Liberals would have you believe that the world is a horrible place to live and that they and they alone can “fix” it. Every night on television, the liberal media’s naysayers decry the state of the country, and Democratic senators and congressmen tell us how the tax bill that is putting more money in our pockets is really a scam to reward the rich. Then the governors of states like California and New York scramble to find a way to lessen taxes for their rich citizens because it is only their rich citizens who will otherwise pay higher taxes under the law. They can not tell us the truth because the truth does not fit their narrative. They want us to believe that everything is going wrong so we will vote them into office to make things right again.
They want to give us Universal Health Care, (paid for by our necessarily higher taxes) just like the system in Great Britain, whose bureaucrats literally held a couple of babies hostage and would not allow their parents to take them to doctors in other countries for treatment. The babies subsequently were killed by the doctors who removed life support against the will of their parents.
They want a more socialistic government just like Great Britain’s where a man will serve eight months in jail for flipping off a traffic camera. And where now, even if you do something that is not illegal, such as cutting in line in front of a person of color, and that individual feels that you did it, not because you are a jerk, but because you are a racist, then cutting in line becomes a racist act for which you will be prosecuted. Get that? Someone else attributes racists motives to you even if you haven’t a racist bone in your body, and you will be prosecuted on that individual’s say alone! This is socialism, but it certainly is not American!
These things don’t currently happen in the U.S., but Democrats would like them to. They believe life would be better under socialism than under capitalism where hard work is rewarded. And yet, they are so very deluded. Let’s look at what has actually been accomplished, primarily by capitalism rather than the socialism that they want to push upon us.
Fifty years ago, nearly 45% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today that number has been reduced to less than 10%. 90% of all people in the world have access to clean water, up from about 50% forty years ago, reducing the child mortality rate to around 5%. Life expectancy around the globe has risen from 60 years old to 72, and in western nations, to 80 years of age. Even in the poorest of African nations, life expectancy has risen from 47 to 60 years of age.
Oil spills occurred at an average of about 24 per year in the 1970s, but since 2000, there have been only an average of 3 spills per year and the amount of oil spilled has been reduced by 99%. Forests, which environmentalist warned were being destroyed at an alarming rate, have increased, especially in Europe and in the United States.
Other drastic horrors which the left constantly warns us about have proven false as well. Dire predictions of global catastrophe as a result of so-called climate change have not come true. The oceans have not submerged our coastal cities, polar bears, who were supposedly on the way to extinction, are flourishing in record numbers; a species of penguin, also thought to be endangered because of global warming, was discovered a few months ago in a new, unknown colony of many thousands; ice caps are melting in some areas but increasing exponentially in others. And the sheer illogic of the climate change advocates is beyond belief. They tell us that CO2 emissions caused by humans are warming the earth and will bring it to an Armageddon. Yet they equally claim that the past record cold winter was caused by human emission-caused climate change. How warming the earth by CO2 emissions can produce colder temperatures is a magic trick they simply ignore, just as they ignore the fact that CO2 is necessary for plant growth and that historically, humans have flourished in warmer decades and struggled in colder ones.
Really good things are happening for America, as well. Things that the left struggles to twist into disasters lest we find we don’t need their “fixes” after all. After decades of U.S. presidents promising to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv, Israel to Israel’s capital city of Jerusalem, President Trump not only announced the move, but had it expedited to be completed Monday, May 14. And U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, faced down the nations of the world who dared to tell the U.S. that they could not make such a move, telling them that she was taking down names of those nations who stood with us and those who did not. Other nations, bit by bit, are following our move, and the weeks of riots and killings that were prophesied would take place at our announcement fizzled into a few small protests. The question of the capital of Israel is no longer a point of debate in any Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. We have taken it off the table.
In the last year, ISIS has been almost totally demolished, and while this does not solve the problem of radical Islamic terrorism, it removes much of the romantic allure of the new Islamic “Caliphate” that drew young, impressionable Muslims to the movement. When Assad of Syria used chemical weapons against his own people again, the U.S., with France, and Great Britain, dropped bombs on chemical weapon sites in Damascus, despite the objection of Russia, who wisely kept out of the way.
One of Obama’s legacy moves was an Iranian agreement by which we unfroze billions of dollars of Iranian assets and flew plane loads of American cash to the Mullahs in exchange for their promising not to complete a nuclear bomb for the next 10-15 years. The money quickly found its way to terrorist groups throughout the Middle East, Iran continued to test ballistic missiles . . . those thing needed to deliver nuclear bombs to Israel and other of our allies, supposed “oversight” by UN forces required a three-day notice to Iran and never included military sites. . . . How could any logical mind conceive that we were really seeing what Iran was doing? Obama knew he could not get enough support even from Democrats to pass the agreement as a treaty although he was able to lure our European allies on board, so he made it a “deal” that clearly did not bind its members as a treaty would have. President Trump wisely withdrew from the deal and reinstated our sanctions on Iran, leaving our European allies with the question of continuing to trade with Iran’s minuscule economy and face sanctions from us, or abandoning their ties to Iran and joining us in renewing sanctions against Iran. Despite their angst, all of our Middle East allies, Arab and Israeli alike, are cheering the move.
North Korea is now talking with South Korea about ending the Korean War that began in 1950 and North Korean lead Kim Yong Un will be meeting with President Trump in person in June. In advance of that proposed meeting, North Korea has ceased its missile testing, closed down at least one launch site, and released and sent home three American hostages that it was holding. The “Little Rocket Man” finally found someone in President Trump that could talk his language and call his bluff. Will we be able to denuclearize North Korea? Who knows. But we are far closer today than we have been during the last three or four presidencies.
On the home front, since the election of President Trump, the stock market has soared, and despite the occasional correction or blip caused by alarming news reports, has remained at an all time high. Unemployment has decreased considerably reaching all time lows for Black Americans and Hispanic Americans. The Tax and Jobs Act has put more money back into the pockets of 90% of Americans, most of them in the middle class. Money which has gone back to corporations has already begun to do as was intended: find its way into increased salaries for workers, expansion of businesses, bonuses for hourly employees, and increased giving to charitable organizations. The production of goods by companies in the U.S. has also increased by about 7%, double the GDP which itself is nearly twice what it was under President Obama. The economy is booming and people are beginning to feel hope for the future again.
Liberals and the mainstream media tell us with boring regularity that we are a country of bigots, and that all who are not “people of color” are cursed with “white privilege” that has somehow given us a leg up in the world. The illogic of that premise, liberals simply ignore. In fact, white people are also poor. White people are also without good educations. White people also hold down poor paying jobs. White people also have to work hard for what they want in life, perhaps harder than people of color, because no one is helping them to get ahead. “White privilege” doesn’t get a student into the college of his choice if a student of color, even less qualified than he, has applied for the slot. “White privilege” doesn’t guarantee white people jobs, but quotas do put people of color into positions they are sometimes not the best qualified for.
In fact, despite the interference of big government, most Americans these days actually do what Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of: they judge others not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Fifty years ago, some white families might have moved out of a neighborhood if a black family moved in. Today, that is unlikely to happen. We get along. We are friends. We work together. Our children play together, totally color blind until liberals, those very ones who claim to be fighting against racism, teach children of color that they are being hated and mistreated by their white friends.
Undoubtedly a tiny number of White Americans look down upon people of color. And certainly, driven by liberals, some Black Americans feel the need to be separate from Whites: racism in reverse. Other than that, racism is largely the creation and perpetuation of the liberals who use its specter to keep people of color firmly in their voter ranks and use its accusation to punish those who disagree with liberal views.
Despite the cry in past weeks for more gun laws, and by some, for a complete (and unfeasible) ban on all guns, violent crime in the United States has actually decreased steadily since the early 1990s, and school shootings, which are seized upon by the media as if they were an epidemic, are actually extremely rare. The United States does not even reach the top ten countries for violence per capita, and though guns are less available in other countries, their criminals find lots of other means by which to dispatch fellow citizens.
Many of the regulations passed during the Obama administration which crippled small business and drove some of them out of business have been revoked by the Trump administration and small businesses are flourishing. EPA regulations which placed unreasonable burdens on certain industries that the Obama administration viewed as “undesirable,” have been lifted without any danger to the quality of the air we breathe or the water we drink. In 2016, only 27% of Americans felt that the country was headed in the right direction. That number has now risen to 42%. Americans are starting to feel cautiously optimistic.
Are there still problems in the country? Absolutely. Drug addiction is becoming rampant in many areas of the country; gang violence continues in black and Latino sections of big cities; our public educational system is failing many of our students; and despite the ongoing efforts of the Trump administration, illegal immigrants with no discernible job skills continue to flood our country, protected by “sanctuary cities” and liberal judges . Many problems remain to be addressed, but on the whole, life is looking up for Americans. The American Dream is back, folks! Don’t let the Democrats tell you otherwise.