Ask a Democrat why they're a Democrat and they'll usually say it's because the Democrat Party is the party of the working man. These people believe this so strongly that they'd vote for the Democrat over anyone else, even if the Democrat on the ticket was an old yellow dog.
It doesn't matter that Democrat policies have been devastating to the poor and middle-class workers in this country for almost 100 years. The poor and middle class still turn out in droves to vote for them. Democrat politicians have successfully positioned themselves as the party of the poor, and they've created an enmity between the poor and the rich.
Democrat leaders perpetuate this enmity with popular slogans like "living wage," "fair share," "working poor," "greedy rich," "rich Republicans" and "evil profits." Their rank and file have bought it hook, line and sinker.
The Great Society
By the late 1950s, America had somewhat recovered from the effects of Woodrow Wilson's policies — the Federal Reserve, the income tax and World War I — and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies — the New Deal and World War II — and prosperity was returning.
Then along came Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Great Society and the next great expansion of the nanny state. Previous Democrat administration policies had been devastating to the people they purported to help and, with his Great Society programs Johnson continued the assault on the poor under the guise of helping the "less fortunate" (as if success is only about how you're born, the opposite of the American ideal).
Within three years of assuming the Presidency in 1963, Johnson had requested 200 major pieces of legislation and Congress had approved 181 of them, according to Leslie Carbone in Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform.
"Roosevelt had peddled the drug of government give-aways primarily in the poor neighborhoods; Johnson set up shop in middle-class cul-de-sacs, and most Americans, willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, are forced to shoot up. Johnson's sweeping proposals sought to address almost every issue of concern to Americans: civil rights, poverty, education, health, housing, pollution, the arts, cities, occupational safety, consumer protection, and mass transit, to name only the most prominent," according to Carbone.
And what have these programs wrought? Mark Owen, adjunct professor of economics at Northwood University, wrote a column for LewRockwell.com entitled The Welfare State: Shredding Society. In it he said:
"While crime and family destabilization may be two of the more obvious results of the welfare state, there are many others. The stigma for single mother births has virtually disappeared. Intergenerational dependency on government programs with the related lack of skills for self-sufficiency, much like a farm animal unable to live without the farmer for food and shelter, has created people without hope or ambition."
The welfare state has created a cycle of dependency that perpetuates itself. Now there are third and fourth generations of single women living off welfare and raising children in single-parent homes.
Typically these women live in urban areas and their children are held hostage to failing inner-city school systems. And Democrat policies are to blame for these failing schools.
In 1965 Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, according to Carbone. It provided aid to poor children in slums and rural areas, created a five-year program for school libraries to buy textbooks and other instructional materials and provided for educational research, among other things. Essentially, the Federal government took over the education of children.
Carbone writes: "Representative Charles Goodell warned that the bill's 'clear intent is to radically change our historic structure of education by a dramatic shift of power to the federal level.'" Gradually, step by small step, this is the goal of all progressive, statist Democrats, as you can see today with the constant call for Federal laws and federal takeover of everything, but I digress.
The National Education Association (NEA) teacher's union, a supporter of Democrat candidates and causes, opposes any and all efforts to inject competition or reform into the failing schools. Much the opposite, in fact. Their national meeting this year was all about gender politics, as they sought to change "mother" to "birthing parent," "father" to "non-birthing parent," and "maternity leave" to "parental leave" in the name of LGBTQ inclusion in all contract language. The measure failed, this year at least.
Democrats support such "woke" attempts and also oppose any competition to progressive union teachers and school competition as well. Combined with local teacher unions, the NEA also fights efforts to change the tenure system which protects the jobs of bad teachers to the detriment of the children.
Echoes of FDR
Like Herbert Hoover, George W. Bush was a Republican without a conservative soul. And just like Hoover, his policies to battle the recession were all wrong. First was the stimulus bill of 2008, a $150 billion — 1 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) — kick in the economy through tax rebate checks that the government hoped would prevent or shorten the recession.
Next came the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free market," Bush said at the time.
Then Obama went one better than Bush. Just two months after taking office he pushed through Congress a $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. So within the space of one year more than $1.5 trillion new dollars had been injected into the economy, further eroding the value of the dollars the poor and middle-class hold.
Michael Barone wrote for The Washington Examiner, "One-third of the 2009 stimulus money went to state and local governments — an obvious payoff to the public employee unions which gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Democrats and got hundreds of billions of dollars in return, to insulate public employee unions from the effects of the recession which has affected everyone else."
And then there are the new tax increases in Biden's so-called "Inflation Reduction Act of 2022" which will do no such thing. How can it, with over $400 billion in new spending? Of course, growing government and creating a cycle of dependency is the goal of Democrat tax-and-spenders.
Party of the working man (or woman)? Not hardly. Only old yellow dogs waiting under the porch for handouts thrive under Democrat policies.
They're convinced they can spend any amount of money, steal any freedom, impose any onerous regulation or create yet another bloated bureaucracy and you will like it. If not, they have both free, fawning media coverage and also enough dough in their pockets to pay for glitzy television advertisements to convince you that whatever they are up to is for your own good.
How Democrats have managed to maintain the myth that their policies are beneficial to Average Working-class Joe (or Jane) is one of the great mysteries of all time — ranking up there with dark matter and how Joe Besser ever became one of the Three Stooges. For Democrat big-government policies have been devastating to the "working" man.
Yours for the truth,
Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter®
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