It's the Economy Stupid!

The news channels on Saturday was as frenzied as I have seen them in a while. There seemed to be a lot of hype surrounding the upcoming vote. While the vote was to merely debate the proposed bill on the floor of the Senate, it is important because it does communicate what leadership deems to be important and what they intend to focus on. On Fox News that Saturday I watched Harry Reid make speech emploring senators to vote for cloture.

All we are doing is voting to debate the bill. Not debating this bill would be un-American
(Paraphrased Because I cannot find a the quote in print but watched it live)

The most compelling argument came from Senator Bob Corker (R-TN).
Corker Says Reid Health Care Plan "Takes Our Country In Exactly The Wrong Direction"

While the Senator mostly focuses on the direction of the bill, I was hoping someone would talk about the direction of the country. I was hoping that someone would mangle Bill Clinton's tag line and declare "It's the job market stupid!"

The Obama administration will have spent their entire first year in office dedicated to pretty much this one issue. I have pointed out before that if you crunch the numbers the issue they are trying to address will really only benefit 4% maybe 5% of the population. realtively minuscule compared to the 10.2% of the population that is unemployed right now. And guess what, at least 86% of Americans get their health care insurance through their employers. So you know what that means? Unemployment is a health care issue!

Ideally someone would have stood up during the debate and pleaded to vote against bringing the bill to the floor so that the senate could move on to issues that deal with 10.2% of the population that is unemployed.

Unfortunately, the senate has clearly communicated to businesses that the government take over of health care is their priority instead. And so, despite a slight upturn in economic indicators, business will be sitting on any mild gains they have been able to make. With the uncertainty over what additional costs per employee due to health care obligations, the senate has insured that for the fourth quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010, businesses will not be perusing any aggressive growth strategies.

This is the time of year where businesses are finalizing next years budget. I do not think it a wild exaggeration to say that last Saturdays vote has probably slowed the countries economic recovery by an entire year.