Indebting Missouri’s Children and Expanding Government? That’s Just Wimpy
Although the Popeye the Sailor cartoons were made long before I was born, I was a connoisseur of the VHS copies I had as a kid. Along with Popeye, the shows typically featured his nemesis, Bluto, and his love interest, Olive Oyl, but perhaps the most memorable character from the series outside of Popeye himself was his companion J. Wellington Wimpy. Unfortunately, he’s memorable for all the wrong reasons.
Wimpy is soft-spoken, very intelligent, and well educated, but also cowardly, very lazy, overly parsimonious and utterly gluttonous. He is also something of a scam artist and, especially in the newspaper strip, can be notoriously underhanded at times.
In the animated cartoons, Wimpy comes off as someone who not only is unreliable in his words but, ultimately, self-aggrandizing in his behavior. His signature phrase, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” hints that Wimpy will never pay you at all.
Even as a kid, Wimpy’s character was troubling because, like most children, I was well-acquainted with the idea of “fairness.” Wimpy was always willing to make others worse off for his own immediate benefit, and because of Wimpy’s generalized character issues, it was just hard to like him.
Wimpy would make you worse off . . . and he’d do it with a smile. When I think about how government and its politicians operate, that is, unfortunately, one of the images that comes to mind.
Perhaps this Wimpy image is most appropriate when it comes to the Obamacare debate in Missouri. On the one hand are the true believers who, despite evidence to the contrary, believe that government health care is the best health care. On the other hand are the Wimpys of the debate, whose support of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion has more to do with their near-term interests than the long-term consequences of their actions. Those consequences include billions of dollars in new spending and debt saddled on future generations to fund a failing and flailing health care program, meant to explicitly benefit the well-connected and highly profitable hospital industry. So before we pick up the Obamacare expansion fight in 2015, let’s be clear: that’s just wrong.
I have no problem disagreeing with and debating folks who have a worldview that expanded government is better policy than small government. We can win that debate on the facts. But I have a serious problem with those out there who have concluded that expanded government is better politics—the contingent that’s calculated that they won’t be paying for their hamburger when the bill comes due.
That’s just Wimpy. Missouri needs genuine Medicaid reform. Fix Medicaid. Don’t expand it.
