Being in my mid-thirties, I’ve only been through a handful of major economic downturns.
In the early 1990’s, following 9/11 and our current downturn. I call it a downturn because unlike past true recessions, I really don’t personally see the tumult and apocalypse the media would have me believe.
Then there’s the other group of people. They’re the ones who’ve never really lived through anything. They were sheltered because they were going to school or were living at home when any of these downturns were happening. For all intensive purposes, what they’re experiencing now IS the worst thing in their lives…so far.
I know it’s easy to shrug a lot of this off, but if people under 30 can’t handle what’s happening now, what in the world are they going to do when things might just get worse? Commit suicide?
Ironically enough, most people I know experiencing this current downturn are all Obama supporters and as such, seem more apt to blame capitalism/Republicans/free markets et al for what’s happening right now. And then that leads to what they perceive to be the solution and what they’re to do or let happen.
This is where the danger lies for everyone right now. Too many people right now are trading in their freedom for the cloak of security. They believe the government can do things better…but why? What does the government do better that a free marketplace cannot? I may be preaching to a choir in some places, but what has the government ever done to warrant being able to have so much power of the economy or our lives? What’s their track record?
Let’s just start from the 20th century shall we?
The New Deal:
Social Security. Like many FDR era programs, it was setup under the guise of “protecting” people from the horrors of unemployment and poverty but now has grown so massive it now accounts for 37% of government spending. Don’t count on seeing any sort of benefits if you’re under 35 that amount to anything. The ratio of those giving in and those receiving benefits used to be 16 to 1 back in the 1950’s. Pretty soon it will be down to 2 to 1 ratio.
Farm Subsidies. Under FDR’s AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration), the government paid farmers to destroy crops and food and livestock in order to boost prices artificially to “benefit” farmers. To this day, we still see the byproduct of that thinking when we pay tobacco growers to both produce and also destroy their crops.
The Wagner Act. Ask GM or Ford today if such a thing has helped them.
The Glass-Steagall Act. Basically, the fore-runner to today’s financial “rescue” from today’s Congress. Another overreaction to speculation and profit driven banks. Sound familiar?
The CCC & NYA- The Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration. Does this sound familiar? For all the talk about change, it seems like the President-elect is borrowing an awful lot from a President that didn’t really do anything to get the country out of the Great Depression. Most historians seem to admit these days that outside of his fireside chats (that weren’t on TV Joe Biden), his programs did nothing for the country.
The Great Society:
Medicare. Spending for this LBJ program is nearly half a TRILLION dollars now and could be out of money in another decade.
Medicaid. Much like Medicare, a sole government entity. Was on pace to spend $300 billion in 2007. And like Medicare, it has been expanded and includes programs like S-CHIP for children. Up and up it goes with no end in sight and if you’re in a state like Wisconsin, you have large hospital companies pushing to raise taxes in order to get bigger Medicaid payouts. Nothing like businesses falling in line with their hand out.
Public Broadcasting Act. In this day and age, are we in a need for public broadcasting? I hear the faux anger over the Fairness Doctrine and talk radio, yet I can rarely find opposing viewpoints on a lot of programs from my TWO local public broadcast channels.
The War on Poverty. The hallmark of the benevolent left is to use the government to social engineer results to problem they believe they can solve. We’ve spent TRILLIONS of dollars on this war and what did we have to show for it? Black families destroyed and millions of people that have been sequestered behind the government folly of subsidized housing and food stamps. So many people have been brought up believing that the government would provide for them based on the all out “war” on poverty that was actually going down before LBJ took office.
Those are just the big examples and there are plenty more. Our state of education could be an entire book, much less a post. Yet, if the government were a private company providing such “grand” programs, you know how they would be treated if their results were like this. Millions of people led down the path of salvation provided by the government, yet instead they’ve been imprisoned by the constant promise and have passed that legacy onto their children that still demands to be taken care of.
And now today, new generations of young people are expecting a man to take care of them. One can only hope they wake up and realize that government is not their answer, nor is one man from Chicago.
