The Orange Country Register had a good editorial about the pork spendulus, where the editors concluded "Without secrecy, panic and haste, the stimulus bill could never have passed."
A reader named Windfall posted a reply explaining political truth to us in a resigned, matter of fact way. I'm not the author of this rant, and it's not a barn burner like Finntann's, but I love it nontheless.
windfall wrote:
Let me make this real simple for you. If you are a political party, you are in business to win elections. To do that, you need voters.
If you are the party of say the long distance runners, you want to create more long distance runners, either by importing them or by influencing voters already here to become long distance runners.
If you are the party of the rich, you want to create more rich voters. You do this by removing impediments to work, saving, investment and production. You lower tax rates and reduce the burden of government.
If you are the party of the poor, you want to create more poor voters. You do this by increasing impediments to work, saving, investment and production. You raise tax rates and increase the burden of government. If this still doesn’t create enough poor voters to solidify your powerbase, you import more poor people and put them on a path to citizenship or just register them to vote anyway. And if this still doesn’t create enough poor voters, you finally just pay people outright to stay dependent on government, which ensures that they never get ahead.
The path to financial independence has an early fork in the road.
One way leads to dependence, one to independence. In order to qualify for government handouts, you need to present and document yourself as a victim. In order to get ahead, you need to accept the axiom that “if it’s going to be, it’s up to me”.
These two positions, states of mind really, are diametrically opposed. It is virtually impossible to hold both concepts of oneself simultaneously. This is why you can choose to get by or you can choose to get ahead but you can’t choose both. Of course, you can always go back and revisit that choice. And that is why the welfare reform of the 1990s worked in terms of weaning people off the welfare rolls and onto a different, more responsible, more productive and, ultimately, more independent path.
In repealing welfare reform as well as encouraging illegal immigration, motor voter laws and the right to vote without providing even basic identification, and by constantly pushing for higher taxes, more government intrusion and intervention into business as well are more borrowing and spending, Democrats are simply doing everything in their power to make it easier to get by and harder to get ahead. They’re hoping that when millions of voters and potential voters reach or revisit that fork in the road, they will choose dependency.
What’s so difficult to understand about that? After all, they are the party of the poor. They need to create as many poor people (and as few rich) as possible.
2/18/2009 7:46:57 AM
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