Exactly Why Progressivism Sucks,
FDR’s/Obama’s Second Bill of Rights
and our Actually $212 TRillion PROBLEM
You do recall candidate Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year? A pledge already worthless? Well consider this, in just a bit over five months, all the Bush tax cuts we’ve been enjoying will be rescinded, but that’s not a tax increase is it? Well, welcome to Bill of Rights Hell, Obamastyle . . . .
Barack Obama would like to take all the credit/blame for his radical legislative program but it’s been around since there have been left-wing progressives interested in “progressing beyond” the United States Constitution which they regard as “outdated” or even “an inferior and ill-conceived document.” Barack Obama himself calls it outdated and adds that it’s merely “a catalog of negative rights.”
Woodrow Wilson was the first recognized Progressive (Teddy Roosevelt was actually the first and mildest** one, however). Wilson, an educator and President of Princeton University wrote several books re-writing history and most particularly the history of the founding of the nation and of the founders. Wilson, according to real history – not progressive history, was an abject racist and the first to segregate the armed forces since Civil War Days. D.W. Griffith’s racist silver screen masterpiece “The Birth of a Nation” which glorified the Ku Klux Klan as the most vital element in post Civil War history, was premiered at the White House for Wilson and his Cabinet.
Herbert Hoover, a Republican like Teddy Roosevelt, believed in government involvement in peoples’ lives to a much greater extent than Teddy did. He sought to involve the government in welfare schemes and to give price supports to farmers among other progressive farm programs. He dramatically reversed the Harding-Coolidge trend of substantially lowered taxes and substantially lowered government spending (over a 45% reduction in both cases in response to the “Invisible Depression” Harding had inherited from Wilson). After the Crash of October ’29 under Herbert Hoover, the Depression was ending with the bottoming out of the stock Market three months after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration (in March, in those days). FDR had run on a promise to return to common sense and cutting taxes and cutting government spending which had cut Wilson’s Depression down to size very quickly and left it known as the “Invisible Depression.”
FDR’s policies extended the Depression another nine years from taking office and presumably would not have ended the Depression at all except for the U.S. entry into the war in December of 1941. In the United States that period in history is known as the “Great” Depression but the rest of the world had a rough three years and simple call it a little ‘d’ depression.
FDR’s Second Bill of Rights was aimed, as many progressive schemes are, at redistributing wealth and its been adopted in whole cloth by Barack Obama. The harm done by FDR was incalculable. Hoover only created two new government agencies, FDR created forty. Barack Obama’s Obamacare health care “reform” has created 390+ new government agencies in just one law. Again, as most people sense, Obamacare has little to do with health care and will NOT cut health care costs it is just a method of grabbing more control for the government and redistributing wealth.
Before FDR’s 1944 inauguration (his 4th!) speech he paid homage to the idea but he’d already come out specifically talking about his agenda of redistributing wealth during his earlier 1944 State of the Union Address. The “Second Bill of Rights” according to FDR are “positive rights,” that is what government can do for or to its citizens (after taxing them unmercifully for the money to do it with). He included:
1. The right to a useful and renumerative job
2. The right to earn enough to provide not only food and clothing but
also recreation
3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that
would give him and his family a decent living
4. The right of every family to a decent home
5. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination from monopolies at home and abroad
6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health
7. The right to a good education
8. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
Quite the socialist agenda, whereas the Founding Fathers said, we’ll keep the government out of your hair and maximize the money you can keep from what you earn and thus maximize your freedom to take care of your needs as you perceive them, FDR said we’ll tax the hell out of you and then give you some of your money back in the form of cradle-to-grave Nanny-state protection, not noticing that this would destroy the economy’s ability to create jobs and make it a lot less likely that anyone would have money to be taxed. This is clearly virtually identical to Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” progam.
Let’s look at item #4, in 1977 Jimmy Carter and his dual-chamber Democratic majority in congress passed the CRA of ’77 (Community Reinvestment Act) which for the first time required banks and local lenders to knowingly make bad home loans to otherwise ineligible clients. Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were added to this travesty in 1992; these “rights” were expanded again twice in 1995; and the Bill Clinton final expansion in '98 (the third expansion under Slicky Willy) put the whole process on steroids and with the help of the Cloward-Piven Strategics of ACORN . . . created the sub-prime lending crisis at the root of today’s economic debacle.
And think of this, the United States had enjoyed for over half a century by far the world’s highest home ownership percentage (62-65%) so there was no problem. What exactly is wrong with renting a home, especially when one is young? What about the rights of landlords to operate their business and perform a clearly useful service?
Item #2 has raised its ugly head often since LBJ’s days, the right to a “guaranteed income.” Wow! Do you mean the right of the lazy and unproductive to extort money from those who earn it fairly by trading their goods and services and talent and education in the free market?
Item #8 is likewise quite interesting. This is the welfare “RIGHT” is it not? At present, our country not only has a $14TRillion national debt, but also $110 TRillion of UNfunded liability courtesy of Social Security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid. No one ever talks about these things or this UNfunded liability . . . but something that’s even less obvious and even more secret: roughly $88 TRillion in UNfunded welfare liability is also coming our way in the next 44-45 years.
#6 is Obamacare and its travesties are just coming to light. It is a nightmare fiscally, will destroy the health insurance industry and the health care industry as we know it. Count on old folks dying courtesy of the rationing which the newly-appointed health care director openly expressed. As well, a lot of infants also will prove to be “not viable enough” to warrant all the health care bucks and services and time that would be needed to keep them alive. And from having the highest cancer cure rate in the world, count on the United States gravitating toward the rate of Great Britain where early intervention against cancer is somewhat of a joke.
#7 is the right to a good education. Wow, Ph.D’s for everyone? Rajjpuut went through college courtesy of the GI Bill he earned and five different jobs he held and wound up with a 3.92 GPA despite taking as many as 29 hours in two different quarters. A lot of people getting through on mommy’s and daddy’s money wasted their education and their time in Rajjpuut’s not-so-humble opinion . . . what’s wrong with people working to put themselves through college? Why should anyone be guaranteed a college education as Barack Obama has promised to provide?
#1 the right to a useful and remunerative job. Really? What about the right of an employer to hire who he needs and only who he needs and to pay them what he must to get good work out of them all the while keeping his company afloat? Study after study has shown that minimum wage laws just put more people out of work and threaten the solvency of more businesses . . . so much for government interference in the marketplace.
#3 means that an inferior farmer has the right to survive and charge enough to cover his ineptitude. He grows cotton in the north and succeeds in half the years but is frozen out in the other half, why should anyone give him more than top dollar for an inferior, at best crop?
#5 Sounds pretty nice. Actually, the policies of FDR favored big business and cut the throat of small business which is one great reason why the Depression lasted almost ten more years after FDR came to power. But if it really were true, big IF that, just as in the case of the farmer, why should someone be forced to pay more than top dollar if the product is inferior or the process to produce it is inefficient? So much for the “Second Bill of Rights!
In other words, FDR who gave the country almost ten extra years of Depression and who ran promising to cut taxes and cut spending but did just the opposite, was the king of the early progressives and the first clearly socialist president and was aiming to move the country toward something quite close to communism. And remember he only created 40 new government agencies Ol’ FDR, while Obama created 390+ just in one law: Obamacare. Gotta love them progressives, don’t you?
Ya’ll live long, strong and ornery,
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