I begin this blog with a heartfelt apology to all middle of the road Democrats whom I have wrongly lumped in with Democratic leadership and with the far left who now seems to be guiding the decisions of the party. There are many Democrats, liberals, out there who are dismayed by much of the direction that their party is taking. The far left joyously celebrated the many “improvements” to our country that took place under the presidency of Barak Obama, and yet throughout his term in office nearly two thirds of the country was dissatisfied with the way the country was heading at any given time. A couple of times that percentage dropped as low as 64 percent but equally for many months it was as high as 88 percent. Obviously many of those disgruntled people were Democrats.
Let’s take a look at the agenda the far left is pushing and why the Democratic Party establishment feels they must adhere to that agenda.
Recently 15 members of Congress signed on to support a bill by Bernie Sanders to provide “Medicare For All,” a single payer health care system to replace the quickly failing Obamacare.
The Washington Post quotes Sanders as explaining, “This is where the country has got to go. Right now, if we want to move away from a dysfunctional, wasteful, bureaucratic system into a rational health-care system that guarantees coverage to everyone in a cost-effective way, the only way to do it is Medicare for All.” Sanders ignores the fact that he, and every one of those 15 Democratic senators, blithely voted for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the “dysfunctional, wasteful” system we currently are saddled with, and indeed voted for it without ever reading the more than a thousand pages that made up the bill. Nancy Pelosi has become famous for her explanation that after they had passed the bill they could read what was in it.
But Bernie’s answer to the health care debacle, like his promise to his young supporters in the 2016 election cycle of free college tuition for all, comes out of his socialist ideals and cannot possibly work in our country. Socialism, in one form or another has failed in the former Soviet Union, in all the Communist block countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany, as well as in China, Venezuela, and Cuba. Many of the Western European countries dabbled in forms of socialism, putting things like airlines, railroads, and power plants under government control and have since found that privatizing them works much better. And of course, many countries have government-provided healthcare. But like our current Medicare, which will run out of money in 2029 if nothing is done to save it, many European universal health care systems are also running out of money as well as providing long wait times for appointments (as much as a year in Canada), and poor healthcare. The wealthy visit their own doctors.
The cost of Medicare for all in the U.S. would raise taxes by an astronomical amount, not only on the wealthy and on the middle class, but also on the working poor, most of whom currently pay no taxes at all. Americans would not stand for that, nor would they relish the long wait times and the poor healthcare. This is a bad idea that is not working elsewhere and will not work here either. But the Democratic Party, more and more, is feeling pushed by the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrens of the Party to move in that direction simply because the idea of government provided benefits is attractive to many young voters and the Party is afraid of losing them.
Another idea pushed by the far left and, regrettably by the Democratic Party, is the idea that anyone at all who wishes to come to live in the United States should be allowed to come and to enjoy everything that U.S. citizens enjoy. . . Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, subsidized housing, and most importantly, the right to vote. They argue that the Constitution (which they normally ignore) guarantees equal rights to everyone before the law. True. Every U.S. citizen or legal resident is guaranteed equal treatment and even illegals can not be deported without due process. They also play upon our sympathies, talking about the poor conditions that many of these people lived under in their home countries and how they only want to better themselves by coming here. That argument does tug at our heart strings, but for every Mexican or Guatemalan who sneaks across the southern border there are millions more living in equally squalid conditions there and elsewhere in the world who would also love to come to live in the U.S. But we can not take them all in. My daughter loves cats as do her father and I, and when we lived in the country with a barn, we had as many as 18 or 19 cats at a time. Now we still have ten, and as much as we would love to take in every stray we simply can not do it. The principle is the same.
The country has trillions of dollars in national debt and those of us who pay taxes, pay way too much. Do we really want that money to be supporting those who do not play by the rules? Apply for a visa, apply for citizenship, and then all the goodies will be yours. But without doing any of those things? How many Country Clubs allow non members to use their facilities unless they are the guests of members? None. How many professional sports teams allow just anyone who happens to stroll into the stadium just before game time to don someone else’s uniform and play on their team? None. Would the Democratic National Committee allow me, a Republican, to bring a few hundred other Republicans to the Democratic National Convention to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate? Of course not. The idea is ludicrous!
So is the idea of allowing anyone in the world, from any country, skilled or unskilled, terrorist or innocent refugee, to simply sneak into this country and then ignore their illegal status and treat them as citizens. Membership has rights and privileges that are not accorded to non-members. Even Democrats and the far-left will admit to that. Then why do they try so hard to protect illegal aliens? Because by protecting them, by allowing them into the country and giving them all these freebies, they can say to them, “Vote for us and we’ll protect you!” “Vote for us and we’ll allow you to stay here.” And it works. Why else did President Obama assure a young illegal adult, a “Dreamer” on television, that if she and her friends voted (illegally) in the 2016 election no one was going to hunt them down and deport them? Why else did I get an email from a Democratic group trying to prevent the government from forcing states to clean up their voting rolls that said, “We must stop this voter suppression or Democrats will not be in power for years to come!” Illegals vote, despite what Democrats try to tell us. And they vote Democratic!
The far left also pushes expansion of government into every facet of our lives, thus the ever increasing number of federal regulations imposed upon us during the Obama years. During his presidency 20,642 new regulations were imposed upon businesses and private individuals in this country, costing small businesses and consumers over $100 billion annually. When I was growing up, my mother ran a small bakery out of her house. She sold cookies door to door and also through a couple of small stores. The Indiana Health Department had to check out her kitchen to be sure it was sanitary, but that was all that was required. Now, a local farm can sell home-made jelly and caramel corn at the farmers’ market, but not in their store, because they are not produced in a “commercial” kitchen. How does this help us? Some of the regulations are extremely beneficial to our safety, but many, many more of them simply provide headaches for consumers and small business owners and work for scores of government workers who could surely find jobs elsewhere. During the Obama administration, because colleges receive federal funding under Title IX, Obama was able to dictate how they should handle cases of alleged sexual harassment or rape. The new guidelines virtually eliminated due process for the accused and ended in the ruining of lives of several innocent young men whose supposed “victims” later recanted or were proven to have been lying. The colleges take federal money, so they had to abide by Obama’s dictates, no matter how unfair. Thankfully, Education Secretary de Vos, under President Trump’s leadership, has rescinded those draconian measures. Charges of sexual harassment and rape can not be ignored, but they, like all crimes, must be investigated by law enforcement officials and the accused given due process under the law.
The same happened with schools and the mandate to allow transgender students to use the bathroom for the gender they “identified with” rather than the one specific to their biological makeup. Schools, too, receive federal funds. As the old adage goes, “He who pays the piper, calls the tunes!” The increased incursion of the government into our private lives, whether in the school and college systems, in regulations on small businesses, in the mandate to buy healthcare coverage, or through free healthcare and free tuition, removes from us little by little our freedoms to make choices for our own lives and brings us closer and closer to socialism, which is the opposite of democracy. There is no freedom in a socialistic government. Ask the Russians how free they felt under Communism (socialism in a slightly different form). Ask the Chinese how free they feel. Ask the Cubans how wonderful their life is when they are still driving cars from the 1950s. Ask the Venezuelans how wonderful they feel about their life in a country rich with oil where the people cannot even get sufficient toilet paper.
I ask the far-left, the Communists, Antifa and their ilk, “If socialism and communism are so great, why is it that people are leaving socialistic and communistic countries to come to America?” They come here, because we are still a democracy, where the people, angry at the way the country is going can elect a Donald Trump as its president. They come here because, as of now, we are still free. But we must all, Democrats and Republicans alike, work together to keep it that way! The Antifas of the country, the far-left, are trying very hard to turn us into the very thing that our forefathers escaped from: Europe. Life therelimit ed, as it limits today, their opportunities. America offered endless opportunity through hard work: The American Dream, we call it. That Dream is still available to us if we act to protect it from the lies of the far-left who would convince us that we must become like the rest of the world. We are not the rest of the world. We are Americans. Let’s not forget that!