Reading this will make you angry if you earn minimum wage, if you are an Illinois teacher waiting for retirement, a student counting on loan forgiveness, a bottom-feeding activist or organizer, or an illegal immigrant convinced you deserve everything. It should. Your president has pledged that America made a bargain with the people.¹ It owes us something. No one told you that the bargain depended on his party’s ability to maintain government giveaways in all sizes and shapes and that when those giveaways stop, the bargain swirls down the drain and the worst fear for Democrats comes true. Forget everything you hear from our Democrat in Chief about America’s defining challenge. It isn’t raising the lower classes with other people’s incomes, no matter how much anger and resentment he tries to arouse:
The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income — it now takes half. Whereas in the past, the average CEO made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s CEO now makes 273 times more. And meanwhile, a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country.²
The real challenge is freeing people from the absurdist idea that Americans and non-Americans alike are owed something simply because they live and work, or worse, because they want what they don’t have and assume government giveaways should provide it for them. For example:
Democrats continue to reassure minimum wage workers walking out on their jobs that they deserve higher pay regardless of what they bring to a business.
Illinois public employees in shock because their unions overhyped the damage inflicted by a minimalist pension reform bill are being harangued about the unfairness of trimming retirements taxpayers cannot afford, a benefit non-government sectors stopped providing years ago.
Illegal immigrants not only believe they deserve the minimum wage even though they can’t legally work, our government keeps telling them they are also entitled to rights and benefits enjoyed by citizens.
Despite many of us remembering years of cutting back to pay off student loans, the emphasis now is for reduced payments and loan forgiveness in as little as 10 years for those entering public service.
Homeowners who believed they deserved the American Dream of a home and didn’t read the fine print in their mortgages found out what that dream could cost and turned to the government for bailouts.
Obamacare couldn’t find enough congressional votes to pass a public option, but we still have Medicaid, and residents of states buying into the expansion are going to expect health care we can’t afford to deliver unless we punish taxpayers with their state and federal tax bills.
If these and all the other giveaways added to federal spending were to disappear, Democrats’ worst fear would materialize: a government stripped to what the founders envisioned with nothing to offer in exchange for votes. With a new year, midterms, and a big budget, debt, and spending battle just around the corner, what government will give to the people expecting Obama’s American bargain is up for grabs. “Making sure our economy works for every working American.”³ has nothing to do with initiative, hard work, or growing the economy. It has everything to do with convincing Americans that the government giveaways Washington has pledged are the only way they can get by because the cards have been stacked against them. How profoundly anti-American.