Democrats Beat Up Children With Their Nanny State

It seems a tad ironic that Democrats feel justified insinuating Republicans don’t care about children. The GOP invariably embraces a pro-life agenda while Democrats champion the right to choose, something lost on Harry Reid as he warns of the beating our nation’s children are taking because nanny state social programs are suddenly out of commission during the shutdown.

Despite the joy politicians take in recounting anecdotes of the pain children and other vulnerable groups are suffering at the hands of their opponents, the real issue isn’t that budget wars deny social services. Instead, we should question why we allow government to assume the roles of parent, guardian, and breadwinner.

Why won’t the Affordable Care Act save these children?

Democrats indulge their nanny state fantasy, but act like children’s health care is more of a talking point than something they take responsibility for. Children are useful when the party has its hand out and they were handy while the Affordable Care Act was being bulldozed through Congress. Reid charges that his opposition would deny health care to children:

Republicans want to return to the days when even children could be denied life-saving coverage because they were born with a heart murmur or a disability. I am not making this up. That’s how it was before Obamacare.¹

Apparently that is the way it is after Obamacare, too. Budget battles and funding contingencies must not have been taken into account when the bill was drafted:

And thanks to the Republican government shutdown, 200 sick patients – including 30 children – were turned away from a National Institutes of Health clinic that offers life-saving new treatments. Most of the children turned away are suffering from various forms of cancer.²

When our nanny state flounders, children take a beating.

Talking about the “heartbreaking letters”³ he has received about the shutdown, the president used his weekly bully pulpit to tell anecdotes of special needs kids forgotten and Head Start services curtailed. He referred to the shutdown as a farce, but the real farce is how tax dollars are used to cover up for the lack of personal responsibility encouraged by false promises made to the Obama underclass.

With the exception of demanding that higher income Americans pay more taxes, Democrats have never been big on responsibility whether fiscal, social, or personal. The failure of personal responsibility is a big plus for the party because it justifies spending money for their nanny state.

Threatening the future of the nation’s children is popular among public officials who have helped destroy that future (see: Politicians Use Our Children’s Future to Coerce Budget Reform) because no matter what happens, the fallout will always be someone else’s fault. Why does no one question the ethics of Democrats getting Americans hooked on social services by using kids to justify welfare spending and then using their pain for political leverage when those programs get jerked out from under party supplicants as a perfectly predictable consequence of periodic budget wars? Instead of blaming the GOP, we should be looking at those who push dependence:

By snatching food out of the hands of millions of the neediest children and their families. House Republicans are determined to gut the nutrition assistance program, although 9 out of 10 recipients are families with children, senior citizens or people with disabilities.⁴

This puts another battle, pro-life vs. pro-choice, into perspective. Perhaps the Democratic Party’s endorsement of the right to choose is just a failed attempt at fiscal responsibility. Is this a liberal mechanism to trim the budget, making nanny state spending more affordable by reducing the number of beneficiaries?

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