February 11, 2009
Goodbye, America! It Was Fun While It Lasted!
Printer FriendlyBy: Ann Coulter
It's bad enough when illiterate jurors issue damages awards in the billions of dollars because they don't grasp the difference between a million and a billion. Now it turns out the Democrats don't know the difference between a million and a trillion.
Why not make the "stimulus bill" a kazillion dollars?
All Americans who work for a living, or who plan to work for a living sometime in the next century, are about to be stuck with a trillion-dollar bill to fund yet more oppressive government bureaucracies. Or as I call it, a trillion dollars and change.
The stimulus bill isn't as bad as we had expected -- it's much worse. Instead of merely creating useless, make-work jobs digging ditches -- or "shovel-ready," in the Democrats' felicitous phrase -- the "stimulus" bill will create an endless army of government bureaucrats aggressively intervening in our lives. Instead of digging ditches, American taxpayers will be digging our own graves.
There are hundreds of examples in the 800-page "stimulus" bill, but here are just two.
First, the welfare bureaucrats are coming back.
For half a century, the welfare establishment had the bright idea to pay women to have children out of wedlock. Following the iron laws of economics -- subsidize something, you get more of it; tax it, you get less of it -- the number of children being born out of wedlock skyrocketed.
The 1996 Welfare Reform bill marked the first time any government entitlement had ever been rolled back. Despite liberal howling and foot-stomping, not subsidizing illegitimacy led, like night into day, to less illegitimacy.
Welfare recipients got jobs, as the hard-core unemployables were coaxed away from their TV sets and into the workforce. For the first time in decades, the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate stopped spiraling upward.
As proof that that welfare reform was a smashing success, a few years later, Bill Clinton started claiming full credit for the bill.
Well, that's over. The stimulus bill goes a long way toward repealing the work requirement of the 1996 Republican Welfare Reform bill and rewards states that increase their welfare caseloads by paying unwed mothers to sit home doing nothing.
Second, bureaucrats at Health and Human Services will electronically collect every citizen's complete medical records and determine appropriate medical care.
Judging by the care that the State Department took with private visa records last year, that the Ohio government took with Joe the Plumber's government records, that the Pentagon took with Linda Tripp's employment records in 1998, and that the FBI took with thousands of top secret "raw" background files in President Clinton's first term, the bright side is: We'll finally be able to find out if Bill Clinton has syphilis -- all thanks to the stimulus bill!
HHS bureaucrats will soon be empowered to overrule your doctor. Doctors who don't comply with the government's treatment protocols will be fined. That's right: Instead of your treatment being determined by your doctor, it will be settled on by some narcoleptic half-wit in Washington who couldn't get a job in the private sector.
And a brand-new set of bureaucrats in the newly created office of "National Coordinator of Health Information Technology" will be empowered to cut off treatments that merely prolong life. Sorry, Mom and Pop, Big Brother said it's time to go.
At every other workplace in the nation -- even Wal-Mart! -- workers are being laid off. But no one at any of the bloated government bureaucracies ever need fear receiving a pink slip. All 64,750 employees at the department of Health and Human Services are apparently absolutely crucial to the smooth functioning of the department.
With the stimulus bill, liberals plan to move unfirable government workers into every activity in America, where they will superintend all aspects of our lives.
Also, thanks to the stimulus bill, the private sector will gradually shrivel and die. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of servicing the bill's nearly trillion-dollar debt will shrink the economy within a decade.
Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'"
The new liberal version is: There are those who look at things and ask, "Why on earth should the government be paying for that?" I dream of things that never were funded by the government and ask, "Why not?"
Posted by redguy at February 11, 2009 10:41 PM
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Comments
I suppose you're correct, Ann.
Americans really should start listening to Conservatives about how to repair our financial meltdown.
After all, it's not as though they took Clinton's budget surplus and left us with a 10 trillion dollar deficit or anything.
Posted by: kevind ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.redstatesusa.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 12, 2009 07:51 AM
As usual, Ann, you're spot-on!
After all, it's not as though the Clinton administration took the budget surplus and international good will and set the wheels in motion to squander that good will and cash out America...
If there's one thing Clinton did do, it was create an environment where terorism could flourish and democrats could clear those pesky laws off the books that kept people buying houses they could afford and kept government out of the private sector.
Your pal,
Meat.
Posted by: meat at February 12, 2009 09:02 AM
Ann,
Our economic problems are much larger than anyone in Goofyville on the Potomac wants to acknowledge.
Sub-prime mortgage defaults "lowered the river and exposed the rocks"; other financial and economic problems that were there all along, just hidden away out of sight, out of mind.
The aggregate total of all taxation by all 87,000 or so governments and other authorities who have been granted taxing authority is by far the number one root cause reason that the nation's financial system and the nation's economy, thus the nation's people and families, have problems. It is only if and when the total cost of taxation in the nation is acknowledged as being the destructive force that it is today and then is addressed that our nation's economy will have a chance to be rebuilt.
We must have fewer, smaller, more focused, better directed and managed, less burdensome governments and other taxing authorities for there to be any chance for us to have real economic recovery.
Forget porkulus legislative packages that are sold to the public as being stimulus legislation. They haven't worked to any real effect recently, they will not work now and they won't work in the future unless and until we rebuild the value creating sectors of our economy so there will be something there to stimulate.
The aggregate total of all taxation in the nation is indirect operating overhead for the value creating sectors of our nation's economy. It is the nation's economy that must pay all of the nation's bills. If the nation's debts are to be paid off and if the unfunded future obligations are to be funded and paid for, it is the nation's economy that will have to be able to pay.
Does anyone seriously believe that either of those two things will ever be done? It is a very sad, very sick joke that has been played on the people by our own governments.
The reason that our value creating businesses are no longer able to compete for shelf space in our own retail stores or in the retail stores of any other country is because the cost of governments that is being dumped into their operating costs prohibits them from being competitive. They must be able to pass on all of their operating costs, both direct and indirect, to be able to remain financially solvent and stay in business.
It will not be easy and it will not be fun for any of us, even for limited government fiscal conservatives, but it must be done and done before it is too late.
CONSERVATISM IS A PHILOSOPHY THAT ENGAGES THE INTELLECT. LIBERALISM IS A BELIEF SYSTEM THAT ENGAGES THE EMOTIONS.
GREAT NATIONS DON'T JUST DIE. THEY ARE ASSASSINATED BY THE UNTHINKING ACTIONS AND THE UNCONTROLLED EXCESSES OF THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS.
Posted by: Tom Kiser at February 12, 2009 09:39 AM
Democracy, it seems that Aristle said if I remember correctly, collapses when the populace learns it can raid the treasury.
Posted by: Miriam McCue at February 12, 2009 12:16 PM
I think that somebody should break out a copy of the US Constitution, read it over and make a list of the responsibilities of the federal government defined therein. We should then limit our government to just those things. Can you imagine how much we could save? Naaaaah, that would be too logical. And it might just work. The liberals would never stand for it.
Posted by: mcrider at February 12, 2009 02:09 PM
As the well educated among us know a billion is a million to the power of 2, which is where it gets the name bi-million from. So the stimulus is only around a $billion, $1,000,000,000,000, not a trillion which is $1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Americans have always been badly educated because the teachers fail to correct the pupils and so many words are not spelled according to the Queen's English.
Just look at the film Doubt, the nun's had not even learned how to use a knife and fork.
What amazes me is the way in which the politicians and their civil servants just have not got a clue how to rectify the recession. They should all be out on their ears because part of their responsibility is to have a contingency plan in place.
The media are also at fault for failing to hold the politicians' feet to the flames. It is no good saying we cannot value these "toxic assets". This is a blatant lie and the SEC should never have allowed these assets to be structured or traded if they could not get a fair value from the underlying securities.
If you have 100,000 mortgages of $100,000 packaged then you not only have $10,000,000,000 of mortgage debt securing the CDO but also the properties themselves. 4% interest would need a total of $400,000,000 being paid each year, $4,000 per mortgage, or $333 per month, which is less than you would pay in rent. So all you need is for the mortgages to be extended for 5 years, and over that period be interest only. In other words if the banks had renegotiated mortgages instead of foreclosing there would not be a problem. So all these idiots in Washington had to do was change the law on foreclosures to require interest only breathing space. The mortgages would retain their position as performing loans and not need to be written down/off.
Doesn't America deserve people with intelligence and decisiveness to run the House and the Senate rather than the current panic stricken idiots.
At this stage the banks should be allowed to value these assets at say between 80% and 70%, and then reduce this at say 2% per annum over 5 years. During this time full due diligence could be done and reported to the SEC.
As for a stimulus package this should concentrate solely on tax cuts, small business incentives and infrastructure projects.
Posted by: Redrex at February 13, 2009 09:22 PM
well I agree with Ann BUT what should and can we do to stop the liberal loonies in DC and elsewhere?
Posted by: WyomingBob at February 18, 2009 03:01 AM
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