There’s a dirty little secret to this health care reform debate. It’s something no one’s talking about. But, it’s out there just the same. Headed straight for a lot of us like an asteroid headed toward the planet.

Take a look at this chart put together by CalculatedRisk.

It shows how unemployment has tracked over time by education level.

See the red line? The red line represents the unemployment rates for those people who have less than 2 years of college on their education resumes. You can see even without being able to read the numbers (visit CalculatedRisk to see a larger view) that those who fall into the red line category have a substantially higher level of unemployment. You can also see that they historically track behind the other categories in overall unemployment.

Now, here’s the deal: The dirty little secret in all of this is that those people were the ones who held hard core blue collar jobs. The dirty little secret is that those jobs are gone for the foreseeable future. To Mexico. To India. To China. They’re probably not gone for good, but they’re gone for a really long time.

Now, life is not without its ironies, and this is certainly no exception.

The irony here is that many of those who are out making threats and screaming about “My America” are the same ones who will be most affected by this long-term loss of hard core blue collar jobs. The irony is that they will be exactly the people who find themselves without a job and unable to find another job.

No job means no benefits. Like health insurance, for example.

These will be the people who show up at the ER at 2 a.m. with no insurance. They are the ones that those of us who do have jobs and do pay taxes wind up paying for.

So, while these “patriots” stand at town halls and hatemonger and refuse to let people talk, they are in a very large sense sealing their own fates.

No, there won’t be any meaningful health care reform. No, nothing will change. There will just be fewer of us who are working. Fewer of us left to pay more in taxes for all those hospital and ER visits made by those who are no longer working, but who fought health care reform.

That sounds an awful lot like Socialism to me. But, I’m sure by the time it dawns on any of these “patriots” what they’ve done to themselves, they’ll have forgotten all about the Socialism argument.

© 2009, Mac Williams. All rights reserved.

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