Indiana State Rep. Nancy Dembowski and a Herd of Elephants

She mentions them, but apparently she's failed to count them and determine the grand sum of their weight and expense. This herd of elephants, of course, is the federal healthcare mandate that has been shoved onto the plate of Hoosier families, small businesses, and our Indiana treasury.

Dembowski believes she speaks for all of us when she says, "We are all trying to digest the scope of the federal health care law that passed in Washington earlier this year." Not all of us have chosen to turn a blind eye to these problems that Ms. Dembowski herself must soon face up to. The news is in and it isn't good. The bill that was sold to the federal government was one in which, due to inaccurate information given to the Congressional Budget Office, was originally expected to cost $20 billion in just five years, has now been revised to a staggering $43 billion, due to an expectedly steep increase in Medicaid enrollees.

At a time when the states have been forced to vastly reduce funding of schools because tax revenue has evaporated from the budget due to a recession, one might think these added elephants were more worrisome, as they certainly are to her constituents-particularly the small business owners who will be taxed and forced to keep up with the bureaucratic game at an tiring and deadly pace.

It is this that Dembowski ought to be spending her interim session learning about and finding solutions for, rather than writing pieces to criticize Gov. Mitch Daniels, whose economic policies, though tough and not always easy to swallow, have kept our state in the black, although not for long, thanks to the Democrats' drunken-sailor spending and big government agenda.

The mess those elephants are making is starting to stink and soon we'll all be stepping in it.