Who Liberals Are

Who Liberals Are

“Wal-Mart moms are frustrated with the state of the country, but they are skeptical about Washington’s ability to address the key issues that will have a positive, tangible impact on their household.” – ABC News, 4-30-12, analysis of “sought-after demographic” defined as a voter with kids under 18 living at home who shops at Wal-Mart at least once a month.

Rush Limbaugh Letter – June 2012.

I’ve often talked about those who make this country work – it’s people like these Wal-Mart moms. They’re anonymous. They do the best they can to play by the rules. They’re the ones who get up every day, get the kids fed and ready for school, and then go to work. But they are not happy with what’s happening to the country. They may not know why, in an ideological sense, but they know it isn’t right. They know what they’re seeing is not how things are supposed to be solved in America. They know all this gigantic government won’t fix what’s wrong.

My objective is that one day these Wal-Mart moms would be able to tell you, in a conservative vs. liberal way, why this isn’t working. I’m convinced that if people would become steeped in an ideological understanding, that’s it for liberalism. If Americans understood liberalism half as much as I do, that would be the end of it.

One of the challenges I’ve had in these 23 years on the radio is convincing non-ideological people just who liberals are. It’s been one of my quests, in fact, an unfinished project. These Wal-Mart moms’ generic skepticism about Washington is a good start. But if more people correctly equated Washington failure with liberalism, Washington failure with Democrats, we’d already be on the road out of this mess.

The ugliness of who liberals are – bitter, arrogant, envy-ridden, self-righteous control freaks who despise the country as founded – can be seen reflected in the ruinous liberal policies they’ve inflicted on the rest of us for well over 50 years.

1960’s

Great Society. With the left’s deceptively well-intentioned-sounding programs, LBJ’s so-called “Great Society” deliberately set time bombs off that are still exploding in the culture, rewarding sloth and punishing achievement while creating dependency and group resentment. Percentage of African-Americans below the poverty line in 1968: 27 percent. Trillions of wealth-transfer dollars later, the percentage of African-Americans below the poverty line in 2011: 27 percent, according to the New York Times.

As Thomas Sowell points out, Great Society programs succeeded in destroying the African-American family: “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

Medicare. Those who argued that the system would collapse under its own weight and bankrupt the country were right. The official estimate from Democrats in 1965 as to Medicare’s costs was $500 million per year. Actual cost? Over ten times that amount: $500 billion in 2011. Medicare Trustees just reported that the program’s unfunded liability is $38.6 trillion, or $328,404.43 per American household, according to the Daily Caller. Medicare is just one in a long line of liberal health care schemes designed to transfer medical choices from the private sector to the government. Because that’s who liberals are.

Medicaid. Medicaid was enacted in 1965 to provide medical aid to a limited group of destitute welfare recipients. According to the Cato Institute, it now covers around 50 million people with income eligibility as high as $89,000 for a family of four (CHIP). As Cato’s Chris Edwards says, the programs generous benefits have “spurred excess demand and over utilization of services.” Totally predictable to anyone with common sense. Spending has jumped from less than $1 billion in 1965 to $450 billion in 2011. Projections for 2019, according to the Department of Health and Human Services: $900 billion. You object? You want to kill the sick. You hate children. And you’re racist. Because smearing political opponents and stifling debate are defining liberal attributes.

Food Stamps. In 1961, the pilot food stamp program went to 380,000 desperately poor recipients to encourage the purchase of fresh food. Now over 45 million people receive food stamps at a cost of $75.3 billion (FY2011) – which can be used for any “food product” except liquor. The Heritage Foundation estimates that over $2 billion in 2011 alone was improperly disbursed via double-dipping and invalid Social Security numbers. Beyond the fraud, Heritage’s concern is that the government “should ensure that food stamps – not to mention the roughly 70 other federally funded welfare programs – are helping individuals become self-reliant rather than dependent on government.” Half of the food stamp recipients have received the benefit for 8.5 years or more. Mission accomplished for liberals, who are in a pitched battle to crush every ember of traditional American rugged individualism.

Minimum Wage. Before federal interventions like minimum wage laws, according to Walter Williams in Race and Economics, over 71 percent of blacks older than 9 were employed, compared with 51% for whites. Today the black adult employment rate is only 58.1%, and 40% of black teens are unemployed. Minimum wage laws are a perfect liberal storm: they sound good to the uninformed, destroy jobs for those at the bottom of the ladder, prop up unions, suppress the overall economy, and give the left enormous control over wages. To a liberal, what’s not to love?

Department of Housing and Urban Development. (HUD). HUD was signed into law in 1965, with a mission to create quality affordable housing. But “far from solving America’s housing and urban problems,” says Cato’s Tad DeHaven, “HUD has made them worse.” From dilapidated and crime-ridden public housing, to its leading role in creating the housing bubble and crisis, the HUD program, now costing taxpayers over $60 billion a year, has only deepened urban blight. Inviting more intervention! Urban blight, a liberal’s delight.

Consumer Protection. Ralph Nader led the charge to pass dozens of onerous and costly consumer protection laws, including the Occupational Product Safety and Health Act, the Consumer Product Safety Act, and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. But the left’s nanny State protects only itself. “the FDA,” reports libertarian research scientist Dr. Mary Ruwart, “has added ten years to the development time of drugs. More people die waiting for life-saving pharmaceuticals than are saved by the extra testing. Similarly, states with more stringent regulations for electricians have more accidental electrocutions as consumers try to do repairs themselves rather than pay the higher cost for a “licensed electrician.”

1970’s

Abortion. The Democrat party platform has pledged to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” In the almost 40 years since Roe v. Wade, over 54 million abortions have been performed. Result: life devalued, culture-wide – with liberals asserting political ownership of “women’s reproductive health.”

Endangered species preservation. Originally enacted to bring 78 fish and animals back from the brink, the various endangered species acts passed by Congress have led to gross abuse of power by the near despotic U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to the Heritage Foundation, the comprehensive Endangered Species Act of 1973 has helped rescue only 10 of the nearly 1,300 species listed – a success rate of less than 1%. At the same time, the Act has dragged countless landowners into endless litigation – making this the left’s most diabolically effective attack on private property rights.

Forced Busing. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts could use forced busing to achieve racial balance. Epic fail, as white families fled to the suburbia or sent their kids to private or parochial schools. In Boston, the proportion of white students shank from 65 percent of total public school enrollment to 28 percent between 1974 and 1985, according to a Hoover Institute study. Boston’s official threshold for “acceptable racial balance” has dropped from 50 percent white in 1965 to 9 percent white today. But liberals got what they wanted – forced social engineering via public schools – and that’s all that matters.

Sex education. “As sex education programs spread widely through the American educational system during the 1970’s, the pregnancy rate among 15 to 19-year-old females rose from approximately 68 per thousand in 1970 to approximately 96 per thousand by 1980. Among unmarried girls in the 15 to 17-year-old bracket, birth rates rose 29% between 1970 and 1984, despite a massive increase in abortions, which more than doubled in the same period. Among girls under 15, the number of abortions surpassed the number of live births by 1974.” – Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed. By design, because a society unhinged from traditional morality provides the chaos liberals can exploit.

Department of Education. Jimmy Carter created the massive new bureaucracy in 1979. According to Cato’s Andrew J. Coulson, “total expenditures per pupil are nearly two-and-a-half times higher today than in 1970.” Meanwhile, a December 2011 study by John Hopkins and the University of Arizona found 40% of high school graduates are unprepared for the workforce. Where has the money gone? Coulson explains that the “ratio of staff to students has gone up by 70% since 1970, swelling the ranks of public school employee unions to about 4.5 million people.” The union/Democrat Party slush fund loop remains unbroken.

Department of Energy. Carter’s DOE, established in 1977, was supposed to lesson our dependence on foreign oil in the wake of the oil embargo. Oops. Our domestic production has decreased to 2 billion barrels of oil in 2011 – from 3 billion barrels in 1977. As long as the liberal bureaucracy attacks proven energy (oil, gas, coal), siphoning billions from the private sector toward phantom green energy, American growth will be stymied. Which, for the left, is the whole point.

1980’s

Multiculturalism. Standard left-wing anti-Americanism in disguise. “The history of Balkanized and polarized societies in the 20th century is a history of horrors… That is the direction we are headed, under the spell of magic words like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ … Our whole educational system … is permeated with ideologies of group grievances and resentments, painting each group into a corner of it’s own separate subculture, instead of drawing them into the mainstream of the American culture that made this the greatest nation on earth.” – Thomas Sowell, on townhall.com. Truth is, the left introduced multiculturalism because the liberals want to eradicate everything that made this the greatest nation on earth.

Needle Exchange. Copying socialist meccas like Amsterdam, liberals established the first U.S. needle exchange program in the late 1980’s In his Children’s AIDS Fund scholarly paper, “An Evidence-Based Review of Needle Exchange Programs,” Dr. Fred Payne, former CDC medical epidemiologist, found no evidence they worked: “The provision of clean needles and syringes appears primarily to support the individual’s addiction and along with it, drug-related high-risk sexual behavior … Far from reducing harm, simply bringing needle/syringe exchange into this maelstrom only adds more fuel to the fire.” Voila.

Homelessness. Homeless advocacy groups raised money to create so-called “long-term solutions” to homelessness, all the while bashing Ronald Reagan. “Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980’s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of the year,” reported National Housing Institute’s Peter Dreier in an article entitled, “Reagan’s Legacy: Homelessness in America.” After decades of throwing billions at the homeless problem, HUD’s latest report celebrates that homelessness has dereased, while reporting that 643,000 persons were homeless on a given night in 2009, and 1.56 million people over a year’s time. Liberals and phony math: some things never change.

1990’s

Luxury Tax. “In the 1990 deal between President George H.W. Bush and a Democratic Congress, yacht owners were the designated villain. Yachts were, after all, owned by millionaires and billionaires’ who didn’t pay their fair share of taxes,” reports Michael Tanner in the New York Post. “So Congress passed a 10% luxury tax on yachts priced more than $100,000. The result was the virtual destruction of the domestic boat-building industry. Sales of luxury boats dropped 70% within a year. Several manufacturers went bankrupt. More than 25,000 workers lost their jobs. And because so few boats were sold, the tax didn’t even generate much new revenue. At the end of the day, the millionaires and billionaires were still rich. But thousands of hardworking middle-class Americans ended up out of work.” Notice the pattern? Liberals always rip the “1%,” but end up screwing everybody else.

Americans with Disabilities Act. “Studies … show that the act has led to less employment of disabled workers,” noted Thomas Deleire, U of Chicago professor in the Spring 2000 issue of Regulation. Why? “The added cost of employing disabled workers to comply with the accommodation mandate of ADA has made those workers relatively unattractive to firms.” Such statistics are, of course, a dog whistle to liberals to “fix” the problem they created with regulations – by concocting more regulations.

Family and Medical Leave Act. Signed into law by Bill Clinton, FMLA requires large companies to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to workers, ostensibly to help new mothers or workers with family health emergencies. Surprise! The law had many unintended consequences. According to Michelle Bernard of the Independent Women’s Forum, employers commonly refer to FMLA as the “Far More Leave than Anyone Intended Act” or the “Slackers Protection Act,” due to the abuse of the law. Verizon Communications found that the number of absent days per employee tripled after FMLA’s passage. Many experts believe that because government-mandated leave has been used primarily by women of child-bearing age, it has discouraged companies from hiring younger women.

2000s

Obesity prevention. Michelle Obama was not the first to publicize childhood obesity. Dietary guidelines were introduced in the 1980s. Obesity prevention programs for both adults and children picked up steam in the 1990s. Dozens of anti-obesity campaigns have been launched in schools. Even so, according to the Centers for Disease Control, obesity has “dramatically increased” over the past 20 years.

Manmade global warming. “The latest data released by the Met Office, based on readings from 30,000 measuring stations, confirms there has been no global warming for 15 years … (making) us victims of perhaps the most expensive fraud in history. Over the past 20 years, across the Western world, billions of pounds, dollars, and euros have been squandered by governments on hare-brained schemes to ‘combat climate change.’ Taxes have been raised, regulations increased, flights made more expensive, incandescent light bulbs banned, landscapes despoiled by ugly, bird-chomping wind farms, economic growth curtailed – all to deal with what now turns out to have been a nonexistent problem: manmade CO2” – James Delingpole, The UK Daily Mail, 2/7/12.

Porkulus. Obama said that if this stimulus bill passed, the unemployment rate would not go above 8 percent. But we’ve had 39 straight months of over 8 percent unemployment, with a high of 10 percent. Twenty-eight months of unemployment at 9 percent or above, according to BLS figures. The Regime promised 3.5 million jobs through Porkulus. A study by economists Timothy Conley of the University Western Ontario and Bill Dupor of Ohio State University reports that Porkulus “created/saved” approximately 450,000 state and local government jobs, and obliterated around 1 million jobs. In other words, we borrowed and spent $831 billion to emerge with a net loss of more than 500,000 jobs.

Obamacare. The purpose of Obamacare, according to Obama, was to “deal with the problem of runaway health insurance costs that are breaking family budgets and breaking business budgets and breaking our national budgets.” The regime swore that individuals would be able to keep their health plans under Obamacare. But experts predict that around 30 percent of employers will dump their current health plan. Leftwing Catholic groups were told they’d earn a conscience clause for their support. That pledge has been withdrawn. Obama promised his plan would not add a dime to the deficit. In fact, according to Heritage, the so-called Affordable Care Act is a “trillion-dollar budget-buster.” Like liberalism itself, it was all lies – in order to establish the left’s crown jewel, government medicine. If Obamacare stands, its game over for America as founded.

A complete list of liberal failures – in foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, military policy; the cultural rot; the long, destructive march through U.S. institutions – would fill libraries. Liberal advocates share common traits: an attitude of smug superiority; a utopian belief in a centralized, controlling government; a desire to remake society; a mission to gather enormous power, control, and cash to themselves; and a total lack of common sense. They leave a long trail of human misery and suffering in their wake, because none of their nostrums ever work. Ever. See: Detroit.

It just astounds me that in the midst of demonstrable, provable failure of liberal policy after liberal policy, that Democrats aren’t ridden out of town on a rail. Liberalism ought not be anywhere near as viable as it appears. It is past time to turn liberalism into a genuine electoral minority that it is, in terms of numbers. After all, the percentage of people in this country who admit to being liberals is 20 percent. A pittance! While 40 percent – a plurality – self-identify as conservatives. If Walmart moms truly understood the tyrannical ideology of big-government types, liberalism would collapse overnight.
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