Friday morning. First cup of coffee. The good mug. “She calls me Daddy.” Kids not up yet, house quiet, the one peaceful ten minutes a father of four gets all day.
And then I read it.
Ro Khanna, congressman from Silicon Valley, announced that it is time for Democrats to offer “a bold vision for free childcare.” His bill would make childcare free, pay childcare workers a “living wage,” put friends, family, and neighbors who watch your kids on the government payroll, and mail stay-at-home parents a $1,000 stipend.
Translation: the federal government would like to raise my children.
Mine. The ones asleep upstairs.
And I swear to you, my life flashed before my eyes. Except it was not MY life. It was the federal government’s. Every program. Every promise. Every ribbon-cutting with the giant scissors. Every “trust us, this time will be different.” A highlight reel where every single clip was a blooper.
The mug hit the floor. Coffee everywhere. Ceramic under the fridge that I will be finding until Easter. And standing there in my socks in a puddle of French roast, I had exactly one clear thought.
We are screwed.
We are so, so screwed.
Because the man proposing this is not some backbencher filling out a press release quota. Ro Khanna is widely reported to be eyeing the White House in 2028. This is not a bill. This is a campaign brochure. He wants to be PRESIDENT. God help us. If that man ever gets his hand on the Resolute Desk, the rapture cannot come soon enough. I will be standing in the front yard with my arms up, just in case.
So before anybody runs an experiment on the children, I am going to do what I make my sophomores do before every single lab. Check the notebook. What happened the LAST time we trusted this operator with something important?
Pour yourself a fresh cup. Hold it with two hands. This is going to take a while, because the list is long, and I promise you I have left things out.
Let us start with what he actually proposed, because the details are where the comedy lives.
“Pay workers a living wage.” That is a government-mandated wage floor, and I have written about the ugly history of that tool before. Progressive Era economists said, in print, under their own names, that the purpose of the wage floor was to price “unemployables” out of work. Princeton’s Thomas Leonard documented exactly who they meant: Black Americans, immigrants, and the disabled. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was pushed because Black construction crews kept underbidding white union crews on federal jobs. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act carved out farm and domestic labor, exactly where Black workers were concentrated, as the price of Southern Democrat votes. Milton Friedman called the minimum wage “the most anti-Negro law on our statute books.”
Now bolt that onto childcare and watch what happens. The woman down the street who watches six kids in her living room cannot pay a mandated “living wage” to anyone, including herself. So she closes. The big centers that can afford a compliance department absorb her families, and when they cannot, the government does. The private alternative dies quietly, and nobody holds a press conference for it.
“Compensate friends, family and neighbors who provide care.” So grandma goes on the federal payroll. Grandma, who has been watching the grandkids for free since the dawn of human civilization because she LOVES THEM, now gets a W-2, a caseworker, and eventually an audit. What is next, the government pays parents to raise their own children… wait, I was just told that is literally the $1,000 stipend in the same bill.
And all of it is “free.” Which is a word that means “somebody else is paying.” Me. I am the somebody else. Sole breadwinner, four kids, one teacher’s salary. My family chose one income on purpose. We said no to a lot of things. We did the math, and the math said my wife raising our children was worth more than anything a second paycheck could buy. And now Congressman Khanna would like me to fund everybody else’s childcare so that more families can do the thing we chose not to do.
Quinn’s Law #25: liberals are great at giving away other people’s money. He did not even hide the ball. The ball is on the podium with a bow on it.
Now. The real question. Who is the babysitter?
— THE BABYSITTER ALREADY HAS A CHILDCARE PROGRAM. IT FAILED. —
You want to know the funniest part? The federal government ALREADY runs a childcare and preschool program. It is called Head Start. It has been running since 1965, it costs on the order of $12 billion a year, and it was supposed to be the crown jewel of the War on Poverty. Close the gap before kindergarten. Give poor kids a head start. It is right there in the name.
So the government’s own Department of Health and Human Services ran a national randomized study. A real one, with a control group, the kind I make my students run. The Head Start kids showed some gains at the end of the Head Start year. By the end of kindergarten, most of the gains had faded. By third grade, the Head Start kids and the control kids were, on most academic measures, the same.
In teacher language: the government spent decades and tens of billions of dollars on a program whose measurable academic effect was gone before the kids learned cursive. And rather than admit it, Congress keeps writing bills that treat Head Start as the proven model for MORE federal childcare.
That is not a policy. That is a science fair project where the kid’s hypothesis failed and he glued the poster board together anyway and asked for a bigger table.
And it is not just us. Quebec launched universal low-cost childcare in 1997, the model every American progressive points to. Economists Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan studied the children who went through it and found WORSE outcomes, not better. More anxiety. More aggression. Worse health. Worse relationships with parents. When they followed those kids into their teens and twenties, the negative effects on behavior were still there, including higher rates of criminal activity. Gruber, by the way, is the same MIT economist who helped design Obamacare. Not exactly a Heritage Foundation plant.
Canada then went national with its “$10-a-day” childcare, and the result was predictable to anybody who passed a high school economics class. Price goes down by decree, demand goes up, supply does not magically appear, and parents across the country land on waitlists for spots that do not exist. You cannot legislate a daycare into existence any more than you can legislate a tree to grow faster. A price cap without supply is not a benefit. It is a lottery ticket.
— “BUT THIS TIME WE WILL KEEP TRACK OF THE KIDS” —
Here is my favorite item on the resume, and I want every parent reading this to sit with it.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for unaccompanied migrant children who cross the border. HHS places them with sponsors. Then HHS is supposed to follow up. Reporting in 2023 found HHS could not reach roughly 85,000 of those children in the prior two years. A later inspector general review found tens of thousands of children who missed immigration court hearings, and ICE could not account for where many of them were.
Tens of thousands of children. In the government’s care. And the government could not tell you where they went.
Every parent reading this knows the feeling. You are at the grocery store, you turn around, and your kid is not there. Ten seconds. Maybe fifteen. Your heart stops. Your stomach drops straight through the linoleum. You are yelling a name in the cereal aisle and you do not care who hears you.
Now multiply that feeling by tens of thousands. And picture the people responsible shrugging, filing a report, and going to lunch.
That is the same department that would administer federal childcare.
If a private daycare lost track of three kids, it would be shut down by Friday, the owner would be on the evening news, and there would be a lawsuit by Monday. When the federal government loses track of TENS OF THOUSANDS of children, a congressman proposes giving it everybody else’s children too.
I have tried to come up with a sharper illustration of this and I cannot. The babysitter lost the last batch of kids, and the proposal is to hand her more kids. You would have to be one fry short of a Happy Meal to sign that permission slip.
— THE CHILD FRAUD FILE —
While we are on children, let us talk about Minnesota, where childcare and child nutrition money became a buffet.
Feeding Our Future was a nonprofit that ran federally funded meal programs for children. Federal prosecutors described it as one of the largest pandemic fraud schemes in the country, roughly $250 million in federal money meant to FEED CHILDREN, stolen through sites that billed for meals that were never served to kids who were never there. Dozens of defendants. Luxury cars. Real estate. Paid for with lunches that did not exist.
Minnesota’s childcare assistance program has its own long file of daycare centers billing the state for children who were not in attendance. The state’s own watchdogs have been writing about it for years. Federal money, state administration, and nobody at the top who owns the loss.
This is not an accident of Minnesota. This is what happens anywhere the government writes checks based on a headcount it does not verify. Colonial Hanoi once paid a bounty for rat tails to reduce the rat population. So people started FARMING RATS. The proxy becomes the product. Pay per child, and you will get paperwork children.
And now a congressman wants to put every family, every neighbor, and every grandma in the country on that same payment system. I cannot wait to find out how many invisible grandchildren are enrolled by year three.
— THE VETERANS: THE PEOPLE THE GOVERNMENT PROMISED THE MOST —
This one is personal, so bear with me.
I spent twenty-three years in uniform, much of it as a combat medic. I have knelt next to young men on the worst day of their lives and promised them they were going to make it home. So when I read about how the government treats those same men once they DO make it home, I do not see a headline. I see faces.
The VA is already single-payer healthcare. It is government-run medicine for the people who bled for this country. In 2014, it came out that the Phoenix VA was keeping veterans on SECRET wait lists to make its numbers look better, while executives collected bonuses tied to those fake numbers. Some veterans died while waiting for appointments. That was not a rogue clerk. Investigators found scheduling manipulation across the system.
The disability exam that decides a veteran’s rating for life, the C&P exam, is now mostly farmed out to contractors. You might get a few minutes with an examiner who has not read your file. Miss the letter and your claim dies. And here is the kicker: those appointment notices and files often go out through FedEx and UPS, because when a letter actually HAS to arrive on a date, the government does not trust the Postal Service that it also runs. The taxpayer pays to keep USPS alive, and then pays a private carrier when the mail matters.
Then there is the wounded veteran tax. If you were combat-wounded and medically retired before twenty years, the government claws back your retirement pay dollar for dollar against your VA disability. Two soldiers. Same war. One gets hurt and the government keeps the money he already earned. The Major Richard Star Act (H.R. 2102) would fix it for the combat-wounded. It has had a mountain of co-sponsors for years and still sits. Washington scores it as “too expensive,” on the order of $10 to $13 billion over a decade.
For comparison, SNAP runs on the order of $8 billion a MONTH.
So the government can find money for everything except the retirement it already promised to the guy missing a leg. And this is the operator that wants my kids.
If you want to help, call your representative. If they co-sponsored H.R. 2102, thank them and ask them to sign the discharge petition, H.Res. 1247, to bring it to the floor. All talk, no action has gone on long enough.
—
AND THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT —
October 2013. The federal government launches the website for the signature law of the Obama administration. It had years to prepare. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the build, and billions by the time it was all counted.
It crashed on launch day. On the first day, a reported handful of people successfully enrolled. Six. Not six thousand. SIX.
I have had more kids show up to a 7 a.m. review session the morning after Halloween.
Then the law itself. It was named the Affordable Care Act. HHS’s own data showed individual-market premiums in states using the federal exchange more than doubled between 2013 and 2017. “If you like your plan, you can keep it” was awarded PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year in 2013. Millions of people got cancellation notices.
Then COVID came, and the enhanced ACA subsidies were written into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and extended in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Both passed with zero Republican votes. Democrats wrote the expiration date. Democrats voted for the sunset. And
voted YES on both of those bills. So when premiums jumped as the subsidies ended right on the schedule his own party wrote, the man currently promising you free childcare was one of the people who built that cliff.
Then the confession. When the administration started removing fraudulent and never-verified enrollments from the exchanges, Democrats called it a step toward ending Obamacare. Think about what that sentence admits. If cleaning out ghosts kills the program, the program was running on ghosts. And if the program only works with temporary COVID money, then the Affordable Care Act is not affordable. They said it out loud. I just wrote it down.
And if you are worried about premiums, here is an idea. We should pass a bill to help Americans afford healthcare. We could call it the Affordable Care Act. Then check back in fifteen years and see how it is going… wait.
— SOCIAL SECURITY: THE SAVINGS ACCOUNT THAT IS NOT A SAVINGS ACCOUNT —
Every paycheck I get, 12.4 percent of wages (split between me and my employer) goes to Social Security. Americans are told this is “their money” going into “their account.”
It is not. It never was. It is a transfer from current workers to current retirees, and the Supreme Court said decades ago in Flemming v. Nestor (1960) that you do not have a contractual right to the benefits. The trustees themselves project the main trust fund runs dry in the early 2030s, after which only about three-quarters or so of scheduled benefits can be paid without a change in law. The long-range unfunded obligation is measured in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Take that same 12.4 percent, invest it in a boring index fund over a forty-year career, and a normal working household would retire with a seven-figure account that they actually OWN and could pass to their kids. Instead the government took the money, spent it, left an IOU in a filing cabinet, and now calls anybody who talks about fixing it a threat to grandma.
And the payments to the dead. The Social Security Administration’s own inspector general has flagged payments continuing after death, and millions of records of people listed at impossible ages. The agency that cannot confirm whether you are alive would like to confirm whether your toddler napped.
— SNAP: SUPPLEMENTAL IS DOING A LOT OF WORK IN THAT NAME —
SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Supplemental. As in, an addition to.
I feed a family of six on a teacher’s salary using paper envelopes. When I price out a week at Aldi, fresh food, real meals, it lands around $120 to $130. That is roughly $520 to $560 a month. The maximum SNAP allotment for a family of six in Ohio runs around $1,400 a month. Nearly triple. That is not a supplement. That is the entire grocery bill plus a steak dinner.
The program costs on the order of $100 billion a year. USDA’s own payment error rates have been running above 10 percent nationally in recent years, with some states far worse. That is billions of dollars a year going out the door wrong. And EBT skimming and trafficking rings keep popping up in state after state.
Meanwhile I am standing at my kitchen counter shredding my own cheddar like a chump, because pre-shredded costs more and I have a budget envelope to answer to.
I am not angry at the family receiving the benefit. I am angry at an architecture that pays for the junk food with my taxes and then pays for the diabetes with my taxes, and calls itself compassion.
— MEDICAID, MEDICARE, AND THE BILLION CLAIMS NOBODY READS —
Medicaid is consistently one of the largest sources of improper payments in the entire federal government, with GAO-style tallies running in the tens of billions of dollars in a single year. Medicare pays over a billion claims a year, and almost none of them are looked at by a human being before the check goes out. Every year the Justice Department holds a national healthcare fraud “takedown” press conference with hundreds of defendants and billions in alleged fraud.
And every year the pipeline that produced the fraud keeps running, because the takedown is the press release. The program is the product.
Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion pays states a 90 percent federal match for able-bodied, working-age adults. That is a richer match than the traditional program pays for poor children, pregnant women, and the disabled. The incentive points exactly away from the most vulnerable. Quinn’s First Law: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.
— THE IMPROPER PAYMENT PILE —
Zoom out with me for a second, because every program so far is just a symptom.
GAO, the government’s own auditor, tracks “improper payments,” money that went to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason. Recent single-year totals have run around $160 billion and up. Cumulatively since 2003, the total is on the order of $2.7 TRILLION.
GAO separately estimated that the federal government loses somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion A YEAR to fraud.
The Earned Income Tax Credit has posted improper payment rates north of 25 percent for years. One in four dollars. If a business had a quarter of its checks going to the wrong people for twenty years, the CEO would be in prison and the board would be in the witness box.
And GAO says, in its own words, that the government cannot even determine the full extent of its improper payments. It does not know how much it is losing. It just knows it is a lot.
And when somebody finally shows up to look for fraud, waste, and abuse, what happens? The same people who want to hand this system your children scream bloody murder about the audit. Nobody ever defends a specific fraudulent payment. They only object to the LOOKING. I am a science teacher, so I will phrase that as a hypothesis: people who are not hiding anything do not usually fight the audit.
— THE PENTAGON: THE ONE JOB THEY ACTUALLY HAVE —
And this one genuinely scares me. National defense is the one thing the Constitution clearly and explicitly gives the federal government. Article I, Section 8. Raise and support armies. Provide and maintain a navy. It is job one.
The Department of Defense started trying to pass a full financial audit in 2018. It has failed every single one. It cannot fully account for its own assets.
The F-35 program has been rebaselined so many times that its lifetime cost estimate passed $1.7 TRILLION. The Littoral Combat Ship became a punchline while it was still being built, and the Navy started retiring some of them after only a few years of service. Base housing contractors have left military families living with mold and blamed the sergeant.
If the government cannot pass an audit on the ONE function the founders unambiguously assigned to it, why in the world would anyone hand it a function the founders never assigned at all?
— THE POST OFFICE: A MONOPOLY THAT STILL LOSES —
The Postal Service has a legal monopoly on delivering letters to your mailbox. Think about that. A monopoly. Nobody else is allowed to compete. And it lost around $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2024 alone, and has lost well over $100 billion cumulatively since 2007, even after Congress wiped out billions in its retiree obligations.
Meanwhile Amazon, a company that did not deliver its own packages fifteen years ago, now moves roughly as many parcels in this country as the Postal Service does, with tracking, Sunday delivery, and a photo of the box on your porch. UPS and FedEx beat USPS on reliability, which is why government agencies themselves use them when it matters.
A company can build a delivery empire from scratch in fifteen years. The government, with a monopoly, a head start of two centuries, and a building in every town, loses billions a year. And I am supposed to believe it can run a daycare.
— TSA: TAKE YOUR SHOES OFF, MISS THE GUN —
Every time you take your shoes off at the airport, you are honoring a guy named Richard Reid who tried to light a shoe bomb in 2001. Two decades later, the ritual is still the product.
In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspector general sent undercover teams through TSA checkpoints with fake weapons and fake explosives. TSA failed 67 out of 70 tests. That is roughly a 95 percent failure rate. Later rounds of testing were still reported to fail a majority of the time.
So the agency that will confiscate your 4-ounce bottle of shampoo cannot find a fake bomb. Congress’s solution was not to replace it. It was to keep funding it and sell you PreCheck so you can pay extra to be failed faster.
— EDUCATION: MORE MONEY, FLATTER SCORES, FAKE DIPLOMAS —
I teach in a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio. I wrote my own Physics and Anatomy textbooks because the district could not buy good ones. So forgive me if I take this section personally.
The federal Department of Education was created in 1979. Education appears nowhere in Article I. Since then, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending has roughly tripled. Reading and math scores have gone approximately nowhere. On the most recent Nation’s Report Card, only about 30 percent of eighth graders are proficient in reading, and roughly a third are BELOW BASIC. Eighth-grade math proficiency has fallen from its 2013 peak.
During COVID, Congress sent roughly $190 billion in emergency money to K through 12 schools. Scores did not recover. Some kept falling after the money landed. The places that kept schools closed the longest were the places with the deepest learning loss.
No Child Left Behind taught schools to teach to the test. Grade inflation now hands roughly four out of five students an A or a B. Districts forbid zeros, mandate minimum grades for work never attempted, and offer unlimited retakes, and then everybody acts surprised when the diploma does not mean the kid can do fractions.
That is what happens when the federal government gets “involved” in a state and local responsibility. The money comes with strings, the strings come with compliance officers, and the compliance officers have never met one of my students.
And now they would like to start the whole process at age six MONTHS instead of age five.
— STUDENT LOANS: SUBSIDIZE IT, WATCH THE PRICE EXPLODE —
The government decided college should be affordable, so it became the lender of first resort and started handing out loans with no regard for what the degree was worth. Colleges immediately raised tuition to capture the money. Former Education Secretary William Bennett predicted it in 1987. Economists call it the Bennett Hypothesis for a reason.
Then the government tried to “simplify” the FAFSA form in 2023 and 2024. The rollout was such a mess that it delayed aid for millions of students and the Education Department’s own staff were scrambling for months. The simplified form was the thing that broke.
Then came the attempt at mass forgiveness under Biden’s Autopen, which the Supreme Court struck down in 2023. That would have handed the bill to the kid who went to trade school, the woman who worked full time through college to graduate debt-free, and the eighteen-year-old who enlisted so he could pay for school. If that is how we treat debt now, I have a mortgage I would like the renters in my town to pitch in on. It is just common sense.
Look at this pattern, because once you see it you cannot unsee it. Things the government does NOT heavily subsidize: televisions, clothing, toys, software, cell service. Prices FELL over the last twenty-five years. Things the government DOES heavily subsidize: college tuition, hospital services, and, yes, CHILDCARE. Prices EXPLODED.
The variable is the subsidy. And Ro Khanna’s plan is to take the most expensive, most subsidized, most regulated corner of childcare and pour more subsidy on it. Somewhere, a village is missing its economist.
— CALIFORNIA HIGH-SPEED RAIL —
In 2008, California voters approved a bond for a high-speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Roughly $33 billion. Done by 2020. Under three hours.
It is now 2026. The cost estimate has ballooned past $100 billion by the state’s own numbers, and far higher by some counts. The first segment is a stretch in the Central Valley between towns most Californians could not find on a map. Paying passengers carried so far: ZERO.
To be fair, it IS the safest rail system in America. Not one passenger injured. Because not one passenger exists.
Ro Khanna represents part of California. He has watched this happen from a front-row seat. And his conclusion is that the government should also run the daycares.
— COVID FRAUD: THE GREATEST HEIST IN MODERN HISTORY —
During COVID, Washington opened the spigot. Pandemic unemployment insurance, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the SBA’s Economic Injury Disaster Loans. The fraud that followed was historic. Estimates of fraudulent pandemic unemployment payments alone run into the tens of billions, with some estimates far higher. The SBA’s inspector general has estimated over $200 billion in potentially fraudulent EIDL and PPP payments. Dead people got loans. Fake companies got loans. Prison inmates got unemployment checks.
That is what happens when the government writes checks faster than it can verify who is on the other end. And a universal childcare program that pays every neighbor and grandma in the country is a program built from the ground up to write checks faster than anyone can verify.
— THE GREATEST HITS REEL —
I cannot give every failure its own section or this article would be longer than the tax code, which, by the way, is its own failure. So here is the rapid-fire round. Each of these could be a full article.
Hurricane Katrina: the levees the Army Corps of Engineers built failed, and FEMA’s response became a national embarrassment, including trailers that turned out to have formaldehyde problems.
Flint, Michigan: government officials switched the water supply to save money, failed to treat it properly, and poisoned a city’s children with lead while insisting the water was fine.
Fast and Furious: the ATF deliberately let guns “walk” to Mexican cartels to track them. They lost track of them. One was found at the scene where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed.
The IRS targeting scandal: in 2013, the IRS admitted it had singled out conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny.
Solyndra: a $535 million federal loan guarantee to a solar company that went bankrupt in 2011. The taxpayer ate it.
The national EV charger program: $7.5 billion appropriated in 2021. Years later, the number of chargers actually built was so small you could count them without taking your shoes off. TSA would be proud.
Cash for Clunkers: the government paid people to destroy working used cars in 2009. Used-car prices went up, which hurt exactly the working-class families who buy used cars.
The Afghanistan withdrawal under Biden’s Autopen: thirteen American service members killed at Abbey Gate, Americans left behind, and billions of dollars of equipment left for the Taliban.
Prohibition: the government banned alcohol in 1920. Drinking did not stop. It went underground, organized crime got rich, people went blind from bad liquor, and the country repealed it in 1933. We never learned the lesson, which is why the War on Drugs is the same movie with a bigger budget.
Public housing: Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis opened in the 1950s as the future of urban living and was demolished in the 1970s as a symbol of everything that went wrong. Its architect later said he wished he had never taken the job.
The Great Society: Black poverty fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960, BEFORE the War on Poverty. After the programs arrived, the decline slowed. Meanwhile welfare rules that punished a man living in the home helped collapse two-parent Black families within a generation. Friedman said these programs pay people to fail, because when they fail they get the money, and when they succeed the money is taken away.
That is the babysitter. Every clip in the reel.
— AND THEY WANT MORE —
Here is what actually made me drop the coffee cup.
After all of that, the ask is never “let us fix what we already run.” The ask is always “give us MORE.”
Quinn’s Tenth Law: the failure is never the idea. The failure is that there was not enough of the idea.
The VA cannot schedule an appointment, so the answer is Medicare for All.
Head Start fades by third grade, so the answer is universal childcare.
HHS loses tens of thousands of migrant children, so HHS should run your kid’s daycare.
The Postal Service loses billions with a monopoly, so the government should run grocery stores.
California cannot build one train, so California wants a carbon market with Québec.
At some point you have to ask how dumb we are willing to be. Because if a contractor built your deck and it collapsed, you would not hire him to build your house. If a babysitter lost your neighbor’s kids, you would not hand her yours. Only in Washington does a failure record count as a qualification.
— WHY CHILDCARE IS THE DOOR, AND HEALTHCARE IS THE HOUSE —
Now let me explain why this matters beyond the price tag, because this is the part that genuinely keeps me up at night.
When the government takes over a market, it does not usually ban the private option on day one. It just subsidizes and regulates the public version until the private version cannot compete. The home daycare closes because she cannot meet the mandated wage. The church preschool closes because it will not comply with the strings attached to the money. The small center closes because the “free” option across town has a waitlist, but it is free. And one day you look up and there is only one provider left.
Now imagine that happening to medicine.
I ran 911 calls as a paramedic. I know what it looks like when somebody needs care NOW. Not after a committee meets. Not after a thirty-week wait. Now. When your wife is on the kitchen floor, you do not want a bureaucrat in the loop. You want a doctor and an ambulance, in that order, fast.
Before I ever stood in front of a classroom, I worked EMS in Cleveland. The company I worked for held a contract to run transports for the VA.
One day we got a request for an emergency pickup. Not a phone call. A FAX. In the age of cell phones, the VA faxed us about an emergency.
The patient was a veteran having an active heart attack.
In Columbus.
We were in Lakewood. From Lakewood to Columbus is roughly 140 miles, over two hours of driving just to reach him. And the plan was not to rush him to the nearest cath lab. The plan was for us to pick him up and bring him all the way back to the Wade Park VA emergency department in Cleveland. Two hours out, two hours back, for a man whose heart muscle was dying by the minute.
Anybody who has worked a cardiac call knows the phrase: time is muscle. Every minute a coronary artery stays blocked, more heart tissue dies and does not come back. The national standard is to get a heart attack patient from the door to an open artery in about ninety minutes. The VA’s plan would have had him riding in the back of my truck for longer than that before he was even halfway to the door.
And again, they did not CALL. They faxed. For a heart attack.
We loaded up and started driving anyway, because that is what you do. Somewhere along the way, as we were getting close, they called us off.
Why? Because the veteran did the smartest thing anybody did that day. He stopped waiting on the VA and called 911. The local emergency system picked him up, got him to a local hospital, and saved his life. That was a city ambulance and a community hospital, not a federal agency and not a fax machine.
The federal system that promised to take care of him would have driven him across half of Ohio. The local system that nobody in Washington ever brags about did the job in minutes.
That is the government healthcare system Congress already runs, for the people it owes the most. And now they want to run everybody else’s, and raise our kids on the side.
I still think about that fax. I think about what would have happened if he had been a little more patient, a little more trusting, and a little more willing to do what the government told him to do.
Now let’s look at other countries with single-payer systems. Right now, when a Canadian gets tired of waiting months for surgery, he can come to the United States. Canadians cross the border for care every year. Wealthy patients from countries with single-payer systems fly here for the treatments they cannot get at home, or cannot get in time. Britain’s NHS waiting list has run past seven million people. Canada’s median wait from a family doctor referral to actual treatment has been measured at around thirty weeks. That is more than half a year of waiting to be fixed.
The United States is the escape hatch for the whole developed world. If we go single-payer, where do THEY go? Where do WE go? There is no America for America. There is no second option. There is a waiting list and a government office.
And here is the part that should concern everybody, regardless of party.
When one payer controls all of medicine, that payer decides what gets covered, for whom, and when. That payer is the government. Now remember the IRS targeting scandal, when an agency of the United States government admitted it had given extra scrutiny to groups based on their politics. Now put that same kind of government in charge of approving your surgery.
I am not saying that it WOULD happen. I am saying it opens the door. A government that controls your paycheck, your children’s care from infancy, and your access to medicine has more leverage over a free citizen than any king George III ever dreamed of.
If you do not support Big Brother, Big Brother holds your claim.
The founders did not build this country on the assumption that people in power would always be good. They built it on the assumption that they would not be. That is not paranoia. That is Federalist No. 51: if men were angels, no government would be necessary.
On January 10, 1963, Representative A.S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read forty-five communist goals for America into the Congressional Record, drawn from Cleon Skousen’s “The Naked Communist.” Goal 41: emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Goal 40: discredit the family as an institution. Goal 32: support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture, including education, social agencies, welfare programs, and mental health clinics.
Federal childcare from infancy. Federal control of medicine. Government payments that replace the family’s role. I am not telling you there was a secret meeting. I am telling you the checklist was read into the official record sixty-three years ago, and I can put a check mark next to more of it every year.
— THE SAFETIES THE FOUNDERS BUILT —
The founders saw all of this coming. Not childcare specifically. But the impulse. The mob that votes itself other people’s money. The concentration of power in one place. And they built safeties into the system specifically to stop it.
The first safety: we are NOT a democracy. We are a constitutional republic. The word “democracy” appears in the Constitution exactly zero times. Article IV, Section 4 guarantees every state “a Republican Form of Government.”
And no, we are not a “democratic republic” either, at least not in the sense people mean when they say it, where the majority of the moment can vote away the rules. Democratic, the adjective, describes how we choose representatives. Democracy, the noun, means direct majority rule. They are not the same thing. Your ninth-grade teacher probably told you they were, and I do not blame them for it. Teachers pass along what they were taught, the same way generations were taught there is no gravity in space, that blood is blue until it hits air, and that you only use ten percent of your brain. Confidently repeated. Still false.
The difference matters, because systems that let the majority rewrite the rules have done exactly that. Germany’s parliament voted to hand Hitler dictatorial power through the Enabling Act in 1933, legally, by vote. Venezuela voted in a 2009 referendum to abolish term limits, and we all watched what came next. A mob with a ballot can vote its constitution into a paperweight. Ours was built so it could not do that easily.
Madison said it plainly in Federalist No. 10: democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention” and “have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” He distinguished between a pure democracy, where citizens rule directly, and a republic, where they act through representatives inside constitutional limits. The whole point was to break and control the violence of faction, meaning the mob.
Hamilton made the same case in Federalist No. 9, celebrating legislative balances and checks as protections against tyranny, including the tyranny of the majority. That is why we have the Senate, the Electoral College, and judicial review. That is why the Constitution rules, not the crowd of the moment. The people govern through the Constitution, and the Constitution limits what the government can do to the people, no matter how many of them vote for it.
The second safety: the Tenth Amendment. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Twenty-eight words that keep Washington small.
Go read Article I, Section 8. It is a list. Coin money. Establish post offices. Raise armies. Maintain a navy. Regulate commerce among the states. Childcare is not on it. Healthcare is not on it. Education is not on it. Madison wrote in Federalist No. 45 that the powers delegated to the federal government “are few and defined,” while those remaining with the states “are numerous and indefinite.”
Few and defined. Look at a federal organization chart today and tell me that is few and defined.
The Tenth Amendment is a safety valve. If Ohio does something dumb, I can move to Indiana. If Illinois runs a bad childcare program, it fails in Illinois and other states learn from it. Justice Brandeis, a progressive, called the states laboratories of democracy for exactly that reason. But when WASHINGTON does something dumb, it does it to all fifty states at once, forever, and there is nowhere to move.
That is exactly what the left keeps trying to destroy. Pack the Court. Abolish the Electoral College. Kill the filibuster. Federalize elections. Federalize childcare. Federalize medicine. Every one of those is a safety being pried off so that the mob, and the people who manage the mob, can take charge. And every one gets sold as “saving democracy,” which is the funniest part, because the founders were trying to save us FROM pure democracy.
What is next, a major party calls for eliminating the Senate filibuster and packing the Supreme Court so no constitutional check can stop them… wait, I am being told they already campaigned on that.
— TAX THE RICH, SAYS THE RICH GUY —
One more thing about Ro Khanna specifically. He is regularly listed among the wealthiest members of Congress, with family fortunes reported in the tens of millions of dollars or more. And he backs every tax-the-rich plan in sight.
So here is my standing offer, and it does not expire. Before I hear another word about the rich paying their share, lead by example. Pay DOUBLE what the IRS says you owe. Standard deduction only. No itemizing. No trusts, no clever structures, nothing but the same one-page life the rest of us live. Do it for three years, publish the returns, and then we might start listening. Until then, the message is noise from a man who knows every loophole because his profession writes them.
And while we are here, Congressman: what have you actually DONE for working families? Not appropriated. Not proposed. DONE. Because if the ledger is nothing but handouts, that is not help. That is a subscription service where the product is a voter who can never afford to cancel. Price the first job out of existence with a wage floor, make the benefits impossible to leave, and put the government in charge of the kids from infancy, and you do not have a population that is helped. You have a population that is kept. The antebellum South needed a captive underclass to keep one party in power too. The chains became benefit cards. The overseers became caseworkers. The plantation just changed its letterhead.
— A MODEST COUNTERPROPOSAL —
In the spirit of bold visions, I would like to submit my own bill.
The Mandatory GPA Redistribution Act. Every quarter, students with high GPAs contribute their extra points into a common pool, which is divided evenly. Everybody graduates with a 2.65. Nobody fails, nobody is left behind, and since research shows students with higher GPAs do better, giving everyone a higher GPA will make everyone do better. It is just common sense.
Also: free ice cream on Mondays, with stores absorbing the cost. Mondays are hard. No working family should face one unfortified. This is not a radical thing.
You laughed at those. You knew instantly they would not work, because the moment grades are redistributed, the good grades stop being earned, and the moment ice cream is free, the stores stop stocking it. Congratulations. You understand universal “free” childcare better than the congressman who wrote it. It took you three seconds. It has taken Washington sixty years and they still have not figured it out. The elevator does not go all the way to the top floor, and I am not sure it ever left the lobby.
— THE BOTTOM LINE —
I am not against childcare. I am not against helping families. I am a father of four and a teacher in a district where the need is real. I have seen it every single day.
What I am against is handing my children, my neighbor’s children, and eventually my doctor’s office to an organization with this resume. The VA wait lists. The lost migrant children. The failed audits. The crashed website. The poisoned water. The trains with no passengers. The trillions in improper payments. The Head Start gains that vanish before third grade. The Quebec kids who came out worse.
The right answer is the one the founders gave us. Keep power close to home. Let states experiment. Let families choose. Protect the private alternatives, the church preschool, the home daycare, grandma, and the stay-at-home parent, instead of regulating them out of existence and replacing them with a waitlist. Put money in the hands of families through tax credits and health savings accounts, not in the hands of a bureaucracy that cannot find its own keys.
Quinn’s Fourth Law says liberalism only succeeds when the public is scared into believing it cannot survive without it. So here is the only thing I will try to scare you with: the actual record. Read it. Then decide whether you want this babysitter.
By the way, one of my kids came downstairs right after the mug hit the floor, still half asleep, and asked if I was okay. I said Daddy is fine. It is the country I am worried about.
I already swept up my coffee cup. I would rather not sweep up the country. And I will be raising my own kids, thank you, Congressman. They are not a line item. They are mine.
But what do I know, I am only a science teacher who checks the lab notebook before letting anybody run an experiment on my kids.
IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE this article so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this — every share really helps get the word out. Use it. COMMENT below with your take. Which government failure on this list would make you LEAST willing to hand Washington your children? And which one did I leave out? Tell me.
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Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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