Stimulus, shimulus.
There are 800 billion reasons to be worried about the so-called "stimulus" bill. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the bill will explode the defecit to the unthinkable level of nearly $2 trillion, or 13.5% of the entire U.S. economy. It will reverse welfare reform and quite deliberately expand the welfare rolls all over again, in a crass, politically-calculated move that will encourage passive dependency, increase crime, destroy lives, and bring misery to millions.
And for what? "Stimulus" is just the label slapped on the Ominbus 2009 Democratic Party Political Payback Bill. There is nothing stimulating about the bill. It is multi-hundred-billion-dollar pork.
If government spending is the very definition of stimulus, as President Obama recently claimed, then the state of California -- whose legislature is controlled by Democrats just like Congress -- should be stimulated indeed. Instead, the state is struggling with a back-breaking $42 billion deficit despite some of the highest tax rates in the country. How can that be, if spending equals stimulus?
Even worse, liberal Democrats in Congress and across the country are working hard to reach their fingers into every aspect of your life, from how much you earn (CEO pay limits are just the start), to how much you get to keep (precious little), what you can eat, what car you drive, where your kids can go to school, what lightbulbs you can use, what you're allowed to say (hate speech laws), whom you're allowed to listen to (talk radio restrictions), how much water you can use, whether your pets can reproduce (mandatory sterilization), and how much medical care you are allowed to receive -- just for starters.
We know where such expansion of government control eventually leads. Given enough time, it leads to the growing discontent like that in centrally-controlled Venezuela and grinding poverty like that of once-proud Zimbabwe, where forcible redistribution of wealth from white farmers to black farmers and related heavy-handed actions have resulted in runaway inflation and a collapse of the economy.
And so, America is dragged forcibly into "stimulus" that will only weaken the economy and jeopardize its recovery, like a 16th-century bloodletting. But we have no choice; Democrats run the show today, and even when they are not engaged in political payback, their understanding of the simple laws of economics is about as advanced as the medical knowledge of those 16th century doctors. So by all means, open a vein and let the bloodletting begin.
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