Moral Deficit Crisis

Yesterday I linked to a David Brooks editorial in which he suggests that we should "reduce the amount of money spent on health care during the last months of life." Frankly I found it incomprehensible how someone could espouse this line and claim to be "moral". I now think I get it. My problem was that I was imagining pulling the plug on people like John F Kennedy, Audie Murphy or others of the so-called Greatest Generation. That, of course, would be reprehensible.

Fortunately we are not talking about euthanizing this group of heroes, great and small. No, this policy nugget is timed perfectly to coincide with the dotage of the Baby Boomers! Conservatives seem to have a special scorn for Baby Boomers - among whom they never count themselves, regardless of birth cohort. If these self-indulgent former hippies die helplessly in their beds, well then, that is just karma landing back on their morally bankrupt selves.

Turns out the moral deficit crisis is not fiscal at all. The actual deficit that the conservatives find is in the character of the post-WWII generation and it must be repaid in blood and breath.

I can't wait to see what these fine moral crusaders have in store for us slacker Gen-X types...

GOP Death Panel QOD

We should adjust pension promises and reduce the amount of money spent on health care during the last months of life so we can preserve programs for those who are growing and learning the most.

David Brooks

How is this different from the supposed death panels that the Palinistas invented in their attempt to derail health care reform? Ah, the conservatives do it in the name of unbearable taxes on capital gains!

Tom Scocca spots the emperor's hind quarters:

The debt—the runaway debt—has nothing to do with morality. Casting the debt as an object of moral concern is the work of minds that have come detached from human experience. The debt is an epiphenomenon. It is the side effect created by the specific moral decisions about what the country wishes to see funded, and how it is willing to fund those things.