Everyone knows Congress passes bills that are signed into law by the President. By 2012 everyone should also be well aware of the even more important role unelected bureaucrats at various and sundry Federal agencies play in actually executing laws as policy.
Conservatives (and us Libertarians) should endeavor to make sure everyone knows that Washington spending has increased by 30+ percent since Obama took office, and that number may well be 40+ percent by 2012. As we saw during the debt ceiling kerfuffle, any attempt to cut spending in a meaningful way will be met with images of Grannie going over a cliff in her wheelchair. In just two years Democrats have permanently raised the federal budget. The thought of going back to the austere days of George W. Bush’s 2.9 trillion dollar budget (and “historic, unprecedented” $800 billion dollar deficit) in 2008 is a pipe dream.
Welcome to your new normal. The baseline is set and will never go down. Obama and Co. have managed to normalize trillion dollar annual deficits. They’re ready to spend more, too.
Over the weekend there were two posts at the Corner that touched on two stories with a couple of common veins. In New York, Nanny Bloomberg’s attempt to prevent food stamps from being used on soda was nixed – at the behest of the Congressional Black Caucus – by the Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile in Detroit the same DOA is spending $4.5 billion to provide school lunches to “ALL — rich and poor, needy and non-needy — of Detroit’s 65,800 public school-students. (Detroit is one of three pilot programs starting this month for a free-for-all that will ultimately cover similar districts nationwide.)”
Common theme one: Department of Agriculture.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, an arm of which gets money from the soda lobby, said the plan would stigmatize the poor.
But the program’s logic is even more insane than the price tag: The administration says it is giving rich kids free food to eliminate the shame that less-fortunate students may feel in receiving free food. We’re not making this up.
“We’ve worked very hard to reduce the stigma,” Aaron Lavallee, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman, told the Detroit News. “We’re seeing a lot of working-class families who’ve had to turn to free school meals to feed their children.”
Common theme two: Department of Agriculture normalizing government hand-outs by reducing the stigma.
Just ask Merriam Webster. The first thing he has to say about stigma is:
Examples of STIGMA
- There’s a social stigma attached to receiving welfare.
Must be an archaic usage. There’s not much stigma attached to anything nowadays. Frankly I want able bodied Americans who are being supported by working people to feel a bit of stigma. Call me heartless. Or racist. But is it wrong to feel a little shame might just help motivate someone to try harder to be a productive member of society?
Easy for me to talk since I’ve never been there, right? I’m not saying we should do away with welfare. We shouldn’t try to remove the stigma either, though. It’s possible to be thankful and shameful at the same time. I don’t want people starving, just desperate to find a job. Any job. If there aren’t jobs there then come on down to Texas and find one. Just not Dallas. It’s already too damned crowded here.
And just the conservatives. We don’t need a bunch of damn Democrats coming here and turning it into another California or Illinois. For the love of God not Illinois.
While there’s nothing illegal to what the Ag Department is doing – they’re spending the money allocated by Congress as they see fit – they’re just stepping over a moral boundary. I’m not saying it’s post hoc ergo propter hoc, but erasing moral boundaries in one area sometimes leads to horrific overstepping of boundaries in others.
A woman encouraged her husband to have sex with a 12-year-old girl so that she would get pregnant and they could claim extra cash benefits.
Alicia Bouchard even sat and watched while her 26-year-old husband had sex with the underage girl at their Florida home.
According to an arrest warrant, the 41-year-old wanted the girl to fall pregnant so that she and her husband would have extra income from state benefits.
People attempting to impregnate 12 year old girls for more welfare. Breed yourself rich. I swear to Christ. We are doomed to an Idiocracy-like future. Too bad grannie didn’t kick off so they could keep her corpse in the back room and the Social Security checks coming or this whole sorted affair might have been averted.
I saw that in Greece unemployment is 20 percent with youth (under age 30, IIRC) at 30 percent. Greek unions and labor law makes it almost impossible to fire or lay-off a worker therefore companies don’t hire until a current worker retires. Think Obama’s Department of Labor would have a problem with policies like that? Are there enough fat cats we can tax to support 20-30 percent of the US workforce on welfare indefinitely?
That is the path we’ve chosen. I’m cooking up something on government as insurance for Americans who make poor decisions; other than as an agent of massive intergenerational wealth transfer, that is. Our only hope is growth and the only hope for growth is the amount of government we had back in 1998. And that’s not happening. Better to go out in a supernova than endure any fiddling with our sacred compact.
Our stigma has been chewed up by a liberal dogma. The only stigma left is not wanting to spend enough of somebody else’s money or meddle in their personal and professional affairs. The bureaucracies are entrenched and newly empowered under Barack Obama. Embrace your new normal and pay no attention to the person buying soda with your money.
