On Monday, Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid announced a grand compromise on healthcare “reform” legislation. To please the leftwing base of his party, Reid’s bill would include a government-run public option – the first step toward socialized medicine in America. That’s not my opinion, but Barney Franks’. To attract the votes of moderate Democrats, Reid announced that his plan would allow states to opt-out of the public option.

The state legislature would have to vote on legislation to opt-out, and the governor would have to sign the opt-out bill. But here’s the catch: There is no opting-out of the taxes to pay for this new $1 trillion entitlement program. All the taxes and penalties would remain in effect, so citizens of states that opt-out would still end up paying for a program they can’t access. As Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said, “the big [liberal] states will [opt-in] and the rest of us will end up paying for their excesses.” Remember what happened to the conservative governors who tried to “opt-out” of the stimulus money?

Last night on MSNBC, leftwing radical Ed Schultz was effusive with praise for Harry Reid’s “opt-out” deception. Schultz stated flatly what drives liberal politics: get constituents hooked on government programs and you have a guaranteed voting base. Schultz said of the public option:

“This is a great move by the Democrats. …Once you give it [the public option] to them, they don’t want to give it up. That’s the way it’s gonna be. I think this is a great move by Harry Reid. The public option is a public option. And it is – it is – the first step toward single payer [socialized medicine]. That’s what we progressives want. This is just the road to get there.”

It couldn’t be clearer than that. Liberal politicians and leftwing progressives are taking us down the road toward socialism, toward confiscatory tax rates, even bigger government, greater spending and more debt.

Your freedom is at stake. The standard of living you have enjoyed will be denied to your children and grandchildren if this new trillion-dollar entitlement program passes. And the quality of healthcare that is available today will be destroyed if government gets involved.

Compared to other proposals the administration has thrown at the American people this past year, the home buyer tax credit was not bad. Unfortunately, the government could not even effectively run this program.

New home buyers would receive up to $8,000 in tax credits under the plan. The money was supposed to be available for first-time buyers who bought a primary residence after April 9, 2008, and only individuals making less than $75,000 or couples making less than $150,000 would be eligible. However, during a Ways and Means oversight subcommittee hearing yesterday, House members were informed that thousands of fraudulent claims were made.

The Treasury Department said that at least 19,000 filers who had not bought homes claimed $139 million in tax credits and were in turn reimbursed. An additional 74,000 tax-credit claims, totaling $500 million, could become invalid because of previous home ownership. Even more surprising, 500 people under the age of 18, including a 4-year-old child, had their names on applications for the credit, which has no minimum-age requirement according to federal officials. Evidently some adults used a child’s name as the purchaser of the home because they were ineligible to receive the credit due to their incomes.

Many of these fraudulent claims occurred before the IRS had updated their computer programs. If they had done this correctly, the program would have automatically checked the claims to ensure that they were valid based on the information submitted.

When added up, the total potential waste of your tax money from fraudulent home-credits could be upwards of $639 million. This is the same government that wants to take over our entire healthcare system! We have seen the government’s ineptitude in recent months with cash-for-clunkers, a behind schedule H1N1 flu vaccination and now this. When will liberals in Washington learn that government isn’t the solution to every problem? As my former boss Ronald Reagan correctly said, “Government is the problem.”

ABC’s one hour infomercial with President Obama promoting his socialized healthcare plan was a ratings bomb for the network. Despite airing in primetime at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, the president attracted fewer than 5 million viewers. The show had the lowest ratings of all the major networks for that hour. It wasn’t as if the other networks aired their most popular shows either. NBC debuted a new show titled “The Philanthropist” and CBS aired a repeat episode of “CSI: NY.”

It appears the American people are getting sick of seeing Barack Obama everywhere. The argument the major news networks use when they receive complaints for giving Obama too much air time is that he is a ratings booster. That argument has lost credibility after Wednesday’s bomb. It is getting harder and harder for Big Media to disguise its true intentions, which is to promote a radical leftwing agenda to the American people. But evidently the American people aren’t that interested in the new ABC — the “All Barack Channel.”