President Trump just announced $500 rebate checks for roughly one million Americans the government admits were overcharged under Obamacare — and the usual suspects are howling about bribery. The real question is why they only get angry when the money flows back to you.
According to Newsweek, the White House posted a video Thursday of Trump announcing the rebates, which he said would go to "nearly 1 million hardworking Americans who were wrongly overcharged through Obamacare." A subsequent executive order specified the refunds would reach Americans in 30 states and would "directly refund the Americans most exposed to the higher costs imposed by the Biden Administration's gross mismanagement of Obamacare." The funding comes from a $500 million surplus the White House says accumulated from ACA exchange fees wrongly charged to consumers under Biden.
So let's get this straight: the government extracted excess fees from working Americans under a program that was supposed to make healthcare cheaper, sat on a half-billion-dollar surplus of your money, and now that Trump wants to give it back, the beltway class has a moral panic.
The left-leaning group Protect Our Care called the plan a "gimmick" and an "insult to working families grappling with the GOP health care crisis," as reported by Newsweek. Notice the framing: returning stolen money is an "insult," but extracting it in the first place was just good governance. These are the same people who never met a foreign aid package they wouldn't fund, never saw a Pentagon slush fund they'd audit, and never objected to a subsidy that went to a corporation instead of a citizen.
The Daily Caller's Ron Hart, channeling Ayn Rand's "Money Speech," put the principle plainly: "Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce." Hart's piece was about capitalism versus the Democratic Socialists who want to destroy it, but the logic applies here too. The government took this money by force of law. It overcharged citizens. It accumulated a surplus. Now the people who produced that wealth are getting a fraction of it back — and the parasite class is scandalized.
Here's the tell: Washington only calls spending "corruption" when the recipient is an ordinary American. When it's a no-bid contract for a connected consultancy, that's just how business gets done. When it's a rebate check to a mechanic in Ohio who got squeezed on his ACA premiums, suddenly we need a congressional investigation.
The punchline writes itself. The ruling class doesn't object to government spending. They object to government spending on you.
