Republicans, Democrats, and the Role of Government
These comments were made in response to an article appearing
in the Chicago Sun-Times Sunday.
I keep hearing how Republicans (repubs, for short) keep
alienating key demographic groups in our country (women, Latinos, blacks,
minorities in general, the poor, the elderly, the disadvantaged, the uninsured,
etc.), while the Democrats (dems, for short) are the party of compassion and
inclusivity.
The difference is that the dems believe that the government
can and should solve every social problem.
All it takes is a government program and a lot of your money.
To that end, the dems have put our country 17 trillion
dollars in debt. But nobody talks about
what debt does to a country.
First of all, everything they spend costs you more than what
it is worth. If you buy a new car for
$25 thousand dollars and only make the minimum payments each month, that same
car might cost you twice as much.
Probably a lot more. You might
never pay it off.
To fund this debt, we borrow trillions of dollars from
whoever is willing to buy it, and often it is a country that is not on our
close friend list. But, because we don’t
want to lose their money, we may allow them more influence on matters where our
best interests lie elsewhere.
Our country prints a lot of money, trillions of dollars a
year. This devalues the money you
already have, in your checking and saving accounts and your paycheck. It makes everything you buy from other countries
more expensive. And remember, ‘we don’t
make anything here anymore.’
The people hurt most by this are the people who can least
afford it, the ones who the government is probably spending that same money to
help.
The government keeps trying to get more money from corporations
and the rich people. But corporations
really are people, like Romney so famously said. What this means is, when you tax
corporations more, you are just taxing the people who buy those goods more. So whatever people buy gets more
expensive. And the people who are hurt
the most, again, are the ones least able to afford it.
You can tax the rich more, but what are you really doing? What do rich people do with all their
money? They don’t leave it in banks when
they don’t get any interest from it. (Thanks,
dems.) Yes, they spend some, which increases
the demand for consumer goods, which raises the demand for jobs.
But they mostly invest their money. It takes a log of money to start a business, to
expand a business. The fact is you will
never work for a poor person. The more
money you take from the rich, the less money there will be for jobs.
Some people criticize this by calling it trickle down
economics. But the fact is you don’t have
to be rich to start a company, but it takes money. And jobs only come when you make enough money
in profits to pay for a salary.
Back to the article at hand, these ‘hardliners’ who
“continue to anger wide swaths of Americans,” what is it that they want?
They want the government to stop spending money it doesn’t have. The government lives in a world outside of reality. Companies constantly shrink and grow as cash
flow varies. Almost every company at
some point has to reduce its workforce to make ends meet. The government thinks it is above that. The government needs to lose a lot more than
800,000 workers. If it did it now, our country
would still be better off, because it would be cheaper to pay them unemployment
than to pay their salaries and pensions.
But our government has been so anti-business for so long, we
can’t produce enough jobs to make up the difference. At least for now.
As for the health care law, the biggest single problem with it
is that the government will now be spending hundreds of billions of dollars a
year subsidizing peoples’ insurance with money it doesn’t have. The dems act as if the bubble can never burst. It can. It will, if we don’t stop this overspending.
You note favorably the fact that women will no longer pay
more than men for health insurance. That
just means that men will pay more than their health risks would warrant. Healthier people will see their premiums shoot
up. Many of them will prefer to just pay
the penalty.
As for food stamps, our government sees it as a badge of
honor that a record number of people are on food stamps. The fact is the more money the government
gives away, the more people come to rely on the government. Our government is encouraging dependency on a
bigger and bigger government, spending more and more money it doesn’t have with
fewer and fewer people working who are paying into the system.
Marlen, do you have kids?
The repubs are like the mother who expects her kids to do chores without
getting paid for them, who spanks them or otherwise punishes them when they do
wrong, who expects them to do their homework, to get a job as soon as they are
old enough, and who doesn’t buy them everything they want., who makes them pay
for them by saving and working for them.
The dems are like the rich uncle or the separated father who
tries to buy the kids’ love by getting them all kinds of expensive toys to spoil
them.
As for Bob Dole, the only reason his party is seen as alienating
people is because the media is not telling the whole story, people are not
seeing the big picture. In real life,
you can’t keep spending what you don’t have, and you can’t keep expecting
people to give you money. The government
is living a lie, like the king that has no clothes, and everybody is afraid to
say anything for fear of looking crazy.
No, wait, there are some people speaking up, and people are calling them
crazy. The media used to hold politicians
accountable, but the media has gone on vacation since 2008.
Republicans, Democrats, and the Role of Government part 2
Republicans today are often portrayed by Democrats, with the
help of the media, as being cold, heartless bigots who hate minorities and only
care about rich white people, actually rich white men. Their white wives and children will share in
their prosperity, but all those people of color and women who want to be like
men don’t really belong here.
The Democrats are the people who are compassionate and
inclusive. Their goal (strategy) is to
identify any discernible demographic group (that doesn’t have white or
Christian in its label) and find a way to give that group government
assistance, which not only makes that group dependent on the government (Government
assistance is a narcotic, changing wants into needs.) but will also generate a
loyal following at voting time.
The Founding Fathers only thought it necessary to name three
rights that people have to justify our country’s existence and to give it
direction: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Bill of Rights (ten in number) further
identified the basic rights that Americans enjoy and that guide the policies of
our country.
But the idea of rights has changed in Democratic
thinking. Where before, rights were
limited to things you can do or things that the government cannot do to you,
now they want to define rights as things that the government owes you, things
that first require the government to take money from somebody else to give to
you in one form or another.
As a right, it doesn’t have to be earned or achieved by the recipient;
the government just needs to see that they get it.
For the first, maybe, 130 years of our country’s existence,
we were all essentially in agreement that the government should be small with a
very limited role in the lives of the people.
People were eager to come here to make their fortune. Our country rapidly achieved unequaled
success and prosperity by just about every criterion. We quickly became the richest, most powerful,
and best educated country in the world.
It has often been noted that going to college was not common before
World War 2, but that didn’t matter much in that an average fifth grader then would
probably outdo the average twelfth grader today
The social bond of the country was religion,
Christianity. The Bible and prayer were
basic and essential parts of the public school education, and social services
were essential parts of the churches, where hundreds of organizations were
founded to address every social need that could be found.
Shortly after the beginning of the 20th century,
when communism and Darwinism were starting to gain prominence in the world,
elements of collective thinking were taking root in our country. In the 1930s, when the country was in a
depression, the time was ripe for a major government expansion, which is
generally agreed today to have prolonged the depressed economy until the Second
World War.
When religion was officially removed from our public schools
and gradually from the public square, the government grew to fill the void of
someone overseeing our society. Where it
fails is that it can only offer money to people where churches could offer love
and accountability, as well as whatever other assistance was needed.
And without the self-constraints taught by religion, the
growth of government was also a way for those in government to personally
prosper as well. The result of their
attempts to help people through giving them money and also using the money that
was available for personal and political benefits has been to create a debt
load so large that the numbers are meaningless to most people. There is no incentive to reduce this debt and
plenty to keep adding to it.
The Democrats give the illusion of being more compassionate,
because they identify specific demographic groups and do something specifically
for them, all the while those same programs have injurious effects on our
country in the long run, either by spending money they don’t have or by
creating more dependency on the government which stifles the creative
independence that generates economic growth.
The Republicans, when not forced by public opinion and media
attention to play the same game, focus on the bigger picture, what is good for
the country as a whole rather than any one particular group. Government jobs take money out of your pocket
to support them. The bigger picture
focuses on freeing up money and businesses and individuals so they can start
jobs and have more personal income and wealth.
The way you help the poor is to create an environment that
creates jobs. That means cutting down on
all the hoops and expenses of starting a business, and keeping the taxes and
regulations low so that a company can afford to hire more people and pay them
more money.
The poor still need to get an education, but it doesn’t help
them or the country when a one in four students doesn’t even graduate high
school.
The Democrats see the government for what it can do for
people. That sounds noble on the surface,
but that is not the genius of our country.
That kind of government requires huge amounts of money and people to
oversee and manage the lives and welfare of a country. The countries that are trying to do this are
(going) broke, and the standard of living diminishes as these policies
continue.
It was not an enormous all-controlling government that made
our country great, but a small government that allowed people the freedom to pursue
their dreams without the heavy hand of government weighing on them. This also required the influence of
Christianity on the people to foster a climate of honesty, integrity, hard
work, and compassion for others.
Trying to run a country without Christian principles and
actions will only lead to more government control, debt, and diminished lives
as seen by the increasing levels of violence and poverty.
