Liberal Policy Failures

August 27, 2008 | Filed Under Business, Dan Scott, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Elections, Energy, Government, Corruption, Media Bias, News, Publius Contributor, Security/Safety, Society/Culture |

-By Dan Scott

I always find the audacity of liberals amazing when they spout their pantheon of myths like, oil free economy, the US has no energy policy, the economy is in recession, illegal immigration is good, unions protect workers, health care is out of control, the rich aren’t paying their fair share of taxes or terrorism is worse than ever. Ironically, each of these myths have a basis in fact that directly indicts the liberals for their own policy failures.

One of my favorite liberal myths is the oil free economy panacea based on alternative fuels. As I pointed out liberals are great at selling things as long as you don’t look too deeply under the surface of their advocacy. When we look deep enough what we really see is a liberal agenda to control the economy and manipulate people for their own ends at everyone’s expense. As we saw with the myth the US has no energy policy, in actuality we see 30 years of liberal pandering and incompetence via drilling bans artificially restricting the US and by extension the world’s energy supply. The inevitable effect of any restriction on a commodity is to force up the price of the commodity. Of course not one drop of oil was saved by the drilling ban, all oil not procured domestically was outsourced form foreign sources. The recent drop in consumption is not as a result of a “more efficient economy” it is as a result of an economic slow down with a recession in the offing if current energy policies don’t change. Saving oil via an economic slow down is not conservation, it is total incompetence, the point is supposed to be to use less oil for greater economic output.

Lately, the liberals have been whining about the state of the economy, and to be sure it’s nothing to brag about except marvel that it keeps chugging along despite the incompetence of liberals engaging in central planning via legislation. Their plan of course by their own admission is to wean the US off of fossil fuels, however, when we look more deeply, it’s nothing more than a scam in which they (such as Al Gore) as a group have financially invested themselves and it turns out that we would have to pay multiple times our current pricing just achieve the panacea they advocate. Here’s an observation that most liberals don’t want to view, Europeans pay more than $9/gallon for gasoline, why then aren’t most of them driving electric cars and hybrids now???? Why pray tell haven’t they been driving electric cars and hybrids long ago??? Why is it the Japanese are offering hybrids here in the US only now when surely a market would have existed years ago in Europe since they reached paying $4/gallon many years ago??? What this observation suggests is the price point for alternative fuels in regards to transportation/vehicles is much higher than what Europeans are paying now!

So now at $4/gallon in the US the price of every item transported to the store for you to buy is now much higher than two years ago when it was $2/gallon. A doubling of transportation costs must eventually ripple through the economy and something has to give in terms of prices going up and companies cutting jobs to keep costs down. You can thank the Democrats for that one, they are solely to blame and in fact they have crowed about this very thing in the past on their long march to the oil free economy panacea. In this case, the price of oil and then in turn stoking inflation which harms the poor of the US and the world at large.

While we are talking about the economy, let’s also bring up the fact that liberals continually insist that illegal immigration is not a problem and it’s cruel to deport them. Unemployment rates in liberal dominated areas like California, Illinois and Michigan are the highest in the country. All of these areas support the Sanctuary City movement and unions. Both liberal policies foster unemployment of US citizens in that illegal aliens are taking low wage jobs and depressing those wages due to their excessive numbers. One look at El Centro, CA (a sanctuary city) with 22.4% unemployment should end all debate over whether the US has a responsibility to control it’s borders and the culpability of local officials failure to uphold the nation’s immigration and labor laws. At the other end of the labor scale, unions with their incessant demands for ever higher unsustainable wages literally price workers out of the labor market driving manufacturers to first automate as much as possible and if that isn’t sufficient then outsource to foreign countries. The auto manufacturing companies are a prime example of productivity increases via automation driving down the labor hours to contain the cost of labor. The US auto manufacturers produce just as many cars now as they did 14 years ago with 17% less labor due to automation, not outsourcing as the liberal’s myth would have you believe.

The so called health care crisis is a result of liberal policy failure. That failure stemmed from three other liberal failures, illegal immigration, mandates upon hospitals and cost shifting. To put it simply, liberals pushed through via legislation that hospitals must treat anyone who enters the emergency room whether they can pay or not, they told the hospitals Medicaid would pay for indigent care for those who could not pay and then short changed the hospitals via Medicaid reimbursement rates that were far below the actual costs of the services they rendered. Since when does an illegal alien (10 to 20 million of them) working an ultra low wage job have money to pay the emergency room? By extension when illegals displace US workers in low wage paying jobs leaving them unemployed or underemployed, they too won’t have the money or insurance coverage to pay medical bills. The hospitals of course were left with limited choices, either drop their emergency rooms which many did or cost shift their losses to those who are already paying (sounds like Socialism doesn’t it?). No business can stay in business continually sustaining financial losses, you must have a profit to stay in business. So the hospitals cost shifted to the insurance companies and individual payers (uninsured). The insurance companies of course balked at double digit annual increases in order to cover the losses of the hospitals. The insurance companies had two choices, raise the premiums to cover the double digit increases in health care or cut coverage or both. The result, more people who didn’t have health insurance and more personal bankruptcies due to catastrophic medical costs. The classic example of liberals creating a problem to propose a socialist solution which in the end makes the problem worse…Socialized Medicine, just ask the Canadians and British.

To finish up on the economic failures I would be remiss in not touching up on the mortgage meltdown initiated by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The liberals would have you believe their myth that the banks were involved in predatory lending. Clinton appointees to these two quasi-government/private corporations changed the lending rules in buying housing mortgages around 1998. Political appointees to the companies’ boards pocket millions in stock options to bolster support on Capitol Hill. Clinton-appointed board members at Fannie Mae include Marc Rich lawyer Jack Quinn and Janet Reno’s lieutenant at the Justice Department, Jamie Gorelick. At the helm of Fannie Mae is another Clinton appointee, Franklin Raines, who was paid more than $4 million and had almost $6 million in unexercised stock options in his first year at the helm. The rules in place were meant to make sound financial transactions which of course barred those whose financial abilities were less than sound. The Clinton appointees operating under the liberal’s Equality of Outcome policy, lowered the lending standards under which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would purchase home loans from the banks. In doing so they created a free for all atmosphere of unsound market speculation where anyone could get a loan even if they couldn’t repay it. The banks were all too happy to make such loans since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac set the lending standards to buy these loans and take the full risk for failure of those loans. The banks made their money on the origination fees. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stuck it to their investors who bought the stock that financed these unsound loans and thus literally caused billions of dollars in financial losses, put the taxpayer on the hook to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and threatened the financial markets whose financial derivative instruments were based on those unsound loans.

To pay for all those wonderful liberal programs and failures taxes must be raised. Who else has the money to pay more taxes, not the poor, you can only squeeze so much out of the middle class, so that leaves the rich of course. Out trots the liberal myth the rich aren’t paying their fair share and their favorite one of tax cuts for the rich. The reality is 70% of all personal income taxes are paid by the top 10% of the taxpayers, the wealthy. The economic reality is when you take money from the most productive members of society, the rich, and give it away to the least productive, the economy does not grow, it contracts. Why is that? Because the wealthy are investors and capital investments are what drives the economy, not simple retail spending. You can not produce widgets at a low cost with no investment capital. When you limit capital investment you limit efficiency and productivity gains which keep retail costs down and enhance the profit margin. No profits means no investments. No investments means an eventual shrinking of supply since there is no means to replace worn out old equipment. A shrinking supply means increased competition between consumers for the product, driving prices up, i.e. the cost of living goes up. By the way, just imagine all the royalties and taxes (literally billions of dollars a year) that were denied the US Treasury because oil had to be imported from foreign countries due to the 30 year drilling ban, it adds up to trillions of dollars!

So now Obama and the Democrats want to raise your taxes to cover up their incompetence, failed policies and pandering to environmental interests.

On the foreign policy side, liberal failure has continued to reveal itself beginning with President Carter’s infamous undermining of the Shah of Iran saddling the world with over 30 years of Islamic financed terrorism to this very day. Iran is thee number one sponsor of terrorism in the world. Our continuing military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan are solely because of Iranian money financing these conflicts. (Saudi money has been nearly dried up by the close cooperation Saudi Arabia and the US fostered by the Bush Administration.) Then came the Clintons (Bill and Hillary) Co-presidency treating Islamic terrorism as a law enforcement matter as an excuse to only react to provocations instead of being proactive militarily to stop them before being attacked. We were attacked around ten times by terrorists during the Clinton administration with futile responses such as firing missiles into the empty desert. The clincher for Osama Bin Laden was the Clintons precipitous pull out from Somalia at the first sign of trouble called the Black Hawk Down incident. Osama bin Laden said of Somalia in his interview with ABC News journalist John Miller in May 1998. “The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat.” Bin Laden told us this seminal event gave him the belief he could take on the US and win. Of course the ultimate failure of the Clinton administration and liberal foreign policy of appeasement was 911. Osama Bin Laden conceived, planned, financed and trained his al Qaeda operatives during the Clinton Administration. The Clintons in their incompetence had warning of an impending attack via a military data mining operation called ABLE DANGER but instead tied up that information in legal red tape thus not sharing it with those who could have made a difference and NEVER told the new Bush Administration about it either.

The reality is terrorism has declined over the years of the Bush Administration, less people are dying from terrorist bombings worldwide than before. George W Bush’s strategy of pinning down al Qaeda in Iraq and forcing them to make a stand there instead of here in the US, depleted the worldwide hard core ranks of the Islamic radicals. Iraq became the low lying swamp into which all the terrorists drained. Osama Bin Laden fell for the rope-a-dope strategy. By engaging the terrorists in the place of our choosing, we created a central point to drain that swamp of terrorists for the entire world. If you will remember, the terrorists streamed in via Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia to do battle with the Great Satan. By concentrating the terrorist effort in one place, we were able to take advantage of our conventional forces to reverse the kill ratio on the terrorists. The advantage of fighting a terrorist action only exists in low-density operations where the effort of one can affect the lives of many. This is totally opposite to conventional military forces that operate on the principle of overwhelming force/numbers to achieve its ends (pincer movement). Contrary to the appeasing, enabling, wishy washy liberals, W’s firm stand against terrorism worked. If we had listened to the liberals, Iraq would be a satellite state of Iran with billions more dollars of oil money annually to fund more terrorist efforts to achieve their dream of a worldwide Caliphate. Terrorism in fact would be exponentially greater now than since 911 had we listened to the liberals.

Come November 4th, 2008 you have a choice, the audacity of Obama spinning his liberal myths or your audacity to confound Obama’s spin masters and liberal policy failures to vote for someone else who has the audacity to lead.
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Dan Scott calls himself a “Member of the Global Capitalist Cabal preaching Capitalism and personal responsibility as the economic solution to world poverty.” He is also a member of the 14th Amendment Society — victimhood is a liberal code word for denying the civil rights of others. He is also a proud member of the Global Warming Denier Cabal, insisting that facts not agendas determine the truth.

Dan can be seen on the web at http://www.geocities.com/fightbigotry2002/ as well as http://www.geocities.com/dscott8186/saidwebpage.htm, And can be reached for comments at dscott8186@yahoo.com.

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