might offend it and give it 
some kind of an insecurity complex?" How 
do I know but that duck in front of me will 
be offended by me calling it a duck? It is the 
epitome of insensitivity for me to assume 
that I have the right to call a duck a duck. 
Who knows, that particular duck might 
think it is a dog. After all, a quack is not that 
far from a bark. 
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, confusion 
reigns. 
During the last year, I have spent a little 
bit of time flying from here to there. And 
the security at these airports defies the 
intelligence God gave a termite. Going 
through the line I have to take off my belt, 
remove my shoes (which come very close to 
a stink bomb), empty all the pens out of my 
pocket and submit myself to a body search. 
Now, they have some kind of electronic 
gizmo that enables them to see through my 
clothes. In 10th grade, I dreamed of such 
a gadget and I am a little provoked it has 
taken them so long to perfect this. 
Two years ago, I traveled from Orlando, 
Florida to Manila, Philippines, through 
Japan and back again to Orlando. The trip 
was fine until I tried to re-enter the United 
States and upon a luggage search, they 
discovered I had one of those old-fashioned 
double blade razors. It was something of 
an antique that my grandfather gave me 
35 years ago. I had been using it to shave 
ever since. After all these years of shaving 
with it, it took the intelligence of some 
security officer to discover this was a highly 
dangerous weapon. Consequently, I was 
not allowed to enter the country with it. 
I must admit that in 35 years of shaving 
with it, I had shed a little bit of blood. I 
never guessed in a million years I was in 
possession of a highly dangerous, illegal 
weapon. The officer who discovered it did 
not recognize it. When I told him it was 
a razor used for shaving, he looked at me 
suspiciously and then said, "Yeah, sure 
it is, Buster." No amount of explanation 
could convince him that it was part of my 
toiletries and he insisted that he confiscate 
it for the protection of everybody in the 
United States. 
It was a close shave, but they finally allowed 
me to enter the United States upon the 
surrender of this highly sophisticatedweapon. Only that security officer knows 
how close this country came to annihilation 
from an antique man's shaver. 
Of course, looks can be deceiving. People 
who looked like someone you could trust 
have perpetrated the biggest frauds in our 
country. Bernie Madoff comes to mind. 
Sometimes what you think you are getting 
you are not really getting. 
There is a spiritual application here. Some 
people may look religious on the outside 
but God knows what is on the inside. 
"But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not 
on his countenance, or on the height of his 
stature; because I have refused him: for [the 
LORD seeth] not as man seeth; for man 
looketh on the outward appearance, but 
the LORD looketh on the heart" (1 Samuel 
16:7 KJV). 
You can fool everybody in the world, but 
you cannot fool God. He wears a white hat 
and always has the last word. 
The Rev. James L. Snyder is pastor of the Family 
of God Fellowship, 1471 Pine Road, Ocala, FL 
34472. He lives with his wife, Martha, in Silver 
Springs Shores.E-mail jamessnyder2@att.net.
The web site is www.whatafellowship.com. 
“Obamacare has become the 
domestic policy equivalent 
of the Iraq War . . . With the 
political damage guaranteed 
to continue, the momentum 
toward repeal will be 
unstoppable.” 
- Steven Hayward in Forbes – 
November, 2013 
I’m not sure what bothers 
me more; that some folks just 
can’t admit to having been wrong, or that some 
can’t stand seeing something succeed, especially 
when that something actually helps people. 
When President Obama’s stimulus bill kicked 
in one year after his inauguration, the effect 
on job creation and economic recovery was 
immediate – as was the effect on those who’d 
fought so hard to kill it. All of a sudden, those 
responsible for the Great Recession in the first 
place were griping about the slowness of the 
recovery. Coming from the brink of a full-
blown depression, the president was branded a 
failure for not having single-handedly restored 
full employment in a few months’ time.
When it became clear that policies were 
working and recovery seemed assured, 
opponents of the president resolved to prevent 
it – trying to sabotage the whole thing with 
“fiscal cliffs” and debt ceiling deadlock. It risked 
plunging us back into recession, but if it did 
they’d be able to gloat they’d been right all along 
about this president presiding over a disastrous 
economy. 
There are those who can’t hide their 
disappointment when we avoid war – for 
whom diplomatic solutions seem some sort of 
failure. “Red lines” and ultimatums are simply 
preliminaries for military aggression; whether 
demanding Saddam Hussein account for 
weapons of mass destruction, or that Ukrainians 
stop mistreating ethnic Russians within their 
borders. 
President Obama’s “red line” against Syria 
was its use of chemical weapons against its 
people. When air strikes led by the U.S. and 
France appeared imminent, Syrian President 
Assad agreed to talk. As of last October, all 
declared facilities and equipment for producing 
chemical weapons had been destroyed. As of 
today, half the weapons themselves are gone – 
and the process continues under international 
supervision. 
Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey 
Graham (R-SC) complained that our avoiding 
war against Syria will be regarded by others as 
“an act of provocative weakness”. 
As to Ukraine, columnist Greg Welborn 
and others seem miffed that, by focusing on 
working with European Union and NATO 
allies in putting political and economic pressure 
on Russia’s President Putin, we’re passing up a 
golden opportunity to re-start a global nuclear-
arms race. 
An item that doesn’t seem to be getting much 
coverage is the fact that March 2014 marked 
the first month in over ten years in which there 
were no deaths of American troops engaged in 
months of downtime following the rollout of 
the federal website. (The CBO had revised its 
projection down to 6 million earlier this year.) 
This is in addition to 4.5 million enrolled 
through states’ expansion of Medicaid coverage, 
and 3 million young adults able to keep coverage 
under their parents’ plans. 
Millions of Americans getting real, affordable 
coverage – not the kind that excludes preexisting 
conditions or ends once a “cap” in 
benefits is reached; free preventive care like 
mammograms and contraception; millions of 
seniors saving nearly $10 billion in prescription 
drug costs – and some people can’t stand it. 
Years of warnings of the program’s inevitable 
“train wreck” and “death spiral” proved baseless; 
tens of millions sunk on failed campaigns 
bankrolled by Koch-backed front groups to 
scare people away from even trying to enroll – 
What could be worse? 
As Jonathan Chait writes in New York 
Magazine, “at its root the idea of Obamacare’s 
collapse was tinged heavily all along with right-
wing wish fulfillment”. Those wishes die hard, 
so now it’s the spin. Michael Hiltzik addressed 
some of the talking points in the L.A. Times: 
First, there’s the charge that many who’ve 
enrolled haven’t paid. Most wouldn’t see much 
reason to pay before receiving their first bill, 
anyway - while states have reported that between 
85% and 90% have paid on time. 
They claim that most enrollees were already 
insured. It’s based on a survey that doesn’t 
separate those who enrolled through the 
exchanges from those who did so with their 
current carriers. Kentucky reports 75% of 
exchange enrollees as previously uninsured; the 
figure out of New York is 92%. 
They argue the ACA resulted in more 
cancellations than new enrollees. A Rand study 
puts the number of newly-uninsured at less than 
a million, while most cancellations involved 
moving into better policies. 
We hear they’re “cooking the books”. The 
figures coming out of Washington reflect those 
states that refused to set up their own exchanges 
– not the better figures from states that did. As 
Hiltzik put it, “If the feds are cooking the books, 
they’ve cooked them to look worse, not better.” 
More insurance companies are seeking to join 
their states’ exchanges this fall for the next round 
of enrollments, and more states are looking to 
get with the program and expand their Medicaid 
eligibility. 
Thanks to the ACA, healthcare costs as a 
percentage of GDP have dropped for the first 
time in over fifteen years. CNN Money projects 
that over the next four years enrollments through 
the exchanges will increase to 25 million, and 
the number of uninsured Americans will drop 
from 45 million to 30 million. 
Eighty years after enactment, there are still 
those decrying Social Security as a doomed 
“Ponzi scheme”. Fifty years into the program, 
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) wants to dump Medicare 
and instead give seniors a “voucher” and wish 
them luck in the private insurance market. 
Decades from now, they’ll still be railing 
If there's one 
thing Republicans 
hate even more 
than health 
insurance for a 
growing number 
of Americans, it's 
empirical evidencethat Obamacare 
is insuring a 
growing number 
of Americans. 
As we hit the 
first enrollment deadline, the raw stats 
demonstrate that the health reform law is 
very much alive and threading itself into 
the national fabric. Well over 6 million 
people have signed up on the state-run 
marketplace exchanges, nearly matching 
the original forecast - a minor miracle, 
given last autumn's website disaster. 
Roughly one-third of those signers were 
previously uninsured. Plus, another 4.5 
million previously uninsured peoplehave signed up for Obamacare, via the 
expanded Medicaid program that's now 
available in half the states. Plus, 3 million 
previously uninsured young adults are 
now covered under their parents' plans, 
via a popular Obamacare provision. 
In other words, at least 9.5 million 
previously uninsured Americans now 
have coverage; indeed, the nonpartisanCongressional Budget Office says in a 
new report that the uninsured populationwill drop more than 20 percent during 
2014. Meanwhile, the public opinion 
vibes are bullish. The latest ABC News-
Washington Post poll says that a plurality 
of Americans now favor Obamacare, 49 to 
48 percent. (That's a new high, driven by a 
surge in Democratic support.) And while 
Republicans continue to jerk their knees 
for repeal, pollsters at the Kaiser Family 
Foundation say that only 29 percent of 
Americans want repeal. 
But we all know how the haters in the 
conservative cocoon react to facts. 
The basic mindset: "No this isn't 
happening!" Or as Republican Sen. 
John Barrasso of Wyoming insisted, the 
Obama administration is simply "cooking 
the books." 
By now, of course, we recognize the 
symptoms of this denial psychosis. Like 
when they insist that virtually every 
climate change scientist on the planet is 
making stuff up. And when they insisted, 
in October 2012, that all the pollsters 
forecasting an Obama victory were 
just cooking the numbers. And when 
they insisted, in October 2012, that the 
reported drop in the jobless rate was 
actually a Labor Department plot to cook 
the stats. 
I know, I know. Obamacare comes with 
many caveats; its fine print has yet to 
be delineated. To borrow the immortal 
Donald Rumsfeld phrase, there are 
many unknown unknowns. We won't 
know for awhile how many of the signers 
have started paying premiums, or what 
percentage of young healthy people have 
enrolled, or whether large uninsured 
communities (such as Hispanics) can be 
persuaded to sign up, or whether insurance 
companies will hike their premiums (as 
they typically did, pre-Obamacare), or 
how the law's postponed provisions will 
work when they finally kick in. 
And I will be shocked if the Republicans 
don't win big in the autumn midterm 
elections. Their votes (older white people)
typically dominate the midterms, and 
this year they'll be highly motivated by 
hatred of Obamacare. President Obama's 
coalition (younger and racially diverse) 
isn't well attuned to the midterms, 
and even if they like Obamacare, their 
intensity level probably isn't sufficient to 
propel them to the polls en masse. 
But even if Republicans take the Senate 
and agitate anew for repeal in 2015, they'll 
be forced to face political reality - not just 
Obama's veto power, but the virtually 
impossible task of stopping a train that 
has already left the station. Anyone who 
signs up for Obamacare is a voter who 
would resent Republican meddling; in 
politics, the most suicidal thing you can 
do is try to take away something that 
people have. And certainly by 2016, the 
Obamacare constituency will be in the 
tens of millions. 
The process hasn't been smooth or pretty - 
as they say in football, it's "two yards and a 
cloud of dust" - but the health reform team 
continues to move the ball downfield 
despite carping from the sidelines. 
Ross Douthat, the New York Times' 
conservative columnist, framed it best 
in his wake-up message to the haters. 
Obamacare, he said, "is taking place on a 
significant scale." For Republicans, the big 
political risk is that they "would end up 
stripping coverage from millions of newly-
insured Americans...But wherever theygo and whatever they do, they will have 
to deal with the reality that Obamacare, 
thrice-buried, looks very much alive." 
Or they can just keep telling themselves 
that reality is merely a mirage. Sounds 
about right. 
DICK Polman OBAMACARE HATERS CAN’T 
HANDLE THE TRUTH 
Mountain Views News 
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share the wealth. It’s their fault people 
aren’t being hired and that family 
income is down. 
It’s a soothing theory, but then any 
theory with a convenient scapegoat 
will ease the pain and deflect anger 
organizations on cultural and moral 
issues. He lives in the Los Angeles 
area with his wife and 3 children and 
is active in the community. He can be 
reached gregwelborn2@gmail.com 
combat. I’m sure there are those who see this 
as a sign we must be doing something wrong. 
The big news was the announcement that 
first-year enrollments through exchanges 
under the Affordable Care Act surpassed the 
Congressional Budget Office’s projection of 7 
against the ACA. And, they’ll no more concede 
they were wrong in predicting its demise than 
they were in their predictions of Republican 
success in the 2014 midterms. 
million – a projection made prior to the two from where it rightly belongs – on 

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