The reasons that every American should be happy not to have a Democratic president in the White House are legion, but let me mentions just a few of them:
Democrats believe in just giving things to people. Free stuff. And that hasn’t worked so well.
But just giving away free stuff doesn’t really help people. Remember the old adage: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The Democrats are really good at giving people fish and not so good at teaching them how to fish. And those giveaways just don’t work in the long run. In fact, they just increase the number of people on welfare and widen the gap between the rich and the poor. According to a Washington Times article in 2015, “ The latest report from the government estimates more than 23 percent of Americans lived in a family that received some form of welfare help under Mr. Obama, up 17.1% from the last year of Mr. Bush’s presidency.”
In fact, the poverty rate was 25 percent when President Bush left office. It rose to 28 percent in 2013. One out of three black children, 38 percent of all African-American children, lived in poverty in 2013, as reported by PEW. Overall, there were more people living in poverty in the U.S. in 2013 than at other time in U.S. history at 45 million people. And yet President Obama and the Democrats had assured us all that the recession was over and the economy was growing again.
Certainly not so for black Americans. Income inequality between black and white is also at its widest point in 25 years. According to a study by PEW in 2014, the average white household was worth $141,900, while the average black one was worth $11,000. How has all the free stuff helped black Americans?
Free stuff has to be paid for by someone, as we learned from the Affordable Care Act.
Many Americans who previously did not have health insurance got it under the ACA, some because the government (taxpayers) paid for much of it, and some because they felt forced to buy it by the law. Unfortunately, many of them, including those who previously had health insurance, saw their monthly insurance premiums, co-pays, and deductibles rise year after year to levels that strained their budgets. Many families have insurance, but never go to a doctor because their deductible is so high that they can never, short a catastrophic illness, get any coverage from the insurance company. Get a cough that lingers? Just ride it out and hope for the best. Otherwise you’ll have to pay for all the lung x-rays yourself. In fact, they can’t afford doctor visits themselves because they are paying through their deductibles and monthly premiums for doctor visits for those getting government subsidized insurance or Medicaid. How is that fair? So, the Democrats’ “stuff” isn’t free at all.
Government has become increasingly unwieldy and government agencies like the EPA have been encouraged to issue thousands of federal regulations that have increased the cost of living for Americans and stifled industry, costing countless American jobs.
In 2016, Obama’s last year in the White House, 3,853 new regulations were imposed, the largest single year number in the last 11 years. During the eight years of the Obama administration, 20,642 new federal regulations were imposed upon the citizens of this country, 4000 of them from the EPA alone. By 2015, the cost to American businesses and the consumer had already reached over $100 billion, resulting from “higher energy rates from the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Clean Power Plan”; increased food prices for both people and pets as a result of excessively prescriptive food production standards; restricted access to credit for consumers and small businesses under Dodd–Frank financial regulations; fewer health care choices and higher medical costs because of the Affordable Care Act; and reduced Internet investment and innovation under the network neutrality rules dictated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)”(Heritage.org). These regulations, passed by federal agencies without the input or approval of our elected representatives, have the weight of law. In 2016 alone, agencies issued 18 new regulations for every law passed by Congress(Forbes).
Under the Democrats, millions of acres of land and water have been seized by the government, restricting their use as grazing land by ranchers and removing them from the production of fossil fuel energy.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument even though his administration had assured the public that he would not do that, locking out “a lot of ranchers, they locked out a whole bunch of clean coal,” according to Utah Gov. Gary Herbert in 2010(Natural News). But he didn’t hold a candle to President Obama, who, according to The New American, has set a new record for the amount of land and water seized by a single chief executive: over 553 million acres, or about 865,000 square miles. That’s 30 percent more acreage than the entire state of Alaska and over three times the size of Texas. National Public Radio reports that about 65% of Utah and 80% of Nevada is now owned by the federal government.
About half of that land grab, 260 million acres was seized in 2016 in yet another attempt to circumvent Congress. According again to The New American, he designated over 1.3 million acres in Utah as the Bears Ears National Monument and 300,000 acres in Nevada as the Gold Butte National Monument. In late summer, he quadrupled the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, an area off the coast of Hawaii, which created the world’s largest marine reserve, and will cost local fishermen, now prevented from fishing those waters, an estimated $10 million a year. Nearly 2 million acres of California was grabbed to create three new national monuments and the Fish and Wildlife Service seized “portions of Alaska equivalent to the size of New Mexico” during a six month period last year (The New American).
Democrats blindly push so-called “clean, sustainable” energy at all costs, damaging both the economy and the environment in the process.
Under President Obama, nearly $30 billion in taxpayer backed loans were made to green energy businesses, 36 of which had already failed or were failing by 2012. By 2015, $1 billion in taxpayer money had already been lost to defaulted loans according to an audit by the Government Accountability Office, and at least another $1.2 billion in defaulted loans was expected (The Washington Times and Fox News).
And the much touted electric cars like the Tesla are not the saviors of the environment that they are purported to be. If you own an electric car, you must charge the battery from the electricity produced by an energy plant, nearly seventy percent of which still use coal to fuel them. In some states, nearly ninety percent of energy plants are fueled by coal. According to The National Review, if your car is charged from a coal-fueled plant, that car will emit 15 ounces of carbon per mile that you drive it, 3% more than a gas fueled car. And the batteries that you are charging are lithium batteries which in 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency described “as having the ‘highest potential for environmental impacts,’ with lithium mining resulting in greenhouse-gas emissions, environmental pollution, and human-health impacts.” The Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that specializes in “science for a healthy planet and safer world,” contends that manufacturing emissions for electric cars like the Tesla are 68 percent higher than for gasoline fueled vehicles (National Review).
We currently have at least a 200 years’ supply of coal and about 100 years’ worth of natural gas. And despite the hysteria of the left, leaked emails and other documents appear to show that energy scientists are playing with the figures to keep global warming a crisis that it may in fact not be at all. Furthermore, although other countries have been swift to join both the Kyoto and Paris Energy Accords, despite their rhetoric, most of them are not racing to abandon fossil fuels in favor of green energy. Yet, despite our withdrawal from the Kyoto Accord under George W. Bush, we have reduced our carbon emissions by over 10% in the last decade, far more than other countries. Research into green technology should by no means be abandoned, but it should be recognized, as the Democrats fail to do, that to abandon all fossil fuel at this stage is only detrimental to the economy and the environment. We have the time, folks. Let’s get it right.
Democrats mistakenly believe that the single greatest threat to the United States is global warming.
President Obama repeatedly claimed that the greatest threat that the United States faces is global warming. And consequently, he poured billions of tax dollars into green technology, ignoring the problem of undocumented individuals who continued to pour across our southern borders. If global warming is indeed accurate, it will be many years (contrary to Al Gore’s dire and subsequently disproven predictions) for climate change to endanger the lives of Americans. The seas would not rise so quickly that people could not move farther inland and those who currently live in the tropics prove to the rest of us that increased temperatures, while not comfortable, are certainly survivable. Terrorism is another story. As proven recently in London, who suffered three terrorist attacks in little over two months, one of them targeting young girls, terrorism is both an immediate and a universal threat. In the United States alone, our citizens have been murdered in terror attack while attending a nightclub, working at a recruitment center, watching a marathon, being on a military base, going to a Christmas party, going to work in the World Trade Center. Islamic terrorists are evil. They are not poor, uneducated, jobless young men. Osama bin Ladin was extremely wealthy. They follow a religion which in its most extreme form calls for the killing of everyone of a different faith, even of a different sect of their own faith. This is evil in its purest form, and the great danger to America is that Democrats do not recognize, perhaps do not even believe in, evil.
So, will things go well now that we do not have a Democrat in the White House? No, sadly, because Washington is still Washington where many are more concerned about themselves than about the good of the country. Add that to an insanely rabid left, out to get this president in any way that they can, and things can not run smoothly. But changes are being made. Many of Obama’s executive orders have already been undone by President Trump. A conservative has been added to the Supreme Court to fill the space left by the death of conservative Antonin Scalia. Jobs have already been brought back to the U.S. Work is being done, albeit slowly, on both healthcare reform and tax reform. The House has already passed a bill gutting much of Dodd-Frank, which made it difficult for small businesses to get loans. The President has reaffirmed our commitment to Israel and to our other allies, and at a summit of over 50 Muslim leaders, told them they must help drive radical Islamist from their countries and from the face of the earth. The number of people crossing our southern border has greatly diminished even before the wall is built, as the Border Patrol is at last able to do their jobs. And when Syria’s Assad used chemical weapons against his foes, instead of issuing a red line and then doing nothing when Assad crossed it, as President Obama had done, President Trump ordered the immediate bombing of the airfield from which the planes carrying out the chemical attack had left. No one, friend or foe, doubts that President Trump will do what he threatens to do. There is indeed a new sheriff in town, and all Americans should be glad.