Turn on the television set and flip to any major network news program. What you’re not likely to see are the heartbreaking stories of crushed dreams that are rampantly spreading across the land. The long shadow of Washington is casting the country into economic darkness, and the only person’s fortunes we are supposed to care about is our elected leader Barack Obama.
As our state-orchestrated media struggle to drag voters into a contrived discussion on everything but the economy, including an imaginary war on women, the urgent need for free condoms, the danger of blacks wearing hoodies, proper dog-rearing habits, and the importance of Mitt Romney’s juvenile pranks, real lives are being wasted, held back by an economy that is criss-crossed in red tape, and stifled by progressive taxation.
While the Democrats are babbling about a composite woman named “Julia,” appropriately faceless and helpless — just the way the party likes ’em, real flesh-and-blood human beings who are born into this world with a hope of doing something positive and constructive with their lives are suffering. But you’re not going to get anecdotal sob stories here to carry the water for a weak argument, like one constantly sees with the mainstream media, but a little history and some hard statistics.
Half of all college graduates today will not be able to find employment under this president, according to current trends. The young people who are supposed to be the critical component to the Obama re-election campaign, and who voted for him over McCain at a rate of 2-1 in 2008, are being asked to turn out for the glory and edification of a man whose policies do not allow them to succeed in kind.
Long-term unemployment is an unmitigated disaster. The hallucinated Obama recovery has seen a tripling of the long-term unemployment rate, meaning that so many able adults have been out of work for so long that their life prospects are dwindling. Should an Internet version of the Fairness Doctrine ever be passed, this would be the part of the editorial where a Democrat comes in and tell us how his party has a monopoly on compassion.
What some people seem to overlook is that Barack Obama was a community organizer, adjunct lecturer, and hard left legislator before becoming president. He approaches the economy like he did the banks and businesses on the streets of Chicago, like targets of opportunity to shake down for cash. But while he is out of his league, and out of his depth, there is no political will for the president to learn how to turn the economy around. In his mind, the economy exists as something to be exploited for the benefit of the party; whether for banks and businesses that are bailed out with taxpayer cash in exchange for campaign contributions, or for welfare recipients who are put on the dole. The human wreckage is considerable: people’s lives ruined, plans forestalled, dreams crushed.
Unless one works for the government, that is. Such employees make double what their private sector counterparts do, and for work that often seems to be pointless if not counter-productive. Paper-shuffling desk jockeys can show up for a 9-to-5, bankroll a hefty salary and cushy pension, and then take that cash and go out to buy things provided by the productive economy. If Ben the bureaucrat wants to buy a house, how many ‘migrant workers’ will have to bust their humps at bargain basement wages to build it? Now imagine an army of millions of bureaucrats exploiting others through the aegis of government. It’s a huge scam and one that not everyone seems to get. Millions still look to the government to get us out of recessions and depressions, technically impossible because of the nature of government and economy, and cannot fathom how a president could be so heartless as to do nothing about them.
One heartless president in America’s past was Calvin Coolidge. The man was so blue-blooded and cold that after the economy tanked following World War I, the president did next to nothing. He simply sat there, wringing his hands about the skyrocketing unemployment rate — or such would be the narrative the way the Democrats tell it. What happened instead was the economy turned around in a little over a year and the depression ended in 1922.
Or take John F. Kennedy. While one can spare the Camelot romanticism about the man, he did have the common sense and foresight to cut the exorbitantly high tax rates, spurring the economy and leading to lower unemployment. This paragon of ‘putting big business and fat cats ahead of the little people’ happened to be a Democrat. Surely he would be denounced today and run out of the party as a DINO (Democrat in Name Only).
This brings us to the arch-nemesis of big-hearted, big government liberalism in leftist ga-ga imagination: Ronald Reagan. The man was so bloodthirsty and cruel, they say, that in concert with other fiscal policies, he cut taxes for the villainous one percent, leading to sustained high growth, lower inflation, and lower unemployment. Maybe all those voters who turned out for Reagan in the 1984 landslide didn’t really know they were satisfied with his policies?
But the heavyweight titan of presidential mythology, the way that any sufficiently credentialed person would tell it, has got to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is a man who actually ran as a small government guy and proceeded to ram a hardcore statist agenda down America’s throat in his first hundred days. The nation was hurting so bad that many Americans were disillusioned with the “capitalist system.”
But FDR’s policies did nothing to ameliorate the situation in the long run. While economists profess that the constricted money supply damaged the recovery after 1929, what they gloss over is that there was another major crash in 1937 after the money supply increased. The sum total of FDR’s policies were a disaster. One of my favorite quotes, and one that leftists particularly revile, is one from Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau:
No, gentlemen, we have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong, as far as I am concerned, somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises…
So Franklin Roosevelt presided over the longest depression in U.S. history and he owns those policies, just like President Obama owns the policies that are driving the country into a prolonged rut. The president even recently compared his administration to FDR’s:
“[The economy] collapsed in the most destructive, worst crisis that we’ve seen since the Great Depression. And sometimes people forget the magnitude of it, you know? … Sometimes I forget.”
So the worst part is: the president doesn’t seem to have learned a damned thing.
If we really entertain our imagination and picture an honest and sincere Treasury Secretary Geithner penning a memoir, it might read like this:
We have tried billions in bailouts, a slew of stimulus, shovel-ready-that-was-not-so-shovel-ready, an endless supply of food stamps, unemployment payment extensions, bank takeovers, nationalizations, green energy subsidies, the entire Keynesian playbook… and what have we gotten for it? An unemployment rate that hasn’t budged, and a stagnating economy. Not to mention an enormous debt to boot!
But the sad thing is that politicians in the Democrat Party aren’t at all interested in turning the economy around, because to them it exists as a source of power, perquisites, and privileges for themselves and their buddies. That is why the Democrats don’t care about the debt our children and grandchildren will have to pay for, or that the CBO projects the economy to economically implode around 2027, or that they have refused to pass a budget for well over a thousand days.
With no plans, no solutions, and no compassion for those who are trying to find a job to pay for the food on their kids’ plates, put gas in their cars, or put roofs over their heads, the Democrat Party has lost all credibility as a party that cares about ‘the little guy.’ The Democrats instead act as if is simply wonderful to restrain the job-creating private sector by raising taxes on it, while doling out checks to people who do little or nothing to earn them. Not to mention that millions of people are unable to fully pursue their dreams. No, the only person whose hopes and dreams we voters are supposed to care about this November are those of Barack Obama. Instead, let us vote in every race possible for limited government and a free market, as a way of voting for ourselves.
