Stimulus and Health Care: At What Price? | Eastern North Carolina Now

Where Do We Go From Here?

    When I was a child, I vividly remember my fraternal grandparents’ spouting negative prognostications as to the future of our nation and of our Southland, and I would easily tire of such conversations, and would understandably long to be somewhere else. The youth do not want, or need such negative conversation, I thought to myself, as we struggle to identify what beauty we can find in this ever changing world that we live in.

    Now as I am older, and have seen too much in this world that truly disgusts me, I do endeavor not to be so negative. I would rather search for the wonderful energy that makes the world so beautiful. I am conscientious to not be so negative with my own four children, but then again, I haven’t become a grandparent as of yet. I sometimes wonder at what point I will turn to understand the oppressive truth of a reality that robs us of our individual expression of willful self-determination and herds us into a groupthink posture that can be conveniently managed by the state. At what point, will I spout even more dire prognostications, about the impending future, than my grandparents?

    Possibly, my grandparents relied on foretelling me off a future that was built from adversity because I was their greatest audience. Maybe my children will escape this calamitous conversation: I have the internet.

    From the strength of this wide platform, I will raise my voice as if I were a “canary in a coal mine,” and I invite you to continue through, and by your comments in this publication. Today, I will initiate a conversation about a path that our nation has embarked on; the one where many have, or will sacrifice their free will for the wide pattern of the ever expanding safety net.

    Since the last Great Depression, the United States of America has initiated what became the aforementioned ever expanding safety net. During the Lyndon Johnson Administration, when the President, during the Vietnam War, promised, “guns and butter,” the proverbial safety net grew some rather large chording. Welfare grew to big business during this era and put many Democrats in office, and then kept many Democrats in office.

    In Beaufort County in the mid 1990’s, when myself and Commissioner Hood Richardson diligently worked to inspire the Democrat controlled county commissioners to initiate the use of a fraud investigator in the county’s welfare department, I can vividly remember Beaufort County Commissioner Frank Bonner, Democrat, stating, “We (county commissioners) do not need to restrict the department of social services. This is one of the largest industries in our county.” Now that is surely something to aspire to: Don’t you think?

    In the later 1996, on the advice of advisor Dick Morris, President Bill Clinton “triangulated” the welfare issue by taking the House Republicans’ initiative to reform welfare to make it his own, and the Republicans were only too happy to let him take whatever credit he wanted, providing he didn’t veto the bill for that reform. At the county level, where we administer the federal welfare program, we initiated the state and county program, Work First, which required that able bodied individuals seek employment or eventually be cut from the welfare roles. This was a broad initiative after so many years of Democrat politicians providing the disincentive for so many of their voters to find gainful employment.

    Now that the Democrats have regained control of the House and the Senate in 2006, and the Presidency in 2008, they have the regained the ability to remake our nation in their image, and from all the indications in today’s federal government, they will remake it again to buy more votes for their collective political futures on the backs of future generations of Americans and her taxpayers.

    And as passionate as some of their ilk appear to be in their willingness to remake our society into one that is more reminiscent of a small, insignificant socialist country lost in the bosom of the European Union; there are others that believe they must attack the rest of us, who possess traditional American values; such as an adherence to capitalism, the work ethic and moral decency. People like us do not want our government babysitting us, only to later parent us into an abusive relationship. The real problem, at hand, is that our federal government, or any government for that matter, is not qualified to shepherd us into a parent / child relationship. We, the public, will only end up as the abused children, that must surrender our rights and our hard earned riches to this Democrat controlled government.

    This plan of the Democrat controlled congress and their able ally, the Obama Administration, is to take from the hardest working, most successful of us, to give to the least successful of us to buy their votes to stay in office; and that is an abusive relationship. When one factors in the consequential self gratification of profit that these Democrats and their cronies reap from staying in office: It is tantamount to stealing from the industrious among us. A kinder, more statesman-like description of this money grab is the phrase “Redistribution of the Wealth.”

    Redistribution of wealth is a phrase that liberals can live with as long as their numbers hold up at the polls. At first blush; it appears that the November 3, 2009 election may be a negative signal on the public’s reception of some their current policies. Considering how fickle the collective public has historically, it is too early to determine whether their political whim will become their future political will.

    It is my earnest desire that the public, in this democratic republic, will become a smarter public and therefore will make better decisions in not managing their own affairs, but in who they elect to lead them. Many people feel powerless to effect their future, but the power rests in their own collective hands. I pray for our nation’s growth in wisdom, but moreover, I pray for their sustained will to make a difference: Before it is too late.

    The Discussussion of the success of big government growing bigger will continue to be an ongoing theme of my commentary. The associated issued of record government spending for Public Health Care and other new, and other very transformational programs, and their associated cost to the working taxpayer will be addressed at future junctures in this publication. We invite your participation as we do consider all of our publications to be the platform for the dissemnination of the absolute truth - at least as far as we know it.
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