PrintJanuary 6, 2011
Saving America
The reality of our national condition dictates that we stop mincing words. A huge challenge awaits our Congress: do something positive for our economy before America succumbs to more spending and the relentless printing of money. Our free-enterprise economy is seriously ill and suffering from bad medicine.
The far left has been in control of the country for four years. It still controls the White House and has a majority in the Senate. Faced with an unprecedented economic crisis, the "know it all" liberals gave us...what? They could not even get many "shovel ready" projects off the ground. Nevertheless, the dedicated socialistic nihilists of George Soros' ilk have gained power over what was once the Democratic Party, forcing it to "move on" to wreck private enterprise and redistribute America's wealth to the rest of the world.
The last four years show that the liberal Democrats are intellectually dogmatic and morally bankrupt. They have no real concept of how to get America going. Their everyday compulsion is to control and direct whatever happens and to manage people other people's lives. ObamaCare, at the forefront of their ideas, is a program certain to send American medicine and health care in a backward direction.
The liberal Democrats have shown serious disregard for the concept of individual dignity as exemplified by the nobility of work. Whatever you think of the New Deal, there is little doubt that some of its more popular efforts centered on providing actual work for people. Through the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and other programs, the government funded civic projects all over the country. A person out of a job could go to work in the morning, create, build or fix something, and then come home with a cash contribution to the family's meager budget. People kept their dignity intact and food on their tables.
Yet despite this precedent, the liberal Democrats from the president on down have not put forth such ideas putting people to work. Perhaps because their intention is to keep their minions in dependency, they have instead insisted on giving out unemployment checks with newly printed money. Nice new signs about American Recovery funds stand by roadsides amid fitful work. Instead of a group of otherwise unemployed laborers doing a needed job in a month, motorists are inconvenienced for many months while bobcats and dozers and trucks shuffle from jobsite to jobsite with little new investment in labor or equipment.
While there is room to criticize the prior administration for some imprudent spending and the bailouts, the Congress of the last two years has sponsored and passed enormously greater bailouts of companies and quasi-governmental institutions that lost their viability. Despite the imprudent lending of the Fannies and Freddies; the acceptance and reliance by financiers, banks and insurers on instruments inherently designed to implode; and the production of unwanted automobiles, the government of the United States has kept most of the blundering herd of "too big to fails" alive.
This "rescue" was not done without setting up another institution to fail: namely, the United States Treasury. Currently, the federal government is spending well over a trillion dollars more than it collects in revenue, while unfunded "entitlements" continue to grow relentlessly and interest costs rise. Balancing the budget is becoming a pipe dream. The ObamaCare program, which "fixed" the best medical delivery system on the planet, will add still more costs and subtract services from Americans' health care budget. Yet the Treasury actually is an institution that must not fail.
Republicans in the new Congress need to seize the chance to highlight the obvious: liberal Democrat economic and governmental ideas are a threat to the survival of the country as a vital nation. Even as private families try to get out of debt, pressures toward hyper-inflation are locked in contest with a Fed that needs to keep interest rates low. Unless rates stay low, the Treasury will not long afford the interest payments on our debt, and housing markets will take another huge hit. If the Fed loses that fight, then get ready for some even more terrible times.
To try to get America back on its feet, the Republicans in Congress need to keep things simple and be downright tough. The program needs to include 1) across-the-board serious budget cuts (10% plus a year) in every department; 2) refuse to fund ObamaCare, period; 3) stop so-called greenhouse gas regulation outright before it cripples American industry based on junk science; and 4) make individual liberty and its promotion the touchstone of any government program, thereby expanding the reach and appeal of the GOP and recalling it to its roots.
If you need convincing on point 3, then hold serious and probing hearings on whether carbon dioxide is dangerous to the planet. (Sound climate science finds no cause for alarm or reason to believe that any significant warming is going to occur due to carbon dioxide.) On the fourth point, revisit the purpose of federal government: to safeguard national defense, see to foreign policy, and preserve to people and the states the many natural rights of man. By all means, take seriously the need to find ways to spur private job creation and to end the disintegration of the inner city. Two generations of dependent mindsets have been created under the decades of welfare since the Great Society programs were launched.
In short, Congress needs to dismantle and downsize the federal bureaucracy, which poses a mortal threat to America's survival as a free and prosperous nation. Charity is an important part of a good person's life, but unaffordable programmed altruism is financial suicide. Block grants to states and localities in the realms of education and welfare would be more effective than the dysfunctional bureaucracy we now have. Departments like Energy and Interior can be boiled down to about a fifth of their present size. By getting Washington off the backs of American business and the states out of the federal red tape, our country will get back out of bed and onto its own feet.
Congress: Get back to basics. The country you need to save is your own, and ours, too.
Harvey M. Sheldon is an attorney in Chicago concentrating in environmental law and a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School. The views expressed are his own and not on behalf of any client or firm.
