By Failing, Progressives ‘Win’
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18 responses to “By Failing, Progressives ‘Win’”
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As someone ostensibly from the left, I chuckled at the headline and the progressive “goals” listed here. Let me share a counterpoint about how the left feels about the right:
If we create a government program to do X and X requires $100 worth of funding to do correctly per year, then the GOP comes in and cuts X’s budget down to $75 and then bemoans the lack of results…well, the conservatives then win by failing government. There’s only one party trying to make government programs work well. The other’s trying to drown it in the bathtub.
Now I don’t think the above is a totally fair take on the right, it is the equivalent of this post from the left’s perspective.
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GOP — “Smaller government is better and we will pass as many restrictive and intrusive laws as necessary to achieve it.”
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So you defend these programs that I have described? I knew someone must.
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And your description is, of course, unbiased too, right?
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I’m not defending the programs, just simply challenging the paradigm that Dems win by having govt fail. I think the case can be made effectively that Republicans win by government failing. Drowning govt programs in a bathtub isn’t something the Dems came up with.
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Sure it is.
First, name a program that was “drowned” by Republicans. I wish I could.
Second, look at the vast expansion of programs and purposeful combination of underestimated costs and short sunset features of the new and expanded programs in Build Back Better.
The new programs are designed to fail at a point at which the current systems they replace and make prohibitively expensive – such as child care – have been driven out of the market and cannot be recreated at affordable costs.
That is the objective truth.
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There aren’t dead govt programs (maybe some old iterations of food stamps, etc.) to note because they just get starved to the point of being ineffective. The goal is to drown them in the bathtub…they haven’t accomplished that anymore than the liberal shave accomplished your stated goals. But see the IRS as the most obvious example that comes to mind for something that’s been starved to the point of being ineffective.
Build Back Better is actually a great example of what we are talking about. In order to do X, Y and Z we probably did need over 3T to do it. These aren’t small problems the government is trying to tackle. However, because of conservatives (I include Manchin in this), the program is scaled back and financial gimmicks are put into place.
I’m a believer in your point about government programs, just not where you choose to put the blame. The partisan narrative doesn’t fit.
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Government spending, as a percentage of GDP, has been steadily rising at the national level and in Virginia for years. The idea that funding has been getting cut is purely a figment of your imagination.
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It’s amazing how federal programs are kept on a starvation diet… yet the size and scope of government continues to grow. I wonder how that works.
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Or, Bezos and a handful of others can win. Your choice.
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“It is the idea of control and the money it brings policy makers from rent seekers rather than the management of programs that attracts them. Plenty of progressives make fortunes playing the strings of the government program violins they have created.”
Fidel Castro died with a net worth of $900m built up while Cuba (the socialist paradise) was mired in poverty.
That’s the way the progressive / socialist elite work.
The progressive / socialist system has three tiers of people:
1. The elite – Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Terry McAuliffe, etc.
2. Useful idiots
3. Schlubs
The elite are the rent seekers and crony capitalists who always get rich skimming off government. The bigger the government the more there is to skim. McAuliffe is a classic example.
The useful idiots are the educated class that the elite persuades to carry the gospel of socialism. They are the elites’ force multiplier. They get their talking points from MSNBC and parrot the party line through any and every available channel (including Bacons’s Rebellion comments). The luckier among them may get crumbs from the elite but most will get trampled by socialism.
The schlubs are the working class and middle class people who suffer through failed big government programs like America’s public education system, They continue to believe the liberal elite’s promises of “free stuff” (amplified by the useful idiots) until the elites have all the “stuff”.
The key, in America as in Cuba, is to make government bigger and bigger so the elites have more and more to steal.
Nancy Pelosi has a net worth of $120m. Recently, a furor erupted when Congressmen and their spouses were found to have traded stock after receiving private briefings on the severity of the COVID-19 virus. Subsequently, Virginia Democratic Representative Abagail Spanberger along with Texas Republican Chip Roy put forth an amendment to restrict the stock trading of Congresspeople and their spouses. Pelosi killed the amendment in the Rules Committee.
Pelosi is an elite rent seeker.
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I missed the part where you applied that same logic to Republicans…
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He is citing human foibles… Republicans are not subject to such as a result of their position in the animal kngdom.
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I have not seen any conservative politicians, on either the state or national level, putting forth serious plans to eliminate any of these awful programs that Mr. Sherlock is convinced are ruining this country. Republicans, i.e. conservatives, were in control of the national government for all but eight years of the first 20 years of this century. I am not going to ask what they actually eliminated, but propose an easier test: What serious efforts were put forth to eliminate any major program? All they did was cut taxes. They cut the revenue, but not the expenditures, then complain about the deficits going up.
I will ask the same question concerning Virginia. Republicans, i.e. conservatives have been the majority party in the General Assembly for most of this century. What major programs did they even try to cut or pare back?
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That’s some lovely politician two step (dodge) you just did there, in reality it’s nothing more than Intellectual Dishonesty.
“A very common dodge is to take the question and turn it around on your opponent or their allies instead of answering it.
This can be accomplished by bringing up an apparent hypocrisy related to the topic, pointing out that an ally of whoever you’re debating did something bad one time, asking your debate opponent an aggressive question, or pointing out an alleged error (real or perceived, big or tiny) in something they said. The point is, you’re doing this instead of answering the question.
This puts the other person on the defensive, and gets you off the hook. Even better: don’t let them finish asking the question before you jump in with your attack. Repeat the same attack again and again if necessary.”
https://www.shanesnow.com/articles/intellectual-dishonesty#articles/what-is-intellectual-dishonesty
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Proof by name, Dick. It’s a mathematical joke.
Theorum: There is no such thing as the smallest positive real value.
Proof: if such a value existed, it would have a name. Since none of the named values, e.g., e, pi, etc., have the property of being the smallest positive real value, it doesn’t exist.OTOH, it is certainly valid in this day of nonexistent things that seem important (CRT) drives politics to ask why things that do exist and seem important don’t.
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Well, it’s official. Democrats run on feel good issues and Republicans run on feel bad issues.
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