How Barack Obama and other big government statists really bankroll their reelections

Video: How Barack Obama and other big government statists really bankroll their reelections
posted at 12:50 pm on February 1, 2012 by Tina Korbe

Simply put, this is one of the best videos I’ve watched in quite some time. If you think Barack Obama will spend just $1 billion on his reelection effort, think again. This president — like the president before him and the president before him — has at his disposal “The Vote Pump,” the elegant but unsustainable system by which the government taxes and borrows money to fund entitlement programs — and by which entitlement beneficiaries, in turn, vote to ensure the government will continue to tax and borrow money to pay their benefits. You might know it better by another name: “The Wealth Redistribution Pump.”

Every minute the presidential candidates debate their plans to create jobs, reform the tax code, protect the country, achieve energy independence, explore space and strengthen the family (among other things) is a minute they don’t debate their plans to reform entitlements. Those other issues are important — but, in the end, it’s the entitlement state that is bringing us to our knees. It’s the welfare state that will, as The Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein argues, destroy us.

Bring up entitlement reform and emotionally-driven accusations will pepper the conversation. Ground rules are required. Here are the two I would propose: (1) Society has obligations to the weakest among us, to those who literally cannot work, but (2) The rule for those who can work ought to be, to borrow a Biblical principle, “He who does not work, neither let him eat.” (Ironically enough, that second principle was invoked by Lenin himself — but he limited the meaning of “work” to labor. A better definition might be the creation of value, under which definition the activity of the “bourgeoisie,” the control of the means of production, is also work.)

Incidentally, it shows far less concern for the happiness of people to give them handouts than it does to require them to earn their success. The correlation between earned success and happiness is well-documented. It’s shabby and shameful that politicians care more about their own reelection and the consolidation of power among them than the happiness of those whose votes they buy with handouts.
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