WASHINGTON, DC, Sep 15 -- Thank God for the few remaining centrist and moderate Democrats in Congress. It just may be that they can help keep the progressives in the House and the Senate from dismantling the Republic by helping to save the nation from bankruptcy with their outrageous $3.5 trillion socialist spending bill.
What's wrong with the spending bill? Instead of focusing on real national needs and fiscal prudence, its focus is on a socialist agenda including raising taxes, ideals that fuel inflation, tuition-free pre-kindergarten, and community college, Medicare-for-all, expansion of Medicare benefits to include dental, hearing, and vision benefits, and giving millions of illegal immigrants legal status and a road to citizenship .
Take Joe Manchin, the Senator from West Virginia. As he put it in an opinion article he wrote and published in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month: "Over the past 18 months, we've spent more than $5 trillion responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Now Democratic congressional leaders propose to pass the largest single spending bill in history with no regard to rising inflation, crippling debt, or the inevitability of future crises. Ignoring the fiscal consequences of our policy choices will create a disastrous future for the next generation of Americans."
Manchin concluded his Op-Ed article with a plea to fellow Democrats to slow down, reminding them that their loyalty is to the nation and the Constitution, not the party, and asking for a "strategic pause" in the budgeting process.
The reasoning expressed by Senator Manchin came as close as it could to the reasoning expressed by the staunchest conservative Republican politicians and commentators, folks like Pat Buchanan, who published a new opinion article just yesterday regarding the spending bill. In it, he points out that:
"As of today, however, neither the infrastructure bill nor the $3.5 trillion omnibus bill is a done deal, with the former looking more probable than the latter. But if both are passed, they would create new records and new realities for the U.S. government.
"The federal debt would exceed the U.S. economy for the first time since World War II. The deficits for this year and last, roughly $3 trillion in each year, already exceed any past deficits since World War II
"Passage of the $3.5 trillion omnibus bill would constitute a quantum leap in the number of Americans dependent on the federal government for the necessities of life."
He went on to conclude that "It would be tantamount to an admission of belief that the real engine of economic growth in America, the truly indispensable provider upon whom an ever-expanding share of the population of the nation depend for food, rent, health care, education and cash income, is the government of the United States, not the American free-market system."
In his commentary, Buchanan noted that President Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural speech, observed that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." He went on to note that, in his first inaugural speech, President Bill Clinton agreed with the late Mr. Reagan. Clinton said that "We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there's not a program for every problem. We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over."
But sadly, it appears that it was actually the era of the "loyal opposition" that was coming to an end, ultimately giving in to progressives and socialists in our midst hell-bent on overthrowing the legacy of our Founding Fathers to be replaced by a newfound Marxist ideology. It is an ideology that Bernie Sanders, the self-declared socialist-n-chief of the Senate Budget Committee, and his Congressional cronies seek to embed in the spending bill.
As political satirist Walt Kelly once pointed out in his Pogo comic strip way back in 1970, "we have seen the enemy and he is us."
John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.
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