"The New York Times tells us that Democrats have hit upon an exciting new strategy in the midterm elections: Talk about ObamaCare! 

"'Party leaders have decided on an aggressive new strategy to address the widespread unease with the health care law,' Ashley Parker reports, 'urging Democratic candidates to talk openly about the law’s problems while also offering their own prescriptions to fix them.' 

"The late Ed Koch was once asked if he would consent to have his picture taken with a tiger. 'The mayor is not a coward — and the mayor is also not a schmuck,' he said. If Democratic candidates adopt this 'aggressive new strategy,' they won’t just be posing with a tiger, they’ll be putting their heads in the tiger’s mouth.

"They will demonstrate that they’re not cowards. But they sure will be schmucks."

"After the UAW did so much to chase automaking out of Detroit with unsustainable labor costs and ridiculous work rules, it is no wonder that workforces haven’t welcomed it into the South, where right-to-work states have become alluring destinations for foreign car companies. 

"For the longest time, the business model of the UAW has been to take its members’ dues and funnel them to friendly Democratic politicians. Unless it breaks into the South, the union knows it’s all but doomed. It may feel this institutional imperative keenly, but workers in good manufacturing jobs who owe nothing to this self-serving dinosaur from the 20th century don’t. They can be forgiven for wondering which side the union is on."

"The proposed Internal Revenue Service regulations governing political activity by nonprofits that have united the Right in opposition are now fracturing the Left. 

"While Senate Republicans, following the lead of their House colleagues, are backing a bill to delay the rules for a year, and the protests of right-leaning nonprofit groups, big and small, are reaching fever pitch, Democratic politicians who are urging the IRS to move forward with the regulations have found themselves at odds with some of their largest constituencies, chief among them the country’s labor unions."

"Millions of Americans are jobless, underemployed or have given up all hope of finding work. The government is led by a president who hasn’t a clue about how to unlock the power of our once-mighty economy to achieve its fullest growth potential. Republicans need to start talking again about how job-creating tax cuts, energy expansion, trade exports and other pro-growth ideas can put America back to work. 

"It’s a hopeful, optimistic message that Americans are hungry to hear again, and this is the year to do it. It’s time to give Mr. Obama and his party another shellacking."

"President Obama’s hero Abraham Lincoln had a famously worshipful view of the rule of law. 'Let reverence for the laws,' he said in his Lyceum Address, 'be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap — let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.' 

"President Obama’s implicit rejoinder: 'Whatever.'"

"It is a painful moment for all those who believed, and still seem to believe, in the world-changing and epoch-making properties of the Affordable Care Act. To them I extend the world-weary sympathies of a man in middle age who knows the meaning of disappointment and loss . . . 

"Naaaaah. 

"Nanny nanny boo boo."

"Seen in totality, it appears that ObamaCare is unraveling like a cheap sweater. But though the administration is trying to limit the number of those who are inconvenienced or hurt by the law, this latest decision is one more shred of evidence that proves the assumptions about the law’s popularity were completely unfounded. Democrats assumed that once the law began to be implemented the benefits it distributed would quickly make it as beloved as Social Security or Medicare. But it is now abundantly clear that the numbers of ObamaCare losers may well equal or exceed the total of those who will benefit from it. No amount of lawlessness on the part of a president who lacks the constitutional power to enforce only the laws or the parts of laws that he likes can conceal the enormity of the ObamaCare fiasco. 

"Unfortunately for the president and Democratic incumbents, the sheer number of ObamaCare exemptions and delays has grown to the point where it is no longer possible to pretend that the only problem with the law was a glitch-ridden website or Republican obstructionism. No matter how many of its ill-conceived moving parts the presidential orders say need not be implemented before November, the accumulated weight of its failure may prove too heavy a burden for Democrats who must answer to the electorate for their votes to shove this monstrosity down the collective throat of the American people."

"What the CBO report makes plain is that under Obamacare a huge cohort of Americans will realize they’d be better off financially if they cut back on their hours or quit working altogether so as to not jeopardize their (taxpayer-financed) health care subsidies. 

"Here’s the rub: Who will be paying for their health care costs? There are two possible answers; one: Americans who remain in the workforce, most of whom are middle class, with economic worries of their own; two: future generations of Americans — as we are borrowing prodigiously to pay for current spending. ...

"To some, the Democrats’ glee over offering people health care so they’ll quit working reprised memories of a hilarious old headline in the satiric online magazine The Onion: 'IBM Emancipates 8,000 Wage Slaves.'

"There’s a serious side to this, a seriously disquieting side: For years, it seemed that although Democrats profess to love jobs, they couldn’t stand employers. Now they’ve gone a step further: They don’t even favor work."

"In 2024, spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Obamacare health insurance exchange subsidies will absorb two-thirds of the $4.9 trillion in revenue the CBO expects the federal government to collect. Add in the rest of mandatory spending and interest payments on the debt, and 96 percent of tax revenues will already be spoken for before Congress allocates money to pay for defense, veteran's benefits, education, transportation, the court system, international affairs and other budget items.

"After 2024, the CBO warned, 'the fiscal outlook is even more worrisome.'"

"The Democrats once styled themselves the party of workers. Now, they are the party of people who would have been workers, if it hadn’t been for Obamacare.  
 
"The Congressional Budget Office released a new analysis of the economic effects of the health care law on Tuesday that estimates that it will reduce the number of workers, in effect, by 2.5 million in 2024. 

"This unleashed a torrent of arguments from the Democrats implicitly denigrating the value of work. Perhaps not since Southern fire-eaters attacked Northern 'wage slavery' in the mid-19th century has a good honest day’s work been talked about so dismissively. It turns out that discouraging work is just another one of the wonders of Obamacare."