From: GemStatePatriot.com By Rich Loudenback
I remember one of the late Johnny Carson’s best one-liners in 1964 when he said, “I heard a guy was just told that President Johnson declared War on Poverty today, so he went out and threw a hand grenade at a beggar.’ Of course, it cracked me up at the time, but America should realize today that there is nothing funny about the results of the ill-fated War on Poverty program. Since that time, we have spent over $22 TRILLION dollars on anti-poverty programs.
The Heritage Foundation reports, “Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the American Revolution. Yet progress against poverty, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau, has been minimal, and in terms of President Johnson’s main goal of reducing the “causes” rather than the mere “consequences” of poverty, the War on Poverty has failed completely. In fact, a significant portion of the population is now less capable of self-sufficiency than it was when the War on Poverty began.”
America was not founded as a magic place where aid is abundant and stuff is free. America is about FREEDOM! Freedom to be resourceful and pursue whatever level of attainment you wish. If you wish to work at a job providing for a small secure home, a car, a wife, a child, a dog and a TV and do so, you are no less a success than the man who owns a business, with a mansion and much else than you. Success is about reaching your personal goal. Levels of success are irrelevant, success is success.
Failure is not a measure of character, it is a learning experience and the character comes in at capitalizing on what was learned and moving forward. The trade-offs for guarantees like minimum wages and job security conversely harm our system competitively, de-incentivize and like all subsidies must be paid for by others. The trade-off for all the socialist programs pushed by Big Gov is that our commerce and our remaining taxpayers who still have jobs are taking the hit.
THE DIMMS’ TODAY
The Democrat Party presently is exactly antithetical to the precepts of what America stands for as created by our founders. We are not the land of freebies, guarantees, open borders, sanctuary cities or Sharia Law. We are about limited government, personal responsibility, moral codes such as the biblical Ten Commandments and the rule of law. Because the Democrat Party has been winning, America has been losing. Thanks to President Trump that trend is starting to reverse and America is starting to win again. The Dimms are in utter shock, ‘Big League.’
The donkey party has for decades rolled on a social bent promising and delivering programs and outright free money that conversely has dealt much harm to American freedoms and our necessary healthy commerce. Most ‘government programs’ have contained a lot of fat, political chicanery and socialist nonsense which is dis-incentivizing and eroding the American spirit to strive upward.
The Democrat Party today is not reaching out to voters so much anymore. They truly are no longer the party of Zell Miller. It is being led by a dictum of raw, far-left anger that is exposing their roots of blatant socialism and even fascism. The new ‘progressive’ Democrat leaders are leaving behind some very good Americans who don’t want any part of their new extreme socialism. It is apparent that the Democrat leadership is so arrogant that they don’t care, since they are buying and training new young socialists for Obama’s ‘Organizing for America’legions who are out raising hell in the streets, protesting everything worthwhile and recruiting new upstarts for the attractive pay of from $15 to $18 an hour plus expenses and transportation courtesy of George ‘Take Down America’ Soros.‘ It is truly a sad party when the best they have is purely obstructionist Chuck Shumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elijah Cummings, Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters.
An Investor’s Business Daily editorial ‘Another Hard-Left Turn Ends Democratic Party As We Know It’ states, “The party has been largely taken over by government worker unions and left-wing billionaires and their PACs, including the omnipresent self-described socialist George Soros and climate change extremist Tom Steyer.
“With thousands of foot soldiers trained and battle-hardened in the Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders for president movements, they are pushing the party to the hard left. The battle for the DNC is emblematic of what’s going on across the Democratic Party, both in Congress and in the states. Moderates are purged, conservative Democrats are nonexistent, and the party’s leaders seem intent on turning it into a party of hard socialism as quickly as possible.
“Obamacare, the failed national health care takeover that Americans despise? Today’s Democrats would go even further into failure with single payer, if they could.
“Dodd-Frank’s regulation heavy smothering of the financial markets? Democrats seem to think that businesses owe their existence to the government, and there’s nothing that ails Wall Street that sending a few CEOs and entrepreneurs to prison wouldn’t cure.
“In case you’re wondering why consumer and business confidence is soaring and the stock market is surging, it isn’t because people think Dodd-Frank is going to survive.
“Get the picture? This is where the Democrats are going. It’s important to note that Obama’s progressive legacy is really one of political defeat for the Democrats.’
SUBSIDIES & FEDERAL PROGRAMS – SOCIALISTS’ ‘DREAM’ TOOLS
Government subsidies are part of socialism and have been running amuck for such as corn, tobacco, wheat, milk, lamb meat, livestock assistance, windmills, solar, rural electrification loans and loan guarantees, rural telephone loans and loan guarantees, public television, state library programs, AMTRAK, General Motors labor, Asian elephant conservation, rhinoceros and tiger conservation, Wildlife Without Borders – Latin America, the Caribbean and Mexico and refugee and entrant assistance programs to name just a few. There are a total currently of 1607 funding programs from our federal government to be precise, totaling $1,974,042,215,000 (that is trillion dollars)! There have been only our surviving businesses and those of us still working to pay for it all. Hopefully, with the Trump Presidency, subsidies will begin decreasing and disappearing as well the number of government programs, agencies and departments.
In the ‘perfect world’ expounded on endlessly from utopian progressives who control the media, Hollywood and the sorry socialist education system, to which we’ve been subjugated, they are constantly demanding fairness, assistance, social justice and redistribution. They do not want you to acknowledge the trade-offs for all their purported goodness and freebies. As certain as Newton’s Law of Physics ‘For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,’ the same can be said for the balance sheet for life in America. There is no something for nothing!
Socialism’s trade-off of course, being that we give up individual freedoms, (in young-speak – let us make that ‘opportunities’). That means when an employer is forced to pay higher minimum wages his balance sheet’s reaction is to either raise prices or cut back on staff. Nothing for nothing. A business must make a profit. So what good is a $15.00 minimum wage if it kills the golden goose?
Every program the government creates has a very simple basis for its existence, ‘It must be supported with money derived from our taxpaying pockets.’ Therefore, like the business owner who must decide to cut back overhead (lay off employees) or increase prices, which may run off business, America, cannot sustain the magnanimity of all these programs and subsidies that are killing our nation’s balance sheet forever. Government itself is killing us!
“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain. – ‘The Law’ by Frederic Bastiat:
It is a testament to our Capitalist system’s resiliency that we have endured as well as we have so far while rapidly backsliding under such erosive abuse. But this erosion will finish us for sure if unchecked as sure as ancient Rome went away. Socialism fails. Socialism just takes and produces nothing that can be taxed. Capitalism succeeds. Capitalism’s profits are the roots to all our taxes. Nothing else.
Lastly, from that Investor’s Business Daily editorial, “The Democrats’ lurch to the left is a tragedy for a once-great party. But for the Republicans, it is an enormous opportunity to craft a governing majority for years to come — unless, like the delusional Democrats, they blow it.”
WORDS TO REMEMBER
Excerpts from ‘Overview of America’, a 29-minute video which will open your eyes to exactly what America is about:
“The Constitution was created to govern the government, not the people, and not the states, each of which is a guardian of its own sovereignty.
“The Constitution, our firm foundation:
“It wasn’t what government did that made America great. It was what government was prevented from doing that made the difference.
“What set America apart from other lands was freedom for the individual. Freedom to work, to produce, to succeed and especially to keep the fruits of one’s labor.
“America became great precisely because the stifling effect of too much government had been prevented.
“However, freedom in America was not totally unrestrained, Americans overwhelmingly chose to limit their actions with moral codes such as the biblical Ten Commandments.
“Personal morality and limited government; it’s the combination that characterized America and made it the envy of the world.”
And lastly summing it all up is one of my favorite statements in the video: “The essence of freedom is the proper limitation of government” – Unquote from ‘Overview of America’