Left & Right June 20, 2018

We discuss "family separation" on the southern border which dominates media lately. We agree on most points, but Gino suggests that Guatemala, Honduras, etc. are suffering because of too many MS-13 members deported back there from the US.

I contend Democrats want open borders but won't say it outright. The "asylum" scam is widening and accelerating. Awesome display of media/Democrat, pro-illegal-immigration propaganda.

What is in Trump's core? Gino says he lacks one, that he's completely opportunistic.

I describe anti-white-men bias at Harvard Medical School, and in undergraduate university admission procedures. Lawsuit by Asians who have been discriminated against is proceeding.

Tariffs past and present -- good or bad? Trade war? I say Calvin Coolidge hands-off policies more effective than Hoover's or Roosevelt's federal control policies.

Gino compares the Great Depression to the financial collapse in 2008.  I contend the feds should have done nothing in both cases and let businesses collapse. Let other private firms pick up pieces after bankruptcies. That's what Coolidge did and it worked very well. Government intervention prolongs recessions/the depression with central control.

Shunning Independence

One of my chores lately is dressing my granddaughters while their mother tends the three-month-old twin boys. Three-year-old Claire puts on most of her clothes herself now. Two-year-old Lila, always trying to keep up with her big sister, will stubbornly tell me “I can do it myself!” even if she really can’t yet, so I summon the patience to wait while she tries to put on her pants and shirt. Both strive to be self-sufficient and I like to foster that, even when it takes three times longer than if they were to let me do it all for them. They also help prepare supper. Claire can peel carrots and Lila can put plates out the table. This takes longer too but they’re proud to do their parts.

Lila and Claire

Two of their great-grandfathers were World War II veterans. My father was born poor in January, 1922 during a time when there was no government assistance. My father-in-law was also born poor a month earlier in December, 1921. Theirs was the generation that witnessed the beginning of federal government intervention in day-to-day lives of millions of Americans. They were teenagers when President Roosevelt took office in 1933. My father and his brothers participated in programs like the CCCs and WPA to earn money for their families. Both great-grandfathers grew up to join the navy and fight the Japanese, one receiving a Purple Heart and the honor of being buried at Arlington National Cemetery last December. Both supported Roosevelt.

Although many Americans received the first forms of federal government assistance during the Great Depression, they didn’t become addicted to government and they were expected to work for their money. When President Johnson took office in 1963, however, the feds started giving money directly to people with no work requirement. Johnson’s “Great Society” declared a “War on Poverty” that, although well-intentioned, hasn’t come close to achieving its lofty goal of eliminating poverty in America after almost fifty years and $15 trillion. Indeed, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last week found a plurality of Americans (24%) who believe it was a huge boondoggle that, rather than eliminate poverty, has extended it.

Part of the War on Poverty was AFDC - Aid To Families with Dependent Children - which gave money to mothers without husbands. Many claim that, because mothers got more money the more children they had, it subsidized an increase in illegitimate births and breakdown of families. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed 13% believing that family breakdown “is most responsible for the continuing problem of poverty” and 10% saying it was “a lack of work ethic” - another result of giving money to people who don’t have to work for it. Those percentages add up to nearly half of all Americans who believe “War on Poverty” programs not only failed to eliminate poverty, but extended it.

As we’re burying the last of our World War II veterans, eight hundred per day lately, the contrast between their generation and the one they parented - baby boomers - couldn’t be more stark. They defeated dictators in Europe and Asia, then defended the free world from communism until the first of the boomer president was inaugurated in 1992 - President Clinton. He was followed by boomer Presidents Bush and Obama. All of them continued to expand government intervention into ordinary Americans’ lives with cradle-to-grave entitlement programs to the point where, in Maine, welfare recipients outnumber taxpayers.

Maine Governor Paul LePage

Making things worse, it’s not just Americans: millions of illegal immigrants are collecting benefits - even terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers who kill us. The US Department of Agriculture actually helps the Mexican government recruit illegal aliens to collect food stamps. In the 19th and 20th centuries, people longed to come to America because they would be free to work toward their dreams and raise their families. We used to attract immigrants “yearning to breathe free.” Now we’re attracting immigrants who want to live for free - at taxpayer expense. According to the Center For Immigration Studies: “In 2009 (based on data collected in 2010), 57 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal and illegal) with children (under 18) used at least one welfare program, compared to 39 percent for native households with children.”

It’s increasingly evident that Americans today can be divided into two categories: those who want to take care of themselves, and those who expect government to do it for them - those proud to be independent like my granddaughters are becoming, and those who not only fear liberty, but crave dependency. It’s the former who built this country and defended it for two centuries. It’s the latter who are running it into the ground.

The New America

In spite of my shock and depression over election results, I banged out a short piece titled “Reckoning” the day after the election. It focused on our looming financial disaster and voter ignorance about Obama’s responsibility for it, but there are so many other aspects of this electoral disaster. It showed us so much about what our country has become, and I’ll deal with another part of it here.

Those last three Obama campaign commercials really shook me up. They were appalling, and I thought: “Who would vote for a president whose campaign put these out?” I believed he would be defeated, soundly and deservedly, because Americans were much too decent to approve this sort of thing. They would be as appalled as I was.

But, alas, I was wrong. Obama was reelected.

The commercials were for internet viewers, not for television, and they were detestable. The first featured a young woman with a tattoo on her shoulder saying coyly: “Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy . . . Before, I was a girl. Now, I was a woman. I pulled back the curtain and I voted for Barack Obama.”

I thought: “Wow. The Obama campaign is really misreading the American voter. This is going to backfire on them, big-time.”

But I was wrong. Obama reads America better than I do. How depressing - not because I’m inferior in my perception, but because of what America has become. I knew it was bad. I didn’t know it was this bad.

The second, put out by Moveon.org, started innocently enough at a nursing home. “A Message From the Greatest Generation” appeared in text. Then five elderly residents appeared and the camera zoomed in on one: “Marie, 97 years old.” She said she was born during World War I and first voted for FDR in 1940. Then she said: “If your voter suppression throughout this beautiful country enables Romney to oust Barack Obama, we will burn this motherfucker down.”

Then another old lady said: “If the Republicans steal this election, I’m going to track down Mitt Romney and give him the world’s biggest cock-punch . . .” Then she paused and looked to her side saying: “What’s the matter sonny? You never heard that phrase ‘cock-punch’? Hah-hah.” Then she grimaced, held out her hand as if to squeeze something and said: “Right in the nut-sack!”

Then an old man said he was a veteran of World War II and that if their offspring let the Republicans steal the election again, they’re going to look down from heaven and watch them have sex.

There was a sick comedic attempt in this second one, but the third was deadly serious and the most shocking.

In it, a series of young girls begged their mothers: “Please, please, please vote for President Obama. Otherwise, your vote is a vote against me.”

If mothers were to vote for Mitt Romney, they would be voting against their own children, the commercial purports. Why? Presumably because Romney would appoint judges not supportive Roe vs Wade - the landmark 1973 US Supreme Court decision preventing individual states from outlawing abortion. Neither Romney nor Roe are mentioned, but the implication is clear.

Each of the girls depicted, ranging in age from about five-years-old to twenty-something, all beg: “Please make the right choice so that when I grow up, I can still have one.” What each aspires to have, of course, is an abortion. They’re begging their own mothers who didn’t kill them in utero to vote for Obama so they can kill their own babies - who would be their mothers’ grandchildren - when they grow up.

This is what my country has become and it’s why I’m so depressed. I’ve always known there were lots of Americans who think like the people in the commercials, and that their numbers were growing. What I didn’t realize was that they’re already in the majority. America has changed, perhaps irretrievably. The concrete of our Brave New World had set while I wasn’t looking.

My view had always been that when people became cognizant of what we were turning into and why, they would choose to reverse course - but that’s not what last week’s election showed us. Now I realize that most of my countrymen believe it’s wonderful and they want more of it.

The commercials may be repulsive to me, but they’re not to the new majority. They’re not ephemeral zeitgeist. They’re what we are.

Reckoning

    My friend was being too pessimistic - I thought.

    Months ago he said the country will continue its downward slide because those who depend on government have become the majority, and will always vote to keep those government benefits coming no matter what.

    Yes, those people who depend on government for everything are increasing, I acknowledged then, but even most of them weren’t stupid enough to believe those benefits would keep coming forever. They understood the simple arithmetic that we could not continue indefinitely borrowing 42 cents of every dollar we spend. If conservatives only pointed out that - even if we took all the income of the richest Americans - we could only continue funding our nanny state for a few months, people would understand. They’d know the whole thing would collapse if we stayed on the road we’re on and they’d vote for fiscal sanity instead of four more years of President Obama’s pie-in-the-sky promises.

    No they won’t, he said. Most Americans are not that smart, he insisted - and he was right. Tuesday’s results proved him right. They proved me wrong and I have to adjust my thinking.

    The wagon-riders have become the majority. Most Americans don’t want real liberty - the liberty to succeed or fail on their own - they want to remain attached to the government umbilical cord and stay home watching “Dancing With The Stars.”

    For quite a while now, commenters on my blog have been deriding me as out of touch with mainstream Americans. I guess I am. I’ve overestimated the common sense of the average American voter.

    Thirty years ago I got to know a wealthy family as I took care of their property. The matriarch’s grandfather made a fortune in shipping during the late nineteenth century, but by the fourth generation, it was all gone. Rags to riches to rags in four generations. How long has it taken the United States to go from the richest nation in history to the biggest debtor nation in history? About four generations.

    My father-in-law is on his death bed as I write this. He’s a twice-wounded veteran of World War II and went on a morphine drip Tuesday - election day. The family is around his bed waiting for the end.

    What strikes me is how analogous that is to our nation’s condition. We just reelected a president who has promised to continue for another four years with the policies that have increased our national debt by 50% and stagnated our economy. Whereas the family waiting for my father-in-law’s death is fully cognizant that he’s dying, the electorate that put President Obama in for another term Tuesday doesn’t understand that America as we know it is dying too. My father-in-law will be gone inside a week, but our country may limp along for months or even years.

    The fiscal cliff looms for January. That budget problem our government put off dealing with? It’s coming up soon. Does President Obama realize that he’s inheriting a much bigger mess for his second term than he did for his first?

    Who is he going to blame it on this time?

Pampered, Selfish Robin Hoods

Liberals love to pat themselves on the back for giving away other people’s money. Latter-day Robin Hoods, they love to tax the “rich” and give to the “poor,” but they’re as tight as the bark on a tree with their own money. Do they rationalize that they give away so much of our money that they don’t need to give away much of their own? “It’s more blessed to give than to receive,” goes the proverb, and liberals believe it’s most blessed to give what isn’t theirs.

Most of what federal government takes from me and about about half of all other Americans is used for social programs. The other half of Americans pay no federal income taxes and receive most of the benefits from those programs. All this was designed by those who called themselves “progressives” at intervals of Democrat rule during twentieth century. Whoever might disagree with them were, by implication, regressive. Progressives called themselves “liberals” later on, but now they again wish to be called “progressives” here in the twenty-first century because “liberal” has taken on a negative connotation. Whatever they’re called, their aim is the same: take as much as they can get away with from the most productive and give it all to the least productive. They use big, bloated government for this redistribution because they don’t want to use bows and arrows and live in the forest like Robin Hood. They want the support Robin Hood received, but also the creature comforts beyond even what the Sheriff of Nottingham’s lifestyle provided. They love performances at the Kennedy Center and lavish parties at the White House paid for by taxpayers.

Whenever progressive liberal Democrats are in charge, they ramp up promises beyond what government could possibly afford. FDR’s New Deal promised Social Security pensions for the elderly. That’s been increased since to include disability payments for people of all ages and may soon be extended to millions of illegal aliens as well if they get their way. Al Gore used to talk about a “lock box” for the money FICA takes from our paychecks, but that was a myth. All the money we send to the federal government for our old-age pensions is spent immediately by that bloated government. All Al Gore’s lock box would contain is IOUs. In 2016, there won’t be enough money to back up the millions of checks it sends out every month. Looking further ahead, deficits for Social Security run to $100 trillion over the several decades.

Liberals in LBJ’s Great Society gave us Medicare thirty years later. Projected deficits for that run into the tens of trillions. Also, Barack Obama gave us health care “reform” that will take $500 billion from Medicare that isn’t really there and spend trillions more that we don’t have either. What he’ll do is try to borrow more and add that red ink to the $14 trillion deficit he already run up. All this debt and the prospect of still more is what’s really depressing the economy today.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has been using FDR’s Keynesian defibrillator to apply trillion-dollar jolts to an economy that continues to flatline. While running trillion-and-a-half-dollar annual deficits that alarm our creditors so much they’re balking at lending us more, he wants to use the “progressive” federal income tax to soak even more out of the “rich.” He’s also using the Federal Reserve to buy US Treasury bonds nobody else wants, and pay for them by printing over $3 trillion. It’s not a question anymore about if it’s all going to come unravelled - it’s only a question of when.

Up to now, the half of Americans who pay no federal income tax have been inclined to vote for presidents, senators and congressmen who promise more and more benefits at the expense of the other half who pay for it all. Along with the votes of guilt-ridden, trust-funded liberals, they swept “progressives” into power in 2006 and 2008. Their policies, however, are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Cities and states like Detroit and California that progressive liberals have been in charge of longest are the closest to bankruptcy. Enough of the bottom half of Americans are watching their over-extended neighbors default on their mortgages and credit cards and realizing that our federal government is doing the same thing. Uncle Sam won’t be able to backstop it anymore. They’re realizing that if they keep voting for progressive liberals and their socialist policies, it will all come crashing down.

It’s going to be very interesting when votes are counted the evening of November 2nd.

Change is Coming

People are worried. More worried than I ever remember. If they’re not out of work, they know others who are. Highly skilled tradesmen are taking on whatever comes their way - jobs they never thought they’d do - because the phone isn’t ringing like it used to. They don’t see an end to it and they don’t expect it to get better. They expect it to get worse - a lot worse. That’s what worries them. And these are reliable people, those who have always taken care of business, of themselves, and of others, have always paid their taxes, have done everything above board.

Others who have hidden income in the underground economy, who have relied on government for unemployment checks, for free health care, and many other government programs, are still doing that, but their phones aren’t ringing at all. They’re calling others in search of work but not finding much. They’ve hired on occasionally with the reliable ones, but those occasions are fewer and farther between. Lately they’ve had more time to stand around with their hands in their pockets listening to anxious talk from those who pay attention to the wider world and understand it a bit. They don’t like what they’re hearing and now they’re worried too.
Then there are those who have never taken care of themselves, who have depended totally on government. They’re still going along as they always have, but they’re noticing the world is slowing down. Businesses are closing. Others aren’t open as much and shelves are empty. They don’t know it yet, but their lives are about to get harder.

Anybody who pays attention has seen it coming for a long time. Political leaders though, acted like it would all go on forever and most voters believed them. A growing number depend on government for everything and don’t know any other way, but with illegal immigration and refugee resettlement, we’re supporting tens of millions of foreigners as well. Some think we can support the whole world. Citizens want to seal the border, but government refuses. Republicans refuse because business constituents like the cheap labor and Democrats refuse because illegals will vote for them after amnesty. Ordinary citizens steam as their government sends so many checks to so many people it can’t cover them anymore. Rather than cut back, it has borrowed from foreigners who don’t want to lend any more. So the Federal Reserve is printing money.

The gravy train is derailing. Some of us know it. Other sense it. Most remain oblivious. Cities and towns can’t pay bills and can’t get help from states that are bankrupt. States can’t get help from a federal government in debt $14 trillion. There’s no backstop anymore. We’ve reached the end. Yet the president and Congress are still pushing health care “reform” for $2 trillion and trashing Senator Jim Bunning for asking where we’re going to get $10 billion to extend unemployment benefits. Because he pointed out that things simply cannot go on like this anymore, Bunning was trashed by Republicans as well.

The dollar is collapsing. The Euro is collapsing. It’s all going to collapse - and very soon - unless we cut everything and cut it deeply. It’s an election year and we should be hearing candidates tell us to cut government back hard now or disintegrate into anarchy, but we’re not. In bankrupt California last week, spoiled college students took to the streets over a raise in fees that will make it difficult for them to buy kegs of imported beer. Imagine what will happen when we raise retirement age, stop cost of living raises, cut entitlements 10% a year, seal the border, impose stiff fines on employers of illegal immigrants, and lay off government workers. It’s either going to happen methodically or everything will just fall apart at once, but it will happen.

Just as animals sense an earthquake, unease is spreading. The new president’s honeymoon ended when people began to realize that his plan to spend us out of recession has only hastened a collapse into depression. States now talk openly of nullification, of resurrecting the 10th Amendment, even of secession.

Change is coming. Not the kind for which people thought they were voting in ’08, but big change nonetheless. Hold on tight.