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," "wealth tax," "greedy rich," "rich Republicans" and "evil profits." Their rank and file have bought it hook, line and sinker, never once thinking that they must be kept "poor" in order for their party to thrive.
It also 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.
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 destructive to the people they purported to help and, with his Great Society programs Johnson continued the assault on the poor, always under the auspices of "helping."
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 giveaways 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."
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:
"Births out of wedlock were consistently at or below 5% between 1940 and 1960. By 1970, the rate had risen to over 10% and has continued to rise..."
(It is almost 40% today)
"Divorce rates increased from 9 to 23 per 1,000 married couples annually from 1960 to 1980, while leveling off at 20 per 1,000 through 1998 ... 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."
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 politicians, who have run these cities for decades, are to blame for these failing schools.
Poverty mindset — manna comes from the government
In 1965 Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It provided for 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 the children.
Carbone wrote: "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.'"
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. Therefore Democrats oppose them 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.
LBJ's War on Poverty programs were dismal failures. The only success these programs had was in exploding the size of government and its reach into our lives. "Within two generations, more than $10 trillion have been spent on this war, more in current dollars than was spent to win World War II," Carbone writes.
And through all that, Democrats are still looking for ways to spend money to fund programs to "fight the War on Poverty." Who benefits? As always, follow the money! 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."
There was another provision in the $787 billion stimulus bill that provided a sop to unions. The money for "shovel-ready" construction projects required it to be spent on firms using union labor. This raises the cost of the projects and freezes out many non-union poor or middle-class construction workers.
This is not to absolve Republicans of responsibility. They were complicit in that they didn't do enough to try and stop the practices before they were implemented nor have they done much to repeal them. Republicans like big government almost as much as the Democrats.
The government has never before been under the complete rule of ideologues of such stripes. They've pushed the government to take over many of the roles traditionally carried out by families and local communities. It doesn't take a village... but "it" also should not be up to the Feds. The cradle-to-grave welfare state of Sweden has always been the envy of the American left, and after implementing as much of it as possible, Americans now get to experience the dark side of the nanny state of high taxes, a sluggish economy that struggles to adapt and innovate, and the erosion of family and community.
Democrats are determined to engage in his type of faith-destroying, socialist legislation to expand the welfare state. They want to grow the government to solve a problem created by the government, and to do so under cover of mob rule (the vote).
The government has nothing good or nice to give to you. The government is in the business of shrinking freedom (and wealth), not expanding it. Growing government and creating a cycle of dependency is always the goal of the Democrats. Only old dogs waiting under the table for scraps survive under Democrat policies.
Freedom and happiness are only restored through self-reliance and acting on our own judgment. Self-sufficiency and self-worth produce ultimate happiness and human liberty.
Manna to the group is poison to the individual.
- Bob Livingston =
