Ridiculously Cool

Democrats plan to gain market share the old fashioned way: promise free stuff. If the Drudge-linked article is right, the left is planning to raise the minimum wage (damn the economic consequence or the simple fact that there are very, very few people working at a minimum wage job who support a family or even themselves wholly on that income), guaranty inexpensive access to broadband (whether this is the job incubator that they expect is wildly open to question), nationalized health care within five years (again, regardless of the actual cost or effect that a Hillary-style system would have on health care in the United States), and further protection and enshrinement of the Social Security welfare program with no privatization, heritability, or long term stability (which they don’t say, but which is entirely true).

Frankly, I’ve seen more than enough of an expansion in government programs and costs under a not-so-fiscally-conservative Republican president. I fear the economic fallout from this plan if it were fully implemented. The bump in taxes (on top of what I would consider to be an expected rollback of the more recent tax cuts) would be enough to send us into a recession--which, of course, would lower tax receipts and cause the left to cry for more tax increases to continue funding all of these indispensable programs. And every government program, once funded, becomes indispensable to someone who either has a job or an ideology at stake.

In my more cynical moments, I’ve come to believe that the GOP stands for the slow destruction of the American economy and the Democrats stand for something a little more immediate.

Good God, what I wouldn’t give for a fiscal conservative in the White House with balls enough to say that the government doesn’t represent the solutions to all of our problems. Someone who will say, in all honesty, that no the government isn’t going to baby us or coddle us or make it so bad things never happen to us. Someone who admits that the bigger the bureaucracy, the more inefficient the organization, the more expensive the end result, and the less likely the results are to be completely satisfactory. Someone who won’t try to buy my vote with a new government spending program.

Crazy dream, no?