No one in modern America has done more than President Obama to bring about inequality. His modern utopia is turning into a queuetopia. Under ObamaCare, Americans have to queue up even to sign up for health care.
We will of course have to stand in ever lengthening lines to get his “navigators” to direct us to a real physician. It’s a queuetopia when the best he can offer in his State of the Union Address is a longer period of time to stand in the unemployment lines. Few of those who have to wait in those lines would prefer a government check to a real job.
Queuetopia was Winston Churchill’s word to describe what the Socialists in Britain had brought to that once-proud island. Churchill also described the difference between free market economies and socialist centrally planned economies: “Capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” As more and more Americans find their health insurance plans being cancelled, plans that 85% of us were satisfied with, our trust in Mr. Obama’s word has dissolved. Now, 63% of Americans tell pollsters they do not trust this president to make the right decisions for our country.
In his much-touted State of the Union Address, Mr. Obama told Congress to give the American people a raise. Do all businesses now belong to Congress? Do all employers have to look to Congress now for every decision they make?
Congress once promised to live under the laws it passed. Now, Members of Congress and their staffs—thanks to the Obama administration’s edicts—will have subsidies paid for by you and me. These subsidies make sure they will not feel our pain when we face premium hikes for health care. No wonder it is said that in government, liberals live and breathe and have their being.
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President Obama deserves the sobriquet of Mr. Inequality because his administration from its earliest days has been taking an axe to the lowest rungs of America’s ladder of social mobility.
We have long known that family—especially the two-parent, married family—is vital for upward mobility. So is regular attendance at a church or synagogue, and working for or starting a small business. These are great generators of upward mobility. We often say this woman or man was “the first one in her family to go to college.” It is understood that families can make all the difference in educational attainment, in celebrating young peoples’ achievement.
This administration has promoted abortion-on-demand since its first days in office. New analysis from Family Research Council’s Dr. Henry Potrykus shows that liberal abortion can cost America more than one hundred billion dollars a year. And he’s been at it for five years.
Single parenthood is one of the most important factors in social mobility. A new study from Harvard confirms this. Yet, Mr. Obama’s Treasury Sec. Tim Geithner virtually challenged Congress to cut Medicaid. He said that 40% of children born today qualify for Medicaid.
This administration does not deplore out-of-wedlock births. The Obama White House invented “Julia,” their iconic cartoon character, who goes through her entire life tied to government programs. In 2012, they announced that Julia had “decided to have a child.” No husband. No marriage. She just decided.
No one wants to return to the Scarlet Letter. Under Obama, however, single parenthood is a status to be encouraged. And the fact that this is a driver for poverty seems not to trouble this administration at all. How else to explain President Obama giving a Medal of Freedom to Gloria Steinem, who infamously said: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Another classic study “Who Escapes?” focused on the importance of church-going for minority youth. This 1986 analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research has never been refuted or even seriously challenged. This analysis showed that young people in troubled neighborhoods still have a chance to escape some worse outcomes if they are regularly involved in their church or synagogue.
The government cannot order young people to go to church or synagogue, but it should give space and respect for what have been called mediating institutions in society. This is especially important for youth being raised in single parent families.
But the Obama administration threatens religious freedom more than any in American history. Whether it’s the Little Sister of the Poor or the Hobby Lobby Corporation and Conestoga Wood Company, these organizations have had to spend precious time and money racing into federal court to defend themselves from the threats to their consciences of HHS Mandates.
Small businesses create most of the new jobs and provide most of the innovation in our economy for new products and services. The Obama administration has burdened small businesses more than any previous administration. Small businesses have been saddled with the burden of ObamaCare, in addition to increased taxes and strangling red tape.
Education, of course, is important to upward mobility. Abraham Lincoln, self-educated as he was, always championed “the right to rise.” But this administration has been singularly hostile to the greatest education reform of them all—parental choice.
No one should criticize President Obama for sending his beautiful and bright daughters to a stylish prep school in Washington, D.C. He also had the benefit of an exclusive prep school education—Honolulu’s Punahou Academy.
What we criticize him for is his administration’s heartless efforts to crush school choice for children from low income households in the District of Columbia. This is unconscionable.
But for Mr. Inequality, it’s policy. So we can consign his latest State of the Union puffery to the slag heap of history. Never before was so much said by so few that was so hurtful to so many.
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