The theme President Obama gave to his State of the Union address was “An America Built to Last.”
But his vision would be better described as an “An America Built to Be Last.”
As the president asked us to be patient and keep drinking the same kool-aid he’s been serving up for three years, the New York Times reported that the Federal Reserve’s latest assessment of our economy is that “…a full recovery is years away.”
Even his most loyal constituency, black Americans, is losing patience. In Gallup’s latest tracking poll, black approval rate for Obama was 79 percent. This is seventeen points under the 96 percent of blacks who voted for him in 2008, and the first time that black approval has dropped under 80 percent.
The debate will go on for many years about what caused the horrible economic collapse from which we are still trying to recover.
The president continues to sell the idea, which serves his agenda to continue to expand government, that the cause was insufficiently regulated business.
There is much convincing research, in which the president shows little interest, that government caused it, by mandating expansion of low quality mortgages and enabling this expansion because taxpayers ultimately guaranteed these loans.
But economists are still debating what caused the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
What Americans must come to terms with now is what we choose to believe this country is about, why in the past it seemed to work so well, and why today things are falling apart.
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According to the president, everything will be okay if we allow him and his government to continue to build and consolidate power over our lives.
He gave more reasons to grow government and barely lip service to what is tearing our nation apart today and dragging it down.
The major factors driving us into insolvency, spending on entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – and covering the interest on our nation’s debt, which is now surpassing the size of our entire economy, got attention in two sentences in an hour plus long speech.
The unraveling of our social fabric doesn’t seem to bother our president a whit.
You would think our nation’s leader would be concerned that today four of every ten of our babies are born to unwed mothers.
He called on “every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.”
Rather than addressing broken families and why poor kids don’t care about learning, our president thinks he’ll solve this problem by turning our failing public schools into prisons.
It’s nice to know that the president believes what “Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.”
But unlike our president, Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. Lincoln’s agenda was freedom.
According to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 54 percent feel that the Supreme Court should find the Obamacare mandate forcing every American to buy government defined health insurance unconstitutional. Only 17% agree with this flagrant violation of individual freedom.
Now the Department of Health and Human Services has ruled that religious institutions must, like all employers under the new Obamacare law, provide free birth control and sterilization services as part of health coverage.
Catholic universities and charitable organizations are now left with the choice of violating their religious convictions, not offering health insurance and pay millions of dollars in fines, or just shut down.
Catholic charities serve over 10 million of America’s poor.
Diminished freedom and moral relativism is no way out of the morass we’re in.
An America built on government, as President Obama sees it, severed from our roots as a free people under God, is surely an America “built to be last.”
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