Excellent question worth the time to evaluate - why do progressive mislead? Well, it's a complicated answer, but there is the essence.
Faced with these constraints, today's progressives must resort to more misleading and sometimes coercive measures, as they seek to bring about equality through collective responsibility; they must rally support by looking beyond economics, to cultural and social identifications, in a bid to maintain the support of voters with little need for government intervention. They also want to limit the voices of citizens at election time, and thereby magnify the influence of the press and academia, which lean sharply in the progressive direction.
Nothing shows the progressive dependence on subterfuge more starkly than Obamacare, which, by imposing a personal mandate to buy insurance in an effort to bring health care to all, will restructure one-sixth of the American economy. Single-payer government health insurance has been a dream on the left for decades, but it was never a politically realistic option. This was true even while Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, as they did during the first two years of Obama's first term. The American public wouldn't tolerate the level of government funding that a single-payer system would require, so the best that the administration could do was to impose a regulatory structure, while accepting a private-insurance model. In crafting the Affordable Care Act, the administration intentionally avoided describing the individual mandate as a tax-a tacit admission that doing so could have sunk the bill. After the bill became law, however, the administration turned around and argued before the Supreme Court that the mandate was, in fact, a tax. The Court upheld the mandate as an exercise of an enumerated government power to levy taxes. Even then, the administration concealed Obamacare's taxes on the wealthy, which were not added to the income-tax tables. The recently publicized comments of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber about the deception involved in promoting the Affordable Care Act demonstrate that such chicanery has become intrinsic to modern progressivism.
American affluence also proved a political obstacle for the law's drafters. Most Americans already had health insurance and a doctor with whom they felt comfortable. To secure support for the ACA, therefore, Obama had to promise repeatedly that those happy with their current health plans (and doctors) could keep them. But ACA requirements resulted in the cancellation of many insurance plans, causing patients to lose access to their doctors. This proved the most damaging blow to Obama's credibility.
Some have labeled the president's economy with the truth a personal failing, but it's more like a professional necessity. Modern progressivism's business model requires obscuring the reality that new programs have winners and losers-and the losers are spread throughout the general population, not confined to members of the so-called 1 percent. As the Affordable Care Act goes fully into effect, the losers will become more visible. If people had known the truth about Obamacare in 2010, the bill would almost certainly have been defeated. If they had known it in 2012, Obama would likely have lost his reelection bid.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_progressives.html
Faced with these constraints, today's progressives must resort to more misleading and sometimes coercive measures, as they seek to bring about equality through collective responsibility; they must rally support by looking beyond economics, to cultural and social identifications, in a bid to maintain the support of voters with little need for government intervention. They also want to limit the voices of citizens at election time, and thereby magnify the influence of the press and academia, which lean sharply in the progressive direction.
Nothing shows the progressive dependence on subterfuge more starkly than Obamacare, which, by imposing a personal mandate to buy insurance in an effort to bring health care to all, will restructure one-sixth of the American economy. Single-payer government health insurance has been a dream on the left for decades, but it was never a politically realistic option. This was true even while Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, as they did during the first two years of Obama's first term. The American public wouldn't tolerate the level of government funding that a single-payer system would require, so the best that the administration could do was to impose a regulatory structure, while accepting a private-insurance model. In crafting the Affordable Care Act, the administration intentionally avoided describing the individual mandate as a tax-a tacit admission that doing so could have sunk the bill. After the bill became law, however, the administration turned around and argued before the Supreme Court that the mandate was, in fact, a tax. The Court upheld the mandate as an exercise of an enumerated government power to levy taxes. Even then, the administration concealed Obamacare's taxes on the wealthy, which were not added to the income-tax tables. The recently publicized comments of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber about the deception involved in promoting the Affordable Care Act demonstrate that such chicanery has become intrinsic to modern progressivism.
American affluence also proved a political obstacle for the law's drafters. Most Americans already had health insurance and a doctor with whom they felt comfortable. To secure support for the ACA, therefore, Obama had to promise repeatedly that those happy with their current health plans (and doctors) could keep them. But ACA requirements resulted in the cancellation of many insurance plans, causing patients to lose access to their doctors. This proved the most damaging blow to Obama's credibility.
Some have labeled the president's economy with the truth a personal failing, but it's more like a professional necessity. Modern progressivism's business model requires obscuring the reality that new programs have winners and losers-and the losers are spread throughout the general population, not confined to members of the so-called 1 percent. As the Affordable Care Act goes fully into effect, the losers will become more visible. If people had known the truth about Obamacare in 2010, the bill would almost certainly have been defeated. If they had known it in 2012, Obama would likely have lost his reelection bid.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_progressives.html
