It’s a long list.
Add Hillary Clinton’s endorsement of driver’s licenses for
illegal immigrants (“it makes sense”) to a very long list.
The list? A seemingly unending series of bad policy proposals
and loopy values that liberals have championed during the course of
decades. What all of these subjects have in common is that they
upended common sense in favor of a fit of moral superiority and
emotional feel-goodism. They are a history of liberal disasters.
All backfired or were proved dead wrong. Sometimes they were
outright lethal. Collectively they are part and parcel of the real
reason the once honorable term “liberal” has won such disdain from
so many Americans when it isn’t being hooted out of a serious
policy discussion with laughter. And lying just under the surface
of all the current crop of polls that predict a Democrat victory in
the race for the White House is the lurking reality that any
candidate who makes a point of flying the liberal flag stands a
serious chance of being defeated outright. Why, after all, do you
think Senator Clinton hemmed and hawed her way through the driver’s
license issue in last week’s debate?
Here’s just a handful of my personal favorites:
* Forced School Busing
The idea: to raise the education level of blacks by forcibly
integrating urban schools with white kids who lived in “segregated”
neighborhoods. The result? Disaster. School enrollment in Boston
plummeted, the percentage of whites dropping from 65% to 28%. In
one urban area after another across the country where forced busing
was instituted amidst angry turmoil “white flight” to the suburbs
took off, igniting a surge of what liberals now moan as “suburban
sprawl.” And education? A study by the National Institute of
Education could not find a single study that showed black kids were
better off as a result. Prominent liberal advocates, of course,
sent their own kids to private schools. Slowly, painfully, most
busing programs wound to a stop. But the damage — to the kids, to
the neighborhoods and to the cities — was done
* Welfare
The idea: The Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was
established in 1935 with the objective to provide welfare relief
for needy families and their children. The result? It wound up
promoting baby bearing-for-benefits scams, smothered incentive to
work, destroyed marriages and created what came to be called a
“culture of dependency” that helped devastate the family structure,
particularly in the black community. The election of a Republican
Congress in 1994 forced the issue to the front, with Speaker Newt
Gingrich making it point three of the ten-item Contract with
America. Conservatives insisted on a five year lifetime limit to be
on the welfare rolls, and a system that led from welfare to work.
Only after vetoing the resulting bill twice, as his presidential
re-election campaign loomed, did President Clinton sign the
conservative reforms. The consequences were dramatic. Welfare rolls
plummeted by 57%, costs fell significantly, the work requirement
was a success and child poverty rates for African-American families
dropped sharply. But again, the damage done before reform was
considerable.
* Luxury Tax
The idea: Pushed by liberals in a 1990 tax bill, the idea was to
tax big-ticket luxury items and increase government revenue. The
result? Buyers of luxuries such as yachts, jewelry, furs and cars
stopped buying them in the United States. Among others, American
carpenters, electricians, fiberglass and metal workers lost their
jobs. Boat building businesses went bankrupt. And the revenue? A
projected gain of five million in taxes resulted in an actual loss
of $24 million. The luxury tax was finally repealed, but not soon
enough to undue the damage to hundreds of thousands who lost their
jobs or businesses.
* Alternative Minimum Tax
The idea: Enacted in 1969, the AMT was to disallow deductions and
exemptions in computing tax liability. Why? There were 155 — 155!
— “rich” households who were deemed by liberals to have too many
tax breaks, thus meaning they paid little or no income tax. The AMT
would supposedly cure this. The result? The Congressional Budget
Office now says that 34% of taxpayers earning between $50,000 and
$100,000 will have to pay the tax — which is another way of saying
that liberals believe if you earn $50,000 you are rich. That 155
taxpayers has now expanded to 11% of all taxpayers. The CBO also
says that if this is not changed by 2010, nearly every married
taxpayer earning between $100,000 and $500,000 will be forced to
pay the AMT. Predictably, after all the unintended consequences
have kicked in once again, liberals in Congress are now frantically
calling for repeal to avoid the wrath of their constituents.
* Bringing Peace to Vietnam and Cambodia
The idea: Withdrawing from Southeast Asia completely in 1975 would
bring “peace” to the people of Vietnam and Cambodia. The result? A
tsunami of murder, concentration camps and desperate “boat people”
engulfed the area, not only not bringing peace to the region but
resulting in what is now recorded as “the killing fields.” The
subject usually brings forth a deafening if not embarrassed silence
from liberals when they are not busy, in face of massive evidence
to the contrary, in denying the result of their idea
altogether.
* Free Love
The idea: If it feels good, went this old idea that was dusted off
at the end of the 1960’s do it. Promiscuity? No problem. Result?
The AIDS epidemic, a stunning rise in sexually transmitted
diseases. Oops.
* Drugs
The idea: Turn on and drop out. Glamorized by the media, hey man,
this was supposed to be great stuff! Let’s party! The result: when
the party was over for all those cool white kids from the sixties
America woke up to a generation of drug addicts who had either died
of overdoses or gotten hooked for a lifetime on any number of
drugs. It drove up crime rates and the cost of health care, ruining
families and wreaking havoc in the black community. Way to go.
TOO SUM UP: Whether it was education policy, welfare policy,
economic policy, foreign policy or social policy, time after time
after time what became the guiding lights of modern American
liberalism proved to be utter disasters. Obvious consequences were
ignored and unintended consequences were rampant. All too
frequently people who were supposed to be helped —
African-Americans, the poor, the Vietnamese and Cambodians, women,
the young — were severely harmed. Most disturbingly, the
proponents of these policies seemed to simply shrug their shoulders
at the results and move straight on the next disaster.
This time? The idea is to provide a driver’s license to illegal
aliens. In other words, an official government photo ID that can be
used to facilitate everything from voting to travel to obtaining
government benefits for people who aren’t American citizens. Smart,
no?
Liberalism today as a philosophy is burning up faster than
Southern California. Bereft of common sense, wreaking havoc on
whole sections of the American and global population, it is still
being championed by followers utterly oblivious to the consequences
already long on the record.
“I have a million ideas,” Senator Clinton said recently,
thoughtfully adding that “the country can’t afford them all.”
No kidding.
