Obamacare Is A Cancer That Must Go

Fellow Americans:

It has been two years this week since the passage of Obamacare, and the firestorm it ignited has not abated but only spread and intensified. Most Americans have already made up their minds, understanding that until it is completely removed, the cancer of Obamacare threatens not only our healthcare and our economy but also our most fundamental liberties and constitutional self-government.

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on its constitutionality, bringing this intolerable act to the forefront of the American mind once again and reminding the country that the issue of Obamacare is by no means settled.

Nothing the Administration has done has made this law more palatable, quite the opposite, and none of the PR events the White House has planned for this week is likely to change people’s minds.

Nor will Obamacare likely be settled by the Supreme Court. As with such divisive questions in the past, this question will be settled by the American people who have throughout this failed episode signaled loud and clear that they want the whole monstrosity repealed once and for all.

In its short 24-month life, Obamacare has done nothing but confirm our worst fears, being a signal failure from the very beginning.

Obamacare promised to make healthcare more accessible and cheaper without increasing taxes or the deficit. If you liked your doctor, of course you could keep your doctor. No one would be made to do anything against their will. These promises have all been broken.

The law’s escalating regulations and costs weigh heavily on the businesses that fuel our economy, one of the reasons job creation has been so anemic and economic recovery has been lackluster. Obamacare is expected to force Americans to pay $99 billion more in taxes and penalties than originally anticipated. Families earning over $250,000 will get hit with a higher Medicare payroll tax.

And just last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that costs, originally pegged at $938 billion, have now risen to $1.76 trillion. Congressional Republicans estimate the tab to be $2.6 trillion. CBO also says that as many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided coverage because of Obamacare.

Turning to the individual mandate forcing all Americans to buy insurance, it quickly led to a revolt by a majority of states, who are now challenging the law before the Supreme Court. The Heritage Foundation weighed in on the issue and filed an amicus brief urging the Court to strike down the law. If government can regulate inactivity, it can do anything.

As Obamacare moves into its implementation phase, we are beginning to see more clearly where it is headed. A heavy-handed mandate for preventive services collides with religious liberty by ordering all insurance plans to cover abortion-inducing drugs, contraception and sterilization at no-cost to the insured. Religious groups serving the public will have to provide such coverage regardless of their religious beliefs and deep moral objections. Those who choose not to comply will face heavy fines that will divert resources from their work to serve the poor, elderly, and sick, if not cause them to leave this work entirely. Such disregard not only tramples our basic liberties but also makes it hard for religious institutions to continue their important work serving communities all across America.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. With each new requirement, Obamacare will make insurance more expensive, reduce flexibility and choice, and take away liberty.

Given this sorry record it is not surprising that Obamacare has been a political loser for its proponents. Starting with the elections of Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey in November 2009, then of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, of all places, two months later, and culminating in the watershed elections of November 2010, when the nation saw the biggest landslide in seven decades.

Today the legislation barely rates a mention in presidential speeches, the signature legislative achievement of President Obama’s first term having become an albatross around his neck.

The American people had the common sense to understand from the start that there is something more at issue when more than 150 federal agencies, bureaus and commissions have the authority to intervene in some of the most personal and private decisions of our lives.

Poll after poll continues to demonstrate that Obamacare is not supported by the American people. The reason is that it offends our principled and abiding attachment to liberty and self government, going to the heart of the relationship between citizen and state.

The only complete remedy is the full repeal of Obamacare in all of its aspects. Like so many, we encourage the Supreme Court to reject the law on constitutional grounds. But Congress must be prepared to finish the job. The ultimate responsibility, though, lies with the American people, who are the ones who elect their leaders. America needs real health care reform that increases access, built on the firm foundation of constitutional principle and the commitment to freedom that has sustained this nation since its founding.

Sixty-five years ago, in the days after their noble victory in World War II, the British people chose not the hero who had led them, Winston Churchill, but replaced his coalition with a socialist Labour Party that quickly brought forth their now-infamous National Health System. By no coincidence, the British government announced a year later it could no longer afford its strategic responsibilities in the post-war world, seemingly reconciled to a declining status.

This will not be our fate. Americans do not line up for instructions from Washington. By their good character and dedication to the principles of liberty, Americans will never resign themselves to being the wards of a bureaucratic state where all is subject to government control, regulatory dictate and administrative whim.

Obamacare is a cancer. We must not rest until we are rid of it.
dgnewdis
The Solar Scenarion And Obama!
Did You See the Senate’s Gas Price Sideshow?

In case you missed it, there was quite a performance in the U.S. Senate yesterday. Liberals put on an election-year show, with the personal encouragement of President Barack Obama, in which they attempted to impose higher taxes on the oil industry as punishment for their profits while gas prices are at an all-time high.

The Senate rejected the bill 51-47. Despite certain defeat, liberals brought up the legislation in hopes of distracting the American people from the fact that President Obama is refusing to take steps that would help increase the supply of oil in the United States, and decrease regulation, thereby bringing down costs for consumers. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) put it, “Day after day after day, Democrats ask us all to come out here, not so we can make an actual difference in the lives of working Americans and families struggling to fill the gas tank, but so we can watch them stage votes for show.”

Heritage expert David Kreutzer points out, most of what the President and his allies call “subsidies” are merely manufacturing tax credits that already put the oil and gas industry at a disadvantage:

[T]he unfair tax break that makes up nearly half of what Obama calls “subsidies” is the manufacturing tax credit. All manufacturers except the oil and gas industry get to deduct 9 percent of their revenues before calculating their tax bills…Though oil and gas producers get the deduction, they are singled out for a lower 6 percent deduction. The oil and gas industry gets a deduction that is only two-thirds as generous as for all other manufacturers …yet the deduction is called a subsidy to oil and gas. The President’s proposal does not eliminate the deduction for any other industry.

To make matters worse, if this legislation had passed and the President achieved his goal of increasing taxes on the oil industry, it would have only served to raise the price of fuel at the pump. When industry is taxed, they invariably pass on the costs to the consumers. But that fact apparently doesn’t matter to the President. His plan, instead, is to take money from the oil industry and hand it to his friends in the alternative energy industry, as he described:

Instead of taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s never been more profitable, we should be using that money to double down on investments in clean energy technologies that have never been more promising. Investments in wind power and solar power and biofuels; in fuel-efficient cars and trucks and homes and buildings. That’s the future.

While the President talks about the future, he glosses over the past. For over three years, he has talked about the promise of alternative energy — and he has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in order to prop up those companies. But those efforts have failed. Solar energy company Solyndra went bankrupt, despite $535 million in taxpayer funding, along with Beacon, Ener1, Abound and others. The New York Times criticized the President’s efforts and concluded that his promise to create five million “green” jobs over 10 years has proven to be nothing more than “a pipe dream.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported, “Meant to create jobs and cut reliance on foreign oil, Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level.”

The President’s crony capitalist devotion to the alternative energy industry — at the expense of energy sources that work — comes with serious consequences. Heritage’s Nick Loris explains:

The reality is that when it comes to energy policy, the free market works. Indeed, the business environment for energy is robust despite seemingly endless forays by policymakers and bureaucrats into the energy industry. But those attempts to control energy markets do have an effect: They result in higher prices, fewer available energy sources, reduced competition, and stifled innovation.

But the President wants even more government involvement in the energy business — on his own terms. In Obama’s FY 2013 budget, he included billions of dollars for a hidden green stimulus — taxpayer money to be spent by the Department of Energy to fund research on technologies that are not commercially viable. In a new paper, Loris identifies $5.5 billion of wasted money that should be cut from the President’s budget, thereby removing the government–and taxpayers–from the role of subsidizing research.

Instead of picking winners and losers, the federal government should let the free market do its job. In addition to getting out of the business of funding research best left to the private sector, that also means ending targeted tax credits for oil, renewables, nuclear, alternative fuels and vehicles, and advanced coal and gasification. The next step is for the federal government to open access to domestic energy sources and end unnecessary, overly burdensome regulations that get in the way of energy production. And the President should approve the Keystone XL pipeline and open up federal lands for energy exploration.
dgnewdis

Obama Slams Supreme Court over Obamacare

The highest elected official in the United States dished out an extra helping of irony yesterday when, in speaking at a joint news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon, President Barack Obama slammed the Supreme Court as an “unelected group of people” who will have turned to “judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint” if they strike down Obamacare.

The President’s remarks imply that the Court, were it to rule the individual mandate unconstitutional, would be acting recklessly in undertaking judicial review of Congress’ unprecedented use of the Commerce Clause to force Americans to buy health care or pay a penalty. The irony in all this is that this President has presided over an Administration that is the epitome of recklessly abusing power, at times in flagrant violation of the Constitution, and has empowered unelected bureaucrats to write scads of new regulations impacting nearly every corner of American life.

Obamacare, of course, is a prime example of that unchecked and multiplying web of the President’s boundless dictates. The law’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (otherwise known as “IPAB”) is packed with unelected bureaucrats who have the power to limit seniors’ treatment options and access to care, essentially ending Medicare as we know it.

On top of IPAB, Obamacare is rife with new regulations, all courtesy of unelected bureaucrats. Professor of law Gary Lawson writes that the implementation of Obamcare “will require many years and literally thousands of administrative regulations, and those regulations will ultimately determine the substantive content and coverage of the law.” In other words, the future of health care in America will not be determined by the people’s elected representatives, but by administrative rulemakings handed down by unelected and largely unknown agency officials. How’s that for a “democratically elected government”?

Obamacare, though, isn’t the only example of the Obama Administration imposing its will via executive fiat. In a new study, Heritage’s James Gattuso and Diane Katz detail 106 new major federal regulations that added more than $46 billion per year in new costs for Americans. And those are regulations enacted not by elected officials who are accountable to voters, but by Washington bureaucrats who can wield their power without having to answer to the people.

While the President is throwing stones at the court, he’s living in a glass house from which he has exercised his tyrannical abuse of power. In January, the President cast aside the Constitution when he illegally appointed Richard Cordray to serve as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, along with three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, all without Senate approval, as the Constitution requires. Former attorney general Ed Meese described the President’s actions as “a constitutional abuse of a high order,” and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said it was “a brazen attempt to undercut the role of the Senate to advise and consent the executive branch on appointments.”

And this is the President who said in December, “What I’m not gonna do is wait for Congress. So wherever we have an opportunity and I have the executive authority to go ahead and get some things done, we’re just gonna go ahead and do ‘em,” irrespective of whether the people’s duly elected representatives have a say in the matter.

Now that the President is seeing the potential for his signature legislation to go down in flames because of its unconstitutional individual mandate, he is lashing out at the Supreme Court. To date, President Obama has enjoyed ruling with impunity and has attempted to carry out his agenda without so much as a hat tip to the Constitution. But come June when the Court rules on Obamacare, the President might finally see part of his agenda stopped in its tracks.
dgnewdis

Harry Reid Opts for Political Theater on Judicial Nominees

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has rightfully earned the reputation of running a do-nothing Senate. More than 1,000 days have elapsed since the upper chamber approved a budget. He’s currently ignoring the House-passed JOBS Act and actively opposing steps to lower gas prices.

Now, in a blatant political stunt, Reid is attempting to blame the Republican minority for the Senate’s failure to confirm 17 of President Obama’s district court nominees.

“Republicans have refused to allow us to even vote — won’t even allow us to vote — on these qualified judicial nominees,” Reid declared. “Republicans have prevented the Senate from doing its constitutional duty and that’s what it is.”

Reid should be commended for his hyperbole.

Let’s begin with the fact that Reid is majority leader, the one who sets the Senate’s agenda and determines the floor schedule. So if Reid is unsatisfied with the pace of progress on Obama’s nominees, then he has only himself to blame.

Conservatives aren’t blocking any votes because they aren’t filibustering. According to statistics compiled by the Senate Republican Policy Committee, Obama has secured approval for 129 district-court judges in three years. That’s more than President George W. Bush’s 120 confirmations over his final four years in office.

There’s also the fact that Obama has sent fewer nominees than Bush to the Senate. In the first three years of his presidency, Bush nominated 215 district court judges; Obama made 173 nominations.

That follows a pattern under Obama. Of the 83 judicial vacancies that currently exist, he’s made 39 nominations, leaving 44 openings unaddressed. And 17 of those nominees haven’t yet been approved by the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee.

That means an astonishing 73 percent of current judicial vacancies are awaiting action from either the White House or the Senate Judiciary Committee. What’s more, it has been reported that the American Bar Association secretly declared a significant number of the president’s nominees to be “not qualified.”

When Reid has brought Obama’s nominees to the floor for a vote, the president has a near-perfect record, including the confirmation of two Supreme Court justices, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) reminded Reid yesterday.

So while Reid would like to paint Republicans as obstructionists, his criticism is misdirected.

Conservatives should use Reid’s stunt to remind Americans about the unconstitutional appointments Obama made earlier this year. In January, while Congress was still in session, Obama ignored the Senate’s advise-and-consent role and purported to unilaterally appointed three people to seats on the National Labor Relations Board and Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Obama’s actions prompted an initial outcry from Republicans. But with few exceptions, they’ve acquiesced. In the two months following Obama’s illegal appointments, the Senate has confirmed seven judicial nominees. That alone is a strong rebuttal to Reid’s bombastic statement that “Republicans have refused to allow us to even vote.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is one of the few conservatives who has vowed on principle to vote against each nominee until the Senate properly considers the four illegally appointed individuals. Lee’s approach is different from a filibuster, which requires a 60-vote threshold. He simply wants a recorded up-or-down vote on each nominee.

“We simply cannot continue to afford nominees near-complete deference until President Obama rescinds his unconstitutional appointments and restores the Senate’s proper constitutional role in the confirmation process,” Lee explained. “I cannot sit idly by and watch as the president openly violates the Constitution and ignores a century of Senate rules.”

Lee spoke at Heritage last month about the long-term consequences, noting that he would be equally outraged if a Republican president was pursuing the same strategy. Watch our exclusive interview.

Reid, however, appears perfectly comfortable with Obama’s approach. He suggested that more illegal “recess” appointments could be coming. He warned, “we will have no alternative but to take action.” Reid’s actions also reveal his blatant hypocrisy. He originated the use of pro-forma sessions to avoid recess appointments under the previous administration, and that’s more proof that Reid’s actions are nothing more than partisan grandstanding.

While Senate conservatives have not filibustered, they would be well within their prerogatives to do so. After all, as Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky noted, former Senator Robert Byrd held up more than 70 nominations and the promotions of 5,000 military personnel over recess appointments that he believed pushed the limits of the recess appointment power, even though the Senate actually was in recess. That’s in contrast to the unconstitutional and invalid act of this president of making recess appointments while the Senate was not in recess.

Now is not the time for political theater. Reid, unfortunately, appears more willing to appease his liberal allies when he should be focusing on issues of job creation and gas prices.

dgnewdis

Hispanics and the 2012 Election

After last week’s Republican primary elections in Wisconsin, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., the 2012 presidential primary season is reaching an inflection point, and eyes are turning toward America’s final decision on Election Day in November. While pundits and pollsters speculate on the horse race and who will capture the hearts and minds of the American people, one segment of the electorate is garnering increased attention — Hispanic Americans.

It is, to be sure, a population that continues to grow in size, voice, and importance. In the 2008 election, Hispanics turned out in force — 9.7 million Hispanics voted, and those numbers are projected to grow to 11.8 million to 12.2 million in 2012, with particular importance in presidential battlegrounds such as Colorado and Nevada, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Last May, President Barack Obama spoke to Hispanic voters in El Paso, Texas, and delivered a highly partisan speech on immigration reform where he chastised his political opponents and their views of border security. In July, the President reached out to the Hispanic community at a gathering organized by The National Council of La Raza, where he again attempted to use the issue of immigration as a wedge issue, casting conservatives as being anti-immigration for their opposition to illegal immigration.

The President’s effort in appealing to Hispanics is not surprising given how that population has suffered under his economic policies. Clearly, he sees there is work to be done in order to firm up his base. From 2005 to 2009, median household wealth among Hispanics fell by 66%, compared with a drop of 53% among blacks and 16% among non-Hispanic whites; the unemployment rate among Hispanics in March was 10.3 percent, compared to 8.2 percent among the broader population; and between 2006 and 2010, the poverty rate among Hispanics increased more than any other group, from 20.6 percent to 26.6 percent, all according to the Pew Hispanic Center. And a majority of Hispanics believe that the economic downturn has been harder on them than on other groups in America. It’s not surprising, then, that Hispanics rank jobs, not immigration, as the number one issue in the 2012 election. Additionally, 56 percent are dissatisfied with the direction the country is headed.

None of this is to say that any one ideology has an iron-clad lock on Hispanics’ loyalty. In fact, among registered Hispanic voters, 35 percent say they’re conservative, 32 percent view themselves as moderate, and 28 percent describe themselves as liberal. What it does mean, though, is that conservatives have a compelling message for the Hispanic community and a case that needs to be made.

And what is the liberal message? They say Hispanics are victims in a racist and unfair society and need government to give them protected status. Is this an inspiring message for the latest group seeking to realize the American Dream and get on the ladder of success?

On the issue of immigration, conservatives have always recognized the need to have more legal immigration. Illegal immigration, though, ignores all the law abiding individuals seeking to legally obtain their citizenship, while others illegally flout the system.

Conservatives must make the case, too, on the issue of jobs, enterprise, and free markets. Like all Americans, Hispanics are suffering high unemployment rates, joblessness that has gone on too long, and stagnant home values. The promise of the President’s big hand of government — the trillion-dollar stimulus, Obamacare, and his mountain of regulations — has not delivered a better life for any American, Hispanic or otherwise. Meanwhile, America’s debt continues to grow, and future generations of all backgrounds will be saddled with the burden of having to cover the costs of the checks the President is writing today. Conservatives, on the other hand, call for a government that lives within its means, empowers the people, and lifts burdens from job creators so that they can grow and thrive.

The Heritage Foundation’s Spanish-language website, Libertad.org, communicates The Heritage Foundation’s policy analysis and research to a Hispanic audience that prefers to read in their first language. Its goal is to educate a growing community about conservative ideals and how limited government — not big government — can help them achieve the American dream.

Hispanics are an important and growing part of America’s fabric. Those who immigrate to the United States are in pursuit of a better life, and they want to be rewarded for the fruits of their labor, just as any other American would. They’re a growing political voice, too, and they should hear the message of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. Those concepts are vital to ensuring a strong future for all Americans, no matter their heritage.

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OBAMA CARE@dannyboys get creative
Obama’s New Gas Price Scapegoat

High gas prices are not a president’s friend, especially in an election year, so it’s not surprising that President Barack Obama is trying his darndest to shift the blame for record-high fuel prices onto something other than his failed energy policies. Yesterday he made a desperate attempt to distract from those failures and redirect America’s gas price rage with a flawed proposal to punish speculators for supposedly driving up the cost of energy.

Speaking from the Rose Garden, the president announced a proposal to spend $52 million to fund increased government oversight of oil futures market trading in addition to harsher civil and criminal penalties for manipulation in energy markets. “We can’t afford a situation where some speculators can reap millions, while millions of American families get the short end of the stick,” Obama said. “That’s not the way the market should work.”

The implication, of course, is that evil Wall Street barons are the reason gas prices are so high, and that they’re walking away with millions at the expense of the rest of the country. (The president even went so far as to invoke Enron.) That simply isn’t the case, and even the president said that “none of these steps by themselves will bring gas prices down overnight” — a point that White House spokesman Jay Carney reiterated in a press conference later in the afternoon when he admitted “it’s hard to know” what the impact of the president’s proposal would be.

Heritage’s David Kreutzer explains that the president’s “the speculators did it” argument is flawed on several levels. If speculators are making unconscionable profits on energy, why are they only doing it occasionally and not all the time? Why are there only speculators in oil, not natural gas (whose current price is about half of what it averaged over the last decade)? And given how the petroleum market works — for every speculator who makes money on a trade, somebody else will lose money — the president’s theory “requires an endless string of chumps to take the other side of the speculators’ deals.” Finally, Kreutzer writes:

For speculation to drive up prices, the speculators must either cause oil production to slow down (which they haven’t) or to pull oil off the market. If the flow of petroleum and its products remains unchanged, the price at the pump will not change. If petroleum is pulled off the market, which can happen even though there are limits to what can be stored, it will eventually come back on the market.

The question becomes, ‘When the oil comes back on the market, is the price higher or lower than when it was pulled off the market?’ The price will only be higher if the amount supplied at that time is lower or the demand is higher. In either of those cases, speculators have helped moderate price fluctuations and will be rewarded with profits. If the price is lower, then the speculators did a bad thing and will be punished by losing money.

In short, the president’s theory that devious energy speculators are at work driving up the price of oil just doesn’t hold water. So what’s the point of all this? Action for the sake of action, in order to provide a distraction from his failed energy policies.

If the president truly wanted to lower gas prices, he would work to increase supply. But when given the opportunity, he just says “no.” He turned turned down the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada. His Administration has made it even harder for companies to explore and extract domestic energy resources by canceling, delaying, or withdrawing a number of lease sales for exploration and development. Meanwhile, huge swaths of federal lands have been put off limits for energy exploration.

The other energy policies he has pursued have either made energy prices higher or proven to be nothing more than abysmal wastes of taxpayer dollars. Take for example new EPA regulations that would effectively ban new coal power plants, thereby increasing the cost of your electricity, or new fuel efficiency standards for automobiles that could add $10,000 to the cost of a new car. Then there’s Obama’s green jobs stimulus, whose poster child of failure is none other than the bankrupt Solyndra solar company that took $540 million of taxpayer funds with it.

In yesterday’s press conference, Carney said, “The president had made clear that there is no silver bullet, there is no pixie dust, there are no magic beans that will — or a 3-point plan that will reduce the price of gas at the pump.” The president is hoping, though, that blaming speculators is all the magic he needs to convince the American people that his energy policies are not a total failure.
dgnewdis
04/19/2012
The Governing Class and Us

In a speech yesterday in Elyria, Ohio — a small town just outside Cleveland sitting at the forks of the Black River — President Barack Obama delivered a politically charged speech in which he hearkened back to the country’s roots, saying that his opponents “don’t seem to remember how America was built.” In his view, taxpayers want their money spent in ways that will help further “the larger project we call America.” In other words, more spending and bigger government paid for with higher taxes.

In a city quite unlike Elyria, thousands of miles west, sprawling forth from the desert just east of Death Valley, officials from this federal government provided the latest example of what happens when the president’s philosophy succeeds — when layer upon layer of government grows so big that it begins to serve the interests of a ruling class, rather than the people from whom it derives its power. Two years ago in Las Vegas, the General Services Administration (GSA) — a little-known federal agency that helps manage other federal agencies — blew through $820,000 in taxpayer funds for a lavish, booze-fueled conference for 300 employees, complete with magic shows, margaritas, and a self-produced rap video making fun of the spending. (It’s worth mentioning that in 2009, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) asked White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for help in encouraging government meetings to be held in Nevada.)

That’s just the giant tip of the iceberg for this wasteful behemoth, as reports have emerged of other taxpayer-financed “business trips,” including junkets to Hawaii, South Pacific islands, California’s Napa Valley and Palm Springs. A hotline has been set up for employee tips on wrongdoing, and this week the House is conducting hearings on the GSA’s gross abuse of taxpayer funds.

Sadly, government waste, fraud and abuse isn’t limited to just one agency. Look no further than the Department of Energy (DOE) whose inspector general said yesterday that he’s overseeing 250 to 300 open criminal investigations into the “entire spectrum of DOE activities,” including 100 reviews involving more than $35 billion in stimulus dollars, according to Politico. In addition, it was reported that the investigators are looking into the “use of thousands of outside contractors, federal money being diverted for personal use, false data in grant and loan applications, conflicts of interest and incomplete and inferior work from DOE weatherization grant winners.” To date, those investigations have led to eight criminal prosecutions and the recovery of $2.3 million.

How commonplace is this waste? Given the sheer size and scope of the government — which is set to spend $6.3 trillion this year — it’s impossible to say. But just as pernicious as the countless billions that have been squandered is the cancerous attitude that has taken hold in Washington and that is metastasizing across the land. It’s one of thoughtless entitlement in which individuals who live off the bureaucratic beast reflexively take and spend more all while doing less, giving no consideration to those who fuel their appetites.

Of course, that mindset is not exclusive to the federal level, and examples abound of government employees taking from the public coffers. Just this week in our nation’s capital, 90 city employees were suspended for receiving unemployment benefits while still holding city jobs, and 40 former city workers cashed unemployment checks that they weren’t entitled to. All told, the city paid out some $800,000 in illegitimate benefits. But it’s not just about outright theft. It’s also about out-of-whack expectations that one is entitled to receive without doing. In Michigan, for example, a public school teacher is advising her students not to become teachers because under a new state law, she won’t be able to retire at age 47 as she hoped.

Contrary to what those on the left might believe, this swollen government is not what was intended.

Flowing from the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution, the federal government was designed on the principle that the ultimate authority of a legitimate government depends on the consent of a free people. As Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III writes in The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, “Nature does not single out who is to govern and who is to be governed; there is no divine right of kings. Nor are rights a matter of legal privilege or the benevolence of some ruling class.” Yet in this government, a privileged few are acting outside those bounds with the expectation that they have the right to do as they please, unfettered by any obligation to the people.

Under the Obama Administration, the situation has gotten worse. The president turns to bigger government and higher taxes as a solution to every problem. On health care, unemployment, education and energy, Obama has reflexively pursued a policy of more is more — more spending paid for with more taxes. This week served up another prime example when the president called for increased regulations and $52 million in spending to combat high gas prices — even though he admitted that the measures wouldn’t have any immediate impact on the price at the pump.

As the people lose control over this unrestrained government, those with the most cash are the ones with a voice. In an interview last week with The New York Times, former Democratic congressman Patrick Kennedy revealed that access to the Obama White House is a “quid pro quo” based on how much money one contributes to the president’s campaign. That news, though, likely is not a shock to an American people who have come to expect the worst, not the best, from Washington. However, that is not how America was built, it’s not the government we must have, nor is it the one that the Founders envisioned!
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Morning Bell
04/30/2012