|
And Rightly So
August 27, 2010
It's being reported as I write this column for our August Bulletin that enrollment in the food
stamp program has hit an all-time high. 40.8 million
Americans have turned to the government for help feeding
themselves and their families. At the same time,
unemployment is up again, nearing the 25-year high it hit
last year. Experts suggest that the economy is headed into
a deeper slump: there's more talk of the dreaded "W-shaped"
or "double-dip" recession.
Coincidentally also today, Byron York is reporting on
a disturbing trend at Obama's Justice Department. Eric
Holder' Civil Rights Division has started writing slush
funds for "qualified organizations" -- read ACORN-style
allies of the Democrats who work to organize support for
yet more Democratic electoral victories and more government
interference in everything -- into their settlements with
businesses accused of illegal discrimination. Nobody's a
fan of AIG, but do we really want a million dollars of
their money (or is it our money? Don't forget their
generous bailout) funneled to community organizers as part
of a consent decree settling charges that they
discriminated against minority borrowers? Or money from a
lawsuit charging that a landlord in LA's Koreatown
discriminated in favor of Koreans to go to an organization
that funds -- wait for it -- more housing discrimination
lawsuits? Especially since neither company was actually
found guilty of the discrimination?
And that's a drop in the bucket compared with the
Obama administration's serious attempts to muck with the
economy. There’s Obamacare, the wrecking ball poised to
smash the American medical system. There are the repeated
attempts to pass "global warming" bills that would
drastically curtail our energy use -- and the promise that
even if none of them pass, Obama's EPA will still regulate
carbon dioxide (yes, the gas we all exhale in every breath)
as a threat to public health. There are the apparently
eternally recurring rounds of "stimulus" that suck money
out of the private sector to prop up the public
bureaucracies in big-spending states. (And to buy literally
millions of dollars of signs touting the stimulus and
President Obama!)
It's all the work of a class of people who see what
we’d call the real economy -- private companies making,
transporting, and selling things that individuals are
willing to pay their own money for -- as a cash cow to
underwrite their re-organization of our lives according to
their plans.
And, you know, it's not just the Obama Administration.
I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. Here's a small
selection of the outrageous boondoggles I've read about in
the local papers in the last couple of weeks. The County
Board gave one mall $4 million for renovations to lure
Costco to locate there. And another $350,000 to some
Colorado consultants to research our demographics and -- no
kidding -- what kinds of recreation citizens are interested
in. Meanwhile, somehow 40% of our police manage to tap into
disability benefits when they retire.
Look, you and I are conservatives. We're not looking
to politics to supply meaning for our lives, or to make us
feel we're smarter or more compassionate than other people.
We'd rather invest our time and money in what's really
productive and meaningful: making something of value,
whether it's a garden, a book, a back yard tool shed, or a
flourishing small business; giving our children a real
education; worshipping God and learning to love our fellow
man.
But we have to stop this disaster. We simply can't
afford it any more. We've already borrowed and wasted so
much money that it's hard to imagine ever paying it back. A
future in which America can't pay her debts is not the
future we want to have to live in. And unless we rein in
our political class, we will.
Americans are hurting already, but there's still a
long way we could go down. Nobody in America's making
clothes out of flour sacks, yet. The American economy is
remarkably resilient. But the trajectory we're on is a bad
one. If you want a picture of what a real economic disaster
looks like, just read The Great Depression: A Diary.
It's not something we want to risk for ourselves, our
children, or our grandchildren.
You'll be reading this column about two months before the
2010 election. If you're not already volunteering, find a
local candidate who will vote against the status quo; call
his campaign office; ask how you can help. Now is the time
for each one of us to do something very concrete to make
sure the winner in this election is the American people,
not the political class.
--Elizabeth Kantor andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com
|
