With less than 90 days to the election, last week’s Gallup poll had Romney and Obama virtually neck and neck. That’s good news for Romney who has now proven he can go face to face with Obama’s Chicago style political attack machine and thrive.
Combine that with the expected boost challengers often get after their convention and another expected boost from late deciding independents (who typically favor the challenger) and the numbers are shaping up pretty good.
Then there’s Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan. While yet to be completely played out in the polls, it also looks to be a winner and will help focus the election into a referendum on economic liberty – a core concept of American freedom.
In last month’s column I tried to debunk the false notion that government welfare, the cradle to grave protection envisioned by liberals, was somehow the only proper moral choice. In other previous columns I have argued against a nanny state that seeks to control you for your own good. I believe that a majority of Americans recognize these truths and understand that our current path of out of control spending is unsustainable.
But if all that is true, Romney should be a shoe in … right?
Not really.
Too many of those same people who intellectually recognize that something needs to be done will hesitate to elect politicians who are willing to do those things for fear of losing their own favorite government benefit. It’s the same, normal human weakness that causes us, even as individuals, to jump into debt way over our heads, to buy the latest “hot” car regardless of the chains it places on our own future.
When Joe Biden said “they’re going to put you all back in chains,” he was only twisting the truth. Modern slavery is not done with chains – that is too old fashioned. Today it’s done with welfare, dependency and debt and the liberals are the ones forging the chains.
So with human nature being what it is, and Obama’s failed economic policies swelling the ranks of those dependent on government, I worry that too many will vote to keep their government dole rather than vote for those who would free up the economic might of America and put the entire country back on solid fiscal ground.
Can the issues trump 600 dollars a month in food stamps or the political power that comes with overseeing that program? I fear that for many the answer is no.
And then there is this.
Greg Mankiw a professor and chairman of the economics department at Harvard University, recently completed an interesting study where he used CBO figures to look not just at taxes paid, but at taxes paid minus direct transfers received from government. Below is a little of what he discovered:
“For 2009, the most recent year available, here are taxes less transfers as a percentage of market income (income that households earned from their work and savings):
Bottom quintile: -301 percent
Second quintile: -42 percent
Middle quintile: -5 percent
Fourth quintile: 10 percent
Highest quintile: 22 percent
Top one percent: 28 percent
The negative 301 percent means that a typical family in the bottom quintile receives about $3 in transfer payments for every dollar earned.”
And, as George Bernard Shaw once said, “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul.”
Liberals see this too. Georgetown University Law Professor Peter Edelman, an outspoken advocate of the welfare system has said, “As long as people in the middle identify more with people on the top than with those on the bottom, we are doomed.”
In other words, the problem to overcome for liberals is that most Americans still identify themselves most closely with success. A dependency mentality changes all that.
The simple truth is that without serious and immediate intervention our economy will continue to wallow in the mire and government welfare will crash for everyone. And Obama’s plan? Well he hasn’t really defined that yet. He just knows that Romney and Ryan are wrong. How does that possibly help the poor?
Maybe it’s the simple logic left over from my days as a medivac pilot that makes this seem so clear to me. Our cardinal rule was to always determine if the mission could be done with reasonable safety. After all, even if you are badly injured, do you really want to get strapped down in the back of a helicopter that has a good chance of crashing in unsafe conditions? And what good does it do you if they crash on the way to the scene? It just destroys a resource for others who might need it later?
Yet these simple truths can be lost on those that receive 3/4 of their present income from the government. And, if the one out of every three Americans that currently receive either food stamps, federal housing assistance, cash welfare or Medicaid, vote only to keep their current government gifts – regardless of the future costs – Romney starts the race with a serious handicap.
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