How to Get Elected in America: 2008

Part I-The Democrats

Depends on which party you’re in and who your constituents are, of course. But we can learn a lot from watching the candidates for president.
If you’ve watched any of the roughly 8,000 Democratic debates, you see the way to win votes is to buy them.

Now you’re saying, this is America, you can’t buy votes.

Of course you can. Just promise everything to everyone. Or, better yet, promise everything to enough people to get you elected. Promise to take everything from those who, in all likelihood won’t vote for you, anyway.

Struggling to make ends meet? We’re going to expand social programs. In trouble with your mortgage? We’re going to punish those evil lenders (and some of them are evil, but we shouldn’t have signed up with them). High medical bills? Free universal health care. Single parent? We’re going to provide free child care and pay you to go back to school.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with helping people get higher education, as they will ultimately contribute more, but the problem is these things aren’t free.

The bigger problem is that not enough people realize this or care. Every day we’re bombarded with promises of what Senators Clinton and Obama will give us, yet I never hear anyone ask where the money or resources for this stuff will come from.

Class warfare? Yes, but on a grander scale. Now it’s outright socialism, especially on the part of Mrs. Clinton. She recently offered up this terrifying quote to the Boston Globe: “I have a million ideas,” (for government), “the country can’t afford all of them.”
One of those ideas apparently included giving every baby born in the US a $5,000 bond.
You can read more about it: Media Matters - On Glenn Beck , Penn Jillette said recent Clinton statement "sounds like Charlie Manson"

Hey, I’m all for it, so long as we can make it retroactive. I’ll take $5,000 from…whoever will have to pay for it…and my son will, too. God knows we’ll need it to pay the higher tax rates we’ll see.

Seriously, folks, this is Marxism. I know a lot of people will hear this and say, “What’s wrong with giving every baby $5,000, you baby-hater?”
The problem is these people don’t know where money comes from.

“It comes from the government, right?”

Sure, and why pay taxes since the government prints money? http://www.deadbeef.com/jeremy/index.php/why_pay_taxes_since_the_government_print

This is what we’re up against. Money is paper. Nothing more. It’s a representation of the goods and services we produce. Not surprisingly, the value of the dollar has been decreasing for several years. The policies of the Democrats would no doubt accelerate this trend. We’re already experiencing high inflation because of soaring energy costs…and the nations of OPEC don’t want dollars, they want Euros.
If you print more money, or redistribute it, you don’t give more value to those who need it. You give them more money, but you make that money worth less. Eventually it will be worthless. We’re already seeing it devalued.
Government giveaways won’t help, they’ll make it worse. Free everything won’t make you better off in the long run, it’ll only make everyone equally poor.

Don’t believe me? Visit the people’s paradise of Cuba. Tell me if you want to live like they do. Or look at Russia. It’s been nearly a century since the revolution and they’re only just now recovering.

To put it in plain English, you can’t give away what you don’t have. And redistributing wealth from one group to another won’t work, either. It won’t help the poor, it will only create more of them as we punish the wealthy.

If we want to be better off, we need to produce more goods and services. There is no way around this fact. The free market is far from perfect, and the government needs to do some things. We ought to help those who, “help themselves.”
But education and competition are the answers. We need to remember the government is not as efficient as private enterprise.

When you hear Hillary Clinton promise you the moon, be very afraid, and be careful what you wish for. You don’t get something for nothing. Ultimately, these ideas would destroy the economy.

Obama is only slightly better. I understand how easy it is to get caught up in his energy, which is the only way I can describe it. He is like Reagan in his optimism. Optimism is good, and at least he doesn’t propose garnishing the wages of the working poor who refuse to sign up for his health plan, unlike Clinton. But he’s not going to magically save the working poor in this country, either.

Unfortunately, he is going to win. I like him, I like listening to him speak. He’s got that energy that draws you to him. But I’m scared of his policies, too. As you can tell, if forced to choose, I’d pick him over Senator Clinton, but only just.

The reason we’re stuck with these two is that the Republicans don’t understand the anger that is out there. For some it’s the Iraq war. I was opposed to it from the start, which is why I suppose I like Obama better than Clinton.
But, for most, it’s the economy. People, myself included, are struggling. You’ve got skyrocketing energy costs. This is at a time when the President and Vice President are perceived to be too cozy with energy companies, and with the Saudi’s, who contrary to the belief of some, are not our friends.

Worse, our current energy policy is a joke. Our policy seems to be that we’ve run on oil for a hundred years, so why change? We’ve hit peak oil, and it doesn’t seem to bother the administration one bit.

Does anyone think the price of oil is going to go down? It’s a non-renewable resource. It will only go up from here, and it’s already hurting people like me who don’t have a lot of disposable income. At some point, we’re going to have to do something to find another fuel-not necessarily the ones we’ve considered so far-or we’re going to take a massive hit in our standard of living.
And frankly, I don’t want to keep shelling out money to a part of the world that hates our guts and will turn guns on us at any opportunity.
Our dollar is already in the toilet, too.

To wit, things have hit a snag. Is it a big deal or just a blip? We don’t know yet.
Unfortunately, economic hard times are ideal if you’re a socialist/populist running for office. Just prey on people’s financial fears. Tell them they can’t survive without aid, and they’ll be more inclined to believe you.
That’s what happened in Russia in 1917. That’s what happened in 1930s Germany. Hard times and, in the case of Germany, terrifying inflation made it easy to mold people to the will of a tyrant.
I’m not comparing us to 1930s Germany, or Soviet Russia. It’s not that bad, which is what we need to remember.

But, circumstances are different. We’ve been completely spoiled by decades of spectacular success. We’ve been raised to believe we’re always supposed to get everything we want, immediately. We spend more than we earn, and don’t think it’s a problem. We need every new gadget.

By the standards of modern America, I’m working poor. Yet, I own a car, I’m not homeless, I can afford to feed myself and my son. Quite well, in fact. I can take him to amusement parks in the summer. Yet, even I’m stung by a lower standard of living, and worried by rising fuel costs.

In this climate, a mild recession combined with inflation is more than enough to inspire anger.
Anger, and forcibly redistributing wealth won’t help, though. Instead, maybe we should get off our behinds, take responsibility for our lives and work to improve them. We can’t all be rich, but we can better off.