It is said that victory has a thousand fathers but that defeat is an orphan. Nowhere is the truth of that phrase more evident than in the Democratic Party today. When anything positive occurs, there is a frenzy to claim credit; but the Party “leaders” refuse to take responsibility for any of the economic turmoil they have caused.
Part of being a leader is owning up to the responsibility of your mistakes. While it is fine that liberals and conservatives have a fundamental difference of opinion on how to turn our country around, what is intolerable is the unwillingness by the left to yield to cold, hard facts that indicate that their radical, socialist agenda is not working. If they don’t believe me, I’ll be happy to show them the figures.
As I discussed earlier, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% for August, but only because 368,000 people have been out of work so long, they are no longer factored into the calculations. While this news is troubling, what’s even worse is that the Democrats, who control the Senate and the White House, have no plans to correct our economic problems.
Okay, I’ll take that back- they have no good ideas to fix the problems. Since to them more government seems to be the panacea to fix any malady, the solutions most proposed by Democrats is to just create a bigger government and to throw money we don’t have at the problem. However, it is that radical bastardization of Keynesian economics that ballooned our national debt to a whopping $16 trillion and provided us with nothing in return but a GDP of 1.7%.
The one bit of solace is that the 2010 elections that ushered in a wave of Tea Party conservatives into Congress has provided enough fiscally conservative support to block the reckless spending of liberals in Washington and stop the bleeding. Of course, the Democrats have plenty to say on this issue.
While President Obama attempts to explain to America why he should continue to keep his job after four years of dismal performance and ineptitude, he has slung accusations of obstructionism at Republicans to detract from his culpability in the mishandling of the economy. Yesterday, Harry Reid got in on the discussion. He stated,
“While our recovery is still moving too slowly for many Americans, job growth would likely have been even stronger if Republicans had not blocked Democratic efforts to hire more teachers, firefighters and police officers.”
He further stated,
“The best way to speed up our recovery is for Republicans to stop their knee-jerk obstruction of every effort Democrats put forward and start working across the aisle to find common ground.”
For those that don’t speak liberal, I’ll translate: “Knee-jerk obstruction” means, “Halting of bad ideas,” and, “Working across the aisle,” means, “Doing it our way.”
It is not obstructionism if you stop bad ideas from passing. The Democrats seem to possess this notion that they have a right to feel abused if they don’t get to pass bills that require more and more spending and government. I’ve had just about enough of these temper tantrums coming from the left because they are not able to do whatever they please.
Reid illustrates the classic problem with leftist economic policy. We do not need to increase the size of government. That is not the solution to every problem. If Reid and other liberals want to see economic growth, they need to spur private sector growth. How that is done is by not punishing success with punitive tax measures, deregulation of industry and incentivizing business expansion by offering tax cuts to businesses. Private enterprise is the way jobs are created, not government.
Follow @GregCampbell_18
