The Drug Is Government, The Pusher Is President Obama
Big Gov't: Gutting Republicans' greatest recent achievement — welfare reform requiring recipients to eventually go to work — is, like ObamaCare, a dose of addictive government dependency. Hail to the Pusher-in-Chief.
Some years back, New York magazine profiled a leading crystal-meth dealer, whom they called "Nick."
Nick said the key to success as a drug pusher was to "Sell to many users in small quantities." He said, "If you sell by scoops, you'll make a couple thousand dollars, but if you break it down into quarter grams and work for a few days, you'll make tens of thousands."
The signature theme of Barack Obama's presidency is getting millions more Americans addicted to more government, often a little bit at a time. Pushing the big government drug is everywhere in Obama domestic policy. High joblessness from his own policies justifies an unprecedented level of extended unemployment benefits, an approach even Paul Krugman concedes "reduces a worker's incentive to quickly find a new job."
ObamaCare is increasing health insurance costs — up 9% for an average family from 2010 to 2011 according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — after Obama sold it as a means of accomplishing the opposite, and it looks increasingly like the slippery slope to single-payer.
Undoing welfare reform is just another way to get more government dependency into Americans' veins. Obama's Health and Human Services department says waiving work requirements will give states flexibility. But soon-to-be GOP nominee Mitt Romney is right to call this what it is: the gutting of the 1996 welfare reform.
Heritage Foundation senior fellow Robert Rector in National Review points to liberals' well-worn "camouflage tactics: They publicly praised workfare while seeking to murder it behind the scenes."
Treating the reform law passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Clinton, as "a blank slate," as Rector puts it, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and her bureaucracy "states that it will not approve policy initiatives that are 'likely to reduce access to aid.' Translation: HHS will oppose any policy that reduces welfare caseloads."
Even more troubling, Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution, a senior congressional aide in 1996 deeply involved in drafting the law, told Investor's Business Daily of HHS' move, "I thought it was illegal at first," but he recently "talked to the lawyers at HHS and they convinced me that there is a problem in the drafting" of the law and that "they exploited the loophole — therefore I think there's a separation of powers issue here" that may well end up in federal court. (Haskins hastens to point out that he's no lawyer.)
Can Americans tolerate another fours years of the White House pushing addictive big government? |
