By Rick Manning
The onslaught of the expansion of government by the Obama Administration continues with almost daily announcements of new challenges to the liberties of Americans.
Between the NSA listening in on our telephone calls, the EPA’s assault on the major energy sources that drive our nation, the constant attempts to raise taxes, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Obamacare, and the common core school curriculum that is more indoctrination than education to name just a few, there is a full scale assault on things that Americans once took for granted.
The government continues to release reports telling us the economy is okay, and the stock market is at all time highs, yet according to realclearpolitics.com polling averages 70.9 percent of Americans believe the nation is going in the wrong direction.
Is it the deluge of issues coming from D.C. that has these Americans feeling they are losing their country or is it something else?
Perhaps it is time to throw out the stock market as an indicator of economic health in the country.
After all, Breitbart.com reports that a record 47 million people received food stamps every month for the past thirteen months. That is just under one in six of every single American reduced to needing food assistance. A nation built on self-reliance has been reduced to having its people dependent upon taxpayer handouts.
Wages are stagnant, and Americans are dropping out of the workforce with the labor participation rate at its lowest levels since 1978.
Big businesses and labor unions work their political connections to get temporary exemptions from the devastating impacts of Obamacare on the cost of health insurance, while the rest of America remains stuck with the high costs of the law.
Americans are tired of the broken big government promise, but they really don’t know what to do about it. The presumed limited government political party leadership has proven itself either unwilling or impotent in the face of freedom limiting, job destroying policies that only make sense to Wall Street bandits whose only concern is whether the Federal Reserve is going to keep pumping $85 billion a month into the system to keep the market bubble inflated.
Our leaders urge kids to go to college to get a job of the future, and when they graduate burdened by massive debt, many of the jobs they find available never required college at all.
Is it any wonder why the people are unhappy?
The economy has been stimulated by those who believe in Keynes, QE’d by the friends of Friedman, and no matter how much the government intervenes, things don’t improve.
Perhaps in the next year, the American public should look for a new kind of representative, one who doesn’t tell them all the things that he or she is going to get the government to do for them, but one who talks about stopping the government from doing so much to them.
It is time to just say no to big government so Americans can thrive once again, because Obama’s big government/big corporation driven new normal of declining wealth for the average American needs to be rejected, so the American dream for the rest of us can be restored.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.
