I’m in the advertising business, so it’s not all that easy to show me a sales pitch I’m shamed by. But I found one over the weekend, while I was wandering around in a middle-class shopping mall in
“Get Everything. Pay Nothing.”
Seeing that sign depressed me. Seeing lots of other people see it and fail to recoil in horror or at least burst out laughing depressed me even more. It’s just like when I get depressed seeing lots of people watching and listening to the president on TV and not recoiling in horror or at least bursting out laughing.
Because that sign might just as easily be posted on the White House lawn.
People need to very quickly decide, en-masse, that this is (to borrow from the rude but accurate Congressman who blurted the blurt heard ‘round the world) a lie, and anyone peddling it, a liar. The current administration has put Truth in the number one position on the endangered species list.
The end game of the obscenely misnamed health care “reform,” followed by the 2010 mid-term elections will reveal, bluntly, just how stupid many of our citizens are. A public intelligence test is in progress. Is the public dumb enough to let its elected representatives buy, on their behalf, the Get-Everything-Pay-Nothing package, or are most people smarter than 5th graders? Is the public willing to trade away their entire country for promises no one capable of counting could believe might be kept, or will it rise up in an ever-growing, evermore vocal resistance movement? Can Truth be saved from extinction?
Recently, President Obama suggested that government (ie. taxpayers) should provide “cradle to career” education for everybody. This is a good an example of the many Get-Everything-Pay Nothing piles of steaming, stinking dung he is trying to peddle as perfume. The less radical, more conservative Jesse Jackson stopped short of that, instead merely proposing all college students have access to government loans at 1 percent interest – the same interest rate banks borrow at, he noted. Never mind that banks are strictly regulated by government to provide strong likelihood of repayments while college students are not such reliable credit risks. Or that it might build character to save up some money and work to earn money to pay for one’s college education or at least some portion of it. Forget all that. Just take note of the fact that even the Reverend Jackson is not as far-left-leaning as Obama. No one is. Certainly no American President has ever been.
Senator Baucus, the Democrat hung out to dry by his president and his Party, became too toxic to stand next to overnight by daring to suggest that somehow, somebody might actually have to pay for the costs of gifting health care to all. Had he come to the microphone wearing a sandwich-board sign reading “Get Everything. Pay Nothing.” he would have been much more warmly received.
If this is what we have come to, that a sales pitch so blatantly, outrageously, obviously a lie is eagerly bought, I fear for
Dan Kennedy is a serial entrepreneur, adviser to business owners, sought-after speaker and author of 13 books. More information about Dan can be found at www.NoBSBooks.com [1], and a free collection of his business resources including newsletters and webinars at www.DanKennedy.com [2].
Like this article? Sign up [3] for “The Balance Sheet,” BMI’s weekly e-mail newsletter.