In a recent interview with Politics Daily, House Speaker San Fran Nan Pelosi complained, “We haven’t really gotten credit for what we have done.” Well, let’s not let the good speaker’s work go unnoticed. Let’s take a look back at what she and her fellow Democrats have done.
For starters they have dragged the recovery to a near standstill. Economists keep pointing out that this is the slowest recovery, aside from the Great Depression itself, in the history of the country. What do the Great Depression and the Great Recession have in common? Massive government intervention.
Pelosi, Obama and the Democrats warned us that if we didn’t accept and pass the stimulus package that spent nearly $1 trillion on temporary employment, our unemployment rate would climb to 8 percent. We passed it and it climbed to 10 percent.
They told us Cash for Clunkers would revitalize the auto industry. Instead it simply moved buyers from the future into the present, and when the program ended, the auto industry nearly ended with it. Paul Krugman of the New York Times is now arguing that the American people are not rejecting the Democrats because their programs didn’t work. The Democrats, he says, are being rejected because they didn’t spend enough money.
Didn’t spend enough money? Consider this: when Nancy Pelosi gave her inaugural address as speaker of the house in 2007, she made a pledge that there would be “no new deficit spending.” Since she uttered those words the national debt has increased $5 trillion. That’s right; in less than 3 years, our national debt has soared from $8.6 trillion to $13.6 trillion.
Let me put it another way. Pelosi is the 60th speaker of the House. She has added more debt than the first 57 combined.
And Krugman thinks they haven’t spent enough. Oh, they’ve spent plenty and that’s what’s driving this voter discontent. Contrary to past electoral cycles and what the Democrats think, the voters ain’t stupid. They may be naïve at times, even delusional when it comes to some candidates, but they can certainly recognize a train wreck when they see one.
What galls Joe and Jane Six-pack is that they have had to reign in their spending. Some of them have seen their homes foreclosed on. Others have lost their jobs. When they look to Washington they see a corps of elite who are immune from job loss and foreclosure. They see a bunch who, instead of pulling in the shutters and weathering the storm, spent like drunken sailors on all sorts of worthless and wasteful programs. At least the drunken sailors were spending their own money.
Had Pelosi and Company not involved the government so much in the affairs of the free market we would be out of this mess by now. That’s something Krugman and the liberals can’t fathom. They believe that the only solution to any and every problem is the government. They don’t believe in the free market. They don’t believe capitalism can prevail best when tinkered with least. They don’t believe a rising tide lifts all boats because they have mentally tied an anchor to theirs and they’re attempting to tie an anchor to us all.
Spending a trillion dollars to repave some roads or build some schools has only created temporary jobs while spending us into oblivion to do it. And the Chinese all too gladly buy our debt as they tighten their grip on our economy.
What’s that you say, Nancy? You haven’t really gotten credit for what you’ve done. Well, let me be the first to point it out.
