Progressives' War on the Economy

Several recent articles illustrate the painful economic consequences of liberal-progressive rule. Contrast these against the final article below showing the economy of Texas under conservative rule.

Real Household Incomes Fall 5.9% Under Obama — "From this analysis, Americans have lost real income gains during an economic recovery for the first time in American history."

ObamaCare Slows Hiring, Raises Prices in 5 States: Fed Survey — "In a Philadelphia Fed survey of regional manufacturers out Thursday, 18% said they employ fewer workers due to the Affordable Care Act than they would in its absence. Just 3% say employment levels are higher as a result. Further, 18% said part-timers make up a greater share of workers due to ObamaCare ... just 1.5% said they've scaled back part-time work in response."

Government Dependency in America Nears Tipping Point -- "New data on federal public assistance programs show we've reached an ignominious milestone: More than 100 million Americans are getting some form of 'means-tested' welfare assistance..." [chart right].

Now consider this from AEIdeas:

Chart of the Day: Texas Jobs — "The chart tells a powerful and important story about the strength of the Texas economy, which has experienced an employment increase of more than 1.3 million workers since late 2007. In contrast, civilian employment in the other 49 states is still almost 1.3 million jobs below the December 2007 level!"

Donatelli: What Part of Constitution Do Liberals Still Support?

"[W]hat is most radically different about the Obama liberals’ interpretation of the Constitution is its neutering of the Bill of Rights," writes Frank Donatelli. "To be sure, liberals never had much good to say about the Second, Ninth and 10th Amendments, but now they’re striking at other amendments, even those they once revered."

Donatelli highlights several examples of liberals' recent abandonment of the Fifth and (perhaps most surprisingly) First Amendment rights as well.

Ironically, the only constitutional provision to limit government power that liberals still champion is the right of “privacy,” which of course is found nowhere in the Constitution.

In recent years, many Democrats have sought to rebrand “liberalism” and “progressivism.” This is not just a cosmetic name change. Liberals of a generation ago accepted limits on government action, especially those limits contained in the Bill of Rights. Progressives, by contrast, have always found limits on their power to be inconvenient. ...  If progressive government in this administration has taught us anything, it is that liberties that run counter to great progressive ambitions are in serious danger.

What Conservatives Learned in 2013

Conservatives "thought that the most efficient method to evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism's most light-shedding texts," writes George Will. "Now they know that a quicker, surer way is to have progressives wield power for a few years."

Will skips lightly through a few key debacles in liberal-progressives' rule over the last 75 years or so to remind readers that this isn't the first time they've been bitten by their arrogant overreach. His modern day examples—from Obamacare's Pajama Boy to Al Gore's global warming predictions—should bring a smile. Yet his point is serious and even uplifting:

Worries about the NSA's collection of metadata occurred in a context of deepened suspicions about government because of this year's revelations that the administration has corrupted the Internal Revenue Service, the most intrusive and potentially the most punitive domestic institution. Conservatism is usually served by weariness of government.

Flynn: Progressives Took Our Booze

Progressives have an unquenchable desire to rule other peoples' lives. Today it's Obamacare. Nearly 100 years ago, it was Prohibition; and that didn't turn out well for them either.

Eighty years ago today [Dec 5th], progressives woke up groggy after their fourteen-year bender in state-imposed sobriety.  ... In the throes of a throbbing political hangover, they blamed the disaster on everybody but themselves.

Progressives may remain oblivious to their boorish behavior when they crashed the party and stayed for 13 years, 10 months, 19 days, 17 hours, 32 minutes, and 30 seconds (surely parched Americans marked the days as though trapped on a desert island). But Americans need not indulge their collective amnesia on today’s anniversary.

Eight decades later, progressives, inebriated by the righteousness of their ideology, blame everyone else for the sins of their forefathers. Projecting one’s errors upon others ensures a repetition of those errors. This may not today manifest itself in relation to alcohol. But the crusading spirit to sterilize their fellow man of impurities — of tobacco and transfats, Big Gulps and Big Macs, and so many delights that make life worth living — surely remains.

Read Daniel J. Flynn's full article, Progressives Took Our Booze: 80 Years Ago Today Americans Took it Back, at the American Spectator.

We can only hope Obamacare goes down in equally glorious flames.

Progressives' Religious Fervor

With Obamacare, "the American people have had an unfiltered look at what progressive policy means to them, and they don't like it," writes Derek Hunter, adding "desperate times require desperate measures. Enter the religious appeal."

In a column reeking of desperation on par with a kid hoping for a unicorn under his Christmas tree, the Washington Post’s Ryan Cooper compiled a list of reasons “Why millennials will come around on Obamacare.” Aside from a desperate lack of understanding of health policy and how people work, the second reason Cooper lists stands out. He writes, “Going without health insurance is morally wrong.”

I’ll give you a minute to let that sink in.

But wait, writes Hunter (after citing two other recent examples of progressives' moral guilt-tripping**),

These are the same people who spent the better part of the last half-century proclaiming “government can’t legislate morality” on any issue remotely moral. [snip]

The Soundtrack of Progressive Destruction

"2013 has been a banner year for damning self-portraits of American progressivism," writes Daren Jonescu in an American Thinker piece so delicious that it's impossible to stop quoting.

"If you like your plan, you can keep it." This is a perfect iteration of the basic lie that has fueled modernity's "progress" down the drain of history -- or History, as progressive thinkers would have it. [snip]

You have heard this lie, and witnessed the tyrannical dialectic it sets in motion, your whole life, as have your parents and grandparents. Variations on this theme have become the soundtrack of late modernity's decline. The theme remains the same; only the melodic details are changed to suit the collectivist totalitarian agenda item of the moment.

"If you like your current healthcare arrangements, you can keep them" -- except that our intention is to delegitimize, denigrate, and finally outlaw all private healthcare arrangements.

"If you like your 'negative rights,' you can keep them" -- except that the new positive rights we are gradually introducing into the political lexicon will necessarily override your life, liberty, and property, not to mention trumping all the secondary rights derived from those initial three, such as speech, association, and religion.

OCare: Progressives Pick Winners & Losers

"Unlike drug addicts, alcoholics, or the obese — all of whom represent higher-than-average medical costs — smokers are the only such group with a pre-existing condition that ObamaCare penalizes," reports William La Jeunesse at Fox News.

It allows insurance companies to charge smokers up to 50 percent more than non-smokers for an identical policy, depending on the state and any subsidies the person might qualify for. [snip]

A study by nonpartisan Institute for Health Policy Solutions found some smokers could pay as much as 33 percent of their income in health care premiums, well in excess of what ObamaCare considers "affordable" health care.

The study presented three scenarios:

1. The premium for a young, non-smoker earning roughly the minimum wage will cost $708. The same policy for a smoker would cost $3,308, or up to 400 percent more.
2. Before subsidies, a non-smoker who is 59 or older would also pay $708 for a "silver" or mid-level policy. However, a smoker of the same age would pay $5,908.
3. In a worst-case scenario, an older couple who smokes could be "literally impoverished" by ObamaCare premiums, said the report. That couple could pay an $11,352 health care premium, or one-half their annual income of $23,000. By comparison, a non-smoking person over 59 years old would pay 90 percent less, or just $952 after federal subsidies.

It seems that Progressives have an insatiable appetite for controlling other peoples' lives and choices, whether it's the amount of salt they eat or the size of the soft drinks they buy. Remember that Progressives were the primary drivers of the Prohibition of alcohol in the early 1900s, too. 

Progressives destroy their government god, especially with young

The liberal-progressive faith relies on inculcating a belief in an omniscient, benevolent and just government god, so it's heartening to watch progressives systematically destroy that faith in their own deity (particularly among the young), as polling data now show.

Pondering how the IRS scandals (which occurred entirely on Obama's watch) have destroyed public confidence in the government agency, Peggy Noonan writes:

One irony here is that the Obama White House, always keen to increase the reach and power of government, also seems profoundly disinterested in good governing. It is strange. The long-term project of liberalism involves encouraging the idea of faith in government as a bringer or guarantor of greater justice. But who needs more government if government works so very badly, and is in its operations unjust?

Recalling Stein's Law in economics—If something cannot go on forever, it will stop—Charles Krauthammer writes:

Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.

Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there’s been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post-World War II auto boom.

Dan Mitchell, in Atlas Shrugs in Detroit, argues:

Arbitrary Justice, Progressive Style

In Deconstructing Reality and Zimmerman, Peter Wehner argues that Justice is being subordinated to the progressive narrative:

What we’re seeing from the left is post-modernism on full display. The facts, the truth and objective reality are subordinate to the progressive narrative. In this particular instance many liberals so want the killing of Trayvon Martin to be driven by bigotry–which would serve as both an indictment of racial attitudes in America and turn a horrible mistake into a “modern-day lynching”–that they will make it so, even if it requires twisting the truth into something unrecognizable. What matters, after all, is The Cause. And everything, including basic facts, must be bent to fit it. This kind of systematic deconstruction of truth is fairly common in college liberal arts courses all across America. But when it becomes the primary mode of interpretation in a murder trial, it is something else again.

Most of us, when we hear the words “justice must be done,” believe that what is right, reasonable, fair and in accordance with the facts be done. But some on the left have something else in mind. For them, justice is a tool in a larger political struggle, a means to an end. Justice can be at odds with reality if reality is at odds with liberalism. Which is why the efforts to turn the Zimmerman verdict into a racial miscarriage of justice is so discouraging and so damaging.

In Open Season?, Dave Carter laments progressive-style justice as well:

The Liberal-Progressive Religion

Logic, consistency and civility aren't strengths of Liberal-Progressive ideology because it's a fundamentalist religion with its own canon, writes Robert Hall in a piece that would be funny if his observations weren't so true. Here are a few:

• If conservatives oppose gay marriage, it is an atrocity; but if Muslims call for the murder of gays, it's a heartwarming display of Multiculturalism.
• The Rich are evil, but only if they earned their money in business and are not Progressives. So mega-millionaires Michael Moore, Warren Buffet, Al Gore, George Soros, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Tax Cheat Tim Geithner, Angelo "Friends of Angelo at Countrywide" Mozilo and any number of entertainment and athletic stars are all righteous people, while a couple each working 60 hours a week to bring home $260k are among the evil rich who aren't "paying their fair share."
• It isn't racist to require minorities to identify themselves to cash a check, fly, drive, buy a gun, buy alcohol, buy tobacco, sign up for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Welfare, or to enter a government building, Obama rally, or the Democrat National convention, but it is racism to ask for ID to vote.
• Progressives think it's an outrage if you don't want to pay for free birth control for yuppie law students, but completely ignore the stoning of women, child marriages, female genital mutilation, honor killings of female relatives for even speaking to a strange man and oppressive inequality of women in Muslim countries under Shari'a Law.
• Children are a high priority. As long as they are children of the Progressive Elect voting blocks in the US. So banning DDT to save the birds to feel good about the Environment was wonderful, and several million dead black, brown, and yellow kids from malaria in the Third World mattered not at all. Nor did the birds, of course, when it was time to build eagle-chopper wind farms in homage to Big Green.

Worth the whole read for anyone who must deal with the cognitive dissonant positions of the Progressive self-righteous, self-annointed 'elect'.

No Compromise with Progressives

Who are progressives? What is their vision, and how have they changed our American democratic republic? In a three-part series of articles, Thomas Sowell offers insight into the Progressive Legacy, while Senator Jim DeMint explains why there can be conservative compromise with them.

Sowell highlights the following:

• Progressives can be found in both political parties.
• Progressives hold a "vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economu and a reduced roles for the Constitution of the United States."
• Progressives are determined critics and foes of big business and often demonize business people with labels such as "robber barons" (early 20th century) and "1 percenters" (today).
• The Progressive movement rose and flourished a hundred years ago in the U.S.
• Progressives were subsequently so discredited by the problems the policies of their vision created "that they started calling themselves 'liberals'" during the mid 20th century, "and after they discredited themselves again, they went back to calling themselves 'progressives', now that people no longer remembered how progressives had discredited themselves before."

Then ... and now:

• "'Often wrong but never in doubt' is a phrase that summarizes much of what was done by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt [Republican] and Woodrow Wilson [Democrat], the two giants of the Progressive Era, a century ago."
• Theodore Roosevelt "stood the 10th Amendment on its head," interpreting "the Constitution to mean that the President of the United States could exercise powers not explicitly forbidden to him."
• "Wilson attacked the Constitution in his writings as an academic," and "once in power, his administration so restricted freedom on speech that this lead to landmark Supreme Court decisions restoring that fundamental right."
• "Theodore Roosevelt was also morally offended by the fact that Standard Oil created 'enormous fortunes' for its owners 'at the expense of business rivals'. How a business can offer consumers lower prices without taking custormers away from businesses that charge higher prices is a mystery still unsolved [by progressives] to the present day, when the very same arguments are used against Wal-Mart."
• Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism was very much in the same mindset. Government intervention in the economy was justified on grounds that 'society is the senior partner in all business'."
• "Barack Obama's rhetoric of 'change' is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated a hundred years ago."

Senator Jim DeMint believes America is at a tipping point—the same tipping point Sowell writes of in the early 20th century Progressive Era.

Against the backdrop of American public opinion calling on Congress to just "get along," Senator Jim DeMint argues in his new book, Now or Never: Saving America from Economic Collapse, that there can be no compromise between two such polar opposite visions for the nation.  Progressive/liberals seek dominance of the federal government in all economic and social aspects of citizens' lives, while conservatives seek individual freedom and limited federal power over citizens' social and economic pursuits.

How can I compromise and work with someone whose vision is so different from mine? It would be like a football coach telling his team, 'I want you to go out on the field and work with the opposing team. Try to help them out. Cooperate with them. Compromise with them.' He can't. The other team has a goal that is the opposite direction from ours, and they are there to beat you. As bad as it sounds, that's where we are in America.

The clash in Washington DC today is once again between progressive/liberals and conservatives over the vision and future course of this nation. It's a battle that conservative must fight to win.

Sources:
Sowell: Progressive Legacy Part I
Sowell: Progressive Legacy Part II
Sowell: Progressive Legacy Part III
DeMint: Speech to Conservative Women's Network (pdf)
DeMint: book review

Saddle-broken and Snake Bitten

The contraception mandate must have come as a shock to the many Catholics who chose to view the Obamacare promises through the church's rosy-colored 'social justice' lens. As conservative columnist George Will succinctly explains in a 54-second clip of ABC's This Week (video here), the Catholic Bishops should have known better:

Three points. As Paul Ryan said to you, this is an accounting gimmick that they've done that in no way ends the complicity of Catholic institutions and individuals in delivering services they consider morally abhorrent.

Second. You asked the question, 'How did this come about?' George, this is what liberalism looks like. This is what the progressive state does. It tries to break all the institutions of civil society, all the institutions that mediate between the individual and the state. They have to break them to the saddle of the state.

Third. The Catholic Bishops, it serves them right. They're the ones who were really hot for Obamacare, with a few exceptions. But they were all in favor of this. And this is what it looks like when the government decides it's going to make your healthcare choices for you.

Cue Al Wilson's "The Snake."

Rays of Optimism

A favorite saying - "this, too, shall pass" - has been used in our family to temper inflated egos and console bitter disappointments. Lately, it's been an encouraging reminder to conservatives that even the darkest nights are eventually broken by the dawn.

This recession has been one of spirit as much as economics for conservatives. In an extraordinary twist of circumstances, the Fall 2007 economic collapse ushered in an unprecedented foray into liberal-progressive radicalism. It would have been easy to become fatalistic and disheartened, yet Americans didn't. Tea parties were the first rays of daylight, and they reminded us of what America has been and could still be:  That we will be our own masters as long as we choose to be.