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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Richard N. Weltz
If one wants to explore what makes the minds of the left-liberal elites tick
, there is perhaps no better place to search than on the editorial pages of
the New York Times, which on the last Saturday of 2011 saw fit to bemoan
such little reductions as Republicans had been able to accomplish in the
Obama administration's ongoing runaway spending binge:
But that still leaves major reductions in the vital category known as
nondefense discretionary spending[.] ...
... This spending category has been the main focus of Republican
pressure for decades. In the 1970s, nondefense discretionary spending
represented about 5 percent of the gross domestic product; that is now down
to about 2.5 percent. Over the next decade, once the new cuts go into effect
, it will decline to less than 2 percent. This year's spending bill, signed
into law a few days ago, is roughly 10 percent lower than last year's,
cutting Pell grants, environmental programs and aid to desperate states. Low
-income heating assistance was cut by 25 percent.
As the economist Jared Bernstein has noted, this is the category of
spending that helps people move up the income ladder, providing nutritious
food, improving early education and job training and putting people to work.
[Emphasis added.]
Without that laundry list of government support (not to mention food stamps,
welfare, and a plethora of other "entitlement" and "safety net" wealth
transfers), we are told that Americans just cannot hope to "move up the
income ladder." Not only is that a bald-faced lie, but it is a gross insult
to all of us -- and, yet such thinking forms the basis of those who would
rule us as a nanny-state (which includes all the left and, sadly, too much
of the right as well).
The Times' assertion is an outright lie because tens of millions of
Americans, both native-born and foreign-born, have utterly disproved it over
more than two centuries -- and tens of millions continue to disprove that
lie to the extent that the government stays off their backs.
It is an insult to all of us whose forbears, including mine, worked hard and
thrived without the kind of government spending enumerated -- not one
single item of which, incidentally, is provided for, or even mentioned, in
the U.S. Constitution.
The left-liberals insult my own grandmother and her sisters and brothers,
who came to this country before the turn of the (20th) century, possessing
very little and unable to speak much English. Every single one of them made
decent middle-class lives and raised their families here without special
education beyond the normal public schooling, without heating assistance,
without government-furnished nutrition, without "job training" beyond what
was available for free in the public high schools -- and, while we're on the
subject, without subsidized housing, government health insurance, relief
from the necessity of learning English, "environmental protection," or
paybacks to the state of part of the money previously taken from it by
Washington.
The least fortunate of them, my grandmother, was left a penniless widow in
the early 1900s with three pre-teen and teenage children. She took in
laundry, the children went to work after school each day, and some of her
brothers and sisters who were better off helped out a bit. The family had
enough to eat, a roof over their heads, and decent clothes to wear. Every
one of the children went on to be a success -- two as entrepreneurs and one
eventually as vice president of a major public corporation -- and they each
raised families of their own with two or three children (my generation).
Their story is hardly unique. It was typical of generations of Americans who
understood the role of education and hard work in getting ahead in America
and took advantage of the opportunity to do just that. There were, of
course, some charities to help the most unfortunate, but Big Brother
government just wasn't around to do all those things the Times insists are
needed by anyone hoping to "move up the income ladder."
Making people dependent upon government is a conceit of the liberal mind,
which thinks that it knows what is best for everyone. It is, surely enough,
a very practical way to keep being re-elected into positions of power or to
occupy seats just behind those thrones. But, much more than that, it is a
mistaken ideological certainty that people just cannot help themselves
upward without a government boost -- despite the legions who did exactly
that over decade after decade when there were no handouts or assistance
programs run by Washington and state and municipal governments.
Then, in a time of stress, FDR was able to stretch and evade constitutional
limits in order to create New Deal programs that involved the federal
government far beyond anything ever previously contemplated -- TVA, REA, CCC
, NRA price controls, PWA, and all the rest of his era. The rest was
gradually added on later, especially in Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society"
programs.
Leaving out the unconstitutional nature of all this liberal interference
into individual freedoms and opportunities, and leaving out for a moment the
"moral hazards" to which we expose those who are made dependent, the
question arises: "at what cost?"
At what cost, for instance, can we hand out free cell phones with a generous
allowance of minutes to welfare families; at what cost free dental
insurance that even Medicare-buyers don't have? At what cost -- in money
and freedom -- do we force children to eat a subsidized lunch at school
instead of one their mom packed at home?
At a far greater cost than we can afford, friends: subsidy after subsidy,
entitlement after entitlement, bureaucracy after bureaucracy, mandate after
mandate, cosseting upon cosseting (yes, in New York's public libraries, "[t]
he surge in immigrants patronizing the Queens system has spurred its
branches to offer books, DVDs, and CDs in 59 languages).
And, over in Brooklyn next door, the lines for welfare and food stamps are
overflowing the offices: "The crush of people grew so large at one Brooklyn
center in November that the Fire Department intervened and prevented anyone
from entering the building."
When times were prosperous, we gritted our teeth and bore such developments.
But the expansion in "spread the wealth" programs -- which has about half
of all American families receiving some kind of government assistance, and
only about half paying any federal income taxes -- has reached a point where
the most basic and important function of our national government is being
jeopardized: namely, to protect our nation and its interests around the
world.
Small wonder that Defense Secretary Panetta has just announced an Obama plan
to weaken our armed forces drastically, beyond the downsizing that took
place under the two previous administrations.
We have come to that place where the pace of frivolous spending has
increased to a point where we can no longer afford to defend ourselves
properly, and that is after we have already established debts that our
children and grandchildren will be paying off long into the future.
It is yet another elitist insult to believe that the American public is
either too entitlement-addicted or too stupid to recognize what Obama-style
"social justice" thinking is doing to our once-proud land. I hope that the
leftist "progressives" are wrong about that, too. |
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