Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
by Bill O'Connell on January 26, 2011
On the surface, President Obama’s State of the Union address was like many others, long on platitudes, short on substance. I had the opportunity to witness it at the studio of WNYC in New York. We were a handful of Tea Party members is a sea of progressives.
by Bill O'Connell on December 21, 2008
An interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times Nicholas Kristof nicely sums up what many conservatives have known all along that leaving aside that conservatives want to push grandma in her wheelchair down the stairs, keep children from getting a good education, and are generally racists to boot, when it comes to being charitable, conservatives are far more generous that those compassionate caring liberals.
Many studies have been done on the subject and a number of them by liberals, who started out with the objective of proving how cold and uncaring conservatives are, only to find the opposite is true. Liberals are generous as long as it’s not with their own money. They insist on using the overwhelming power of the state to steal your money (increasing taxes) and give it to special interest groups in return for votes and by extension, power. Do I seem too cynical?
Let’s take education. The Department of Education was started in 1980 at the end of the Carter Administration. From 1980 to 2008 Congress appropriated $1.06 trillion dollars to the Department of Education. What have we gotten for our “investment” as liberals like to call expenditures? The statistics are hard to come by but I found a comparison of math scores of fourth and eight graders between 1995 and 2007, about half the time the Department of Education has been in operation. In that period test scores improved about 2% in fourth grade and 4% in eight grade. If someone came to you in 1980 and said I’ve got a great deal for you, if you give me a trillion dollars, I’ll improve test scores 2-4% over twelve years, would you buy it? Imagine where we would be today, if we kept that trillion dollars in the hands of taxpayers to use as they saw fit?
If all that money didn’t improve test scores, what did it do? What about employment? Again, it was a challenge finding a comparable period, but I did come up with information for the period 1999 to 2007. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the class Education, Training and Library occupations grew 50.8%. The mantra that we have been hearing, “for the children” mostly trumpeted by the teacher’s unions has been for smaller class sizes. That sounds good but what does it really mean? If you have smaller class sizes, you have to have more teachers. If you have more teachers you have more teacher’s union members. If you have more teacher’s union members you have more contributions to the Democratic party, more votes for Democrats and in turn more education spending to continue the cycle. The students are marginally better educated, the taxpayers get hosed, and on the local level property taxes go through the roof.
How about “Buck-A-Day” Biden? I call him that because that is the average amount that this devout Catholic has given to charity over the past ten years. But pay more in taxes? He says that’s your patriotic duty! The government needs more money. Times are tough.
The problem I have with many government programs is that once passed into laws, rules have to be written on how to execute them and the rules have to be followed explicitly or the lawsuits follow. That means that there will be cases of deserving people, who for one of the rules does not qualify. That also means that there will be cases of undeserving people, who because of the rules qualify for benefits even though they don’t need them.
If liberals followed Mr. Kristof’s lead, in his attempt to shame them into giving more, maybe we could have government take less. That would allow us all to give more, and do it a lot more effectively. Or how about this for a novel approach. Before we implement any government social program, the first 10% of funding has to be raised privately, through charitable donations. If the liberals, who largely favor these kinds of programs can raise the cash, perhaps the program is worthy. If not, perhaps we could be spared another Department of Education bleeding $1 trillion from the economy when most school decisions are made locally anyway.
by Bill O'Connell on November 28, 2008
As Barack Obama builds his Administration team you can sense the frustration starting to build on the left and among those who are still paying attention. In an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Obama Describes Team as Experienced Yet Fresh, you can anticipate the eloquent gymnastics you are about to read as you would watching the young Chinese girls at the Beijing Olympics.
As the agent of hope and change, some people are beginning to wonder that if this is so, why is he populating his administration with so many people from the Clinton administration, causing one pundit to ask if we wanted a return to the Clinton Administration we would have voted for Hillary. The master politician responded to this line of thinking thusly, “Americans would be ‘rightly troubled’ if he overlooked experience to create the perception of change.’” Let me see if I have this right. If you actually change, it is a perception of change, but if you don’t change, it is real change? I got it.
He went on to elaborate, “What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking. But understand where the vision for change comes from first and foremost: It comes from me.” Okay, let me take a hack at that one. Barack Obama is bringing together all these people with long resumes in government, with years of experience, and confident in knowing what to do and how to do it, but they are all going to follow Barack Obama’s direction and apply fresh thinking to their settled ways. Or might they say, yeah kid, go back to the Oval Office and we’ll call you when we need you.
Painting the picture further Obama says, “I suspect that you would be troubled and the American people would be troubled if I selected a Treasury secretary or a chairman of the National Economic Council at one of the most critical economic times in our history who had no experience in government whatsoever.” But an inexperienced president? No problem. Even JFK, who was elected the youngest president in our history, had served one full term in the Senate, was reelected, and was two years into his second term before becoming president. And he had a pretty rocky time between the Bay of Pigs, his Vienna meeting with Khrushchev, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Viet Nam, in less than three years. Barack Obama was four years into his first term and half of that time he spent running for president. Should we not be concerned at the lack of experience at the top?
To prove his point about the freshness of hope and change, he spoke of Paul Volker. Now, I think very highly of Paul Volker. I believe it was he who got inflation under control after the disasterous Carter Administration economic policies. Obama appointed Volker to lead his economic advisory board. At 81 years old, he is the epitome of freshness. How is that you wonder? Obama masterfully spins it this way, “Paul Volker hasn’t been in Washington for quite some time and that’s part of the reason he can provide a fresh perspective.” So where does that leave Obama? Is he stale because he has been in Washington or his he fresh because he has been out campaigning for the last two years?
To cap it off in a question and answer period Obama said, according to the Times, “his [Obama's] call for new ways of thinking on the economy should not be interpreted as a reflection of frustration and disappointment with the Bush administration’s recent economic-recovery efforts. He signaled his support for the latest $800 billion government bailout plan, which is intended to provide new lending for consumers as well as push down home mortgage rates.”
So the purveyor of hope and change wants us all to believe that bringing back the Clinton administration is change; that 81 year old Paul Volker is fresh, but 72 year old John McCain is ancient; that Bush is the cause of all that is wrong with America, but fresh thinking should not be interpreted as frustration with Bush.
My sense has been that Barack Obama was painting himself into a corner. All the while he believed that with his adroit political and verbal skills he would be able to slip out of the corner unnoticed.
The Democrats have only held the White House for eight of the last twenty-eight years. So realistically, where else would Obama go for experienced executives? With no executive experience himself, it’s not like he can bring colleagues in from his past executive positions, like Carter from Georgia, Reagan from California, Clinton from Arkansas, and Bush from Texas. With only four years in Washington, two of them spent on the road campaigning for president, it’s not like he built a network of experienced executive branch contacts there either.
He is also in the precarious position of having built up expectations so high, there is really no where for his job approval ratings to go, once he takes office, but down. In addition to all this, he has to watch his left flank. There are a lot of grumbling noises coming from that direction from a bunch of people with balled up IOUs in their fists, thinking we got you here, where’s the payback?
