Tag Archives: Government Programs

The Monster Under The Bed

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I guess screaming that President Trump is a threat to our democracy has not worked as well as predicted (we are a representative republic) since he is not the one jailing his political opponents and ignoring the rulings of the Supreme Court, so the Democrats need a new fear. The new monster under the bed is Project 2025. Project 2025 is simply a conservative wish list put out by the Heritage Foundation that would bring America closer to the country our Founding Fathers envisioned.

The Project 2025 website notes:

“Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” offers both specific proposals for addressing every major issue facing the country and a blueprint for how to restructure each agency to solve those issues.

Among the recommendations in this edition:

    • Restore the integrity of the Department of Justice to ensure accountability by giving the FBI a hard rest, ensuring consistent litigation decisions, and enforcing immigration laws.
    • Solidify our border by restructuring the Department of Homeland Security and its priorities in ways that streamline the immigration process, end unclear immigration visas, and create a more secure immigration process.
    • Break up the Department of Education to strengthen education freedom, enhance parental rights in education, and protect taxpayers from student loan “forgiveness.”

Which of those ideas is objectionable?

The Heritage Foundation posted an article about the effectiveness of the Department of Education in 2019. The article states:

Federal government efforts to improve education have been dismal.

The fact that Common Core didn’t catalyze improvements in the U.S. isn’t surprising. Large-scale government programs rarely, if ever, do. 

The sooner we can acknowledge that improvements will not come from Washington, the sooner we’re likely to see students flourishing in learning environments.

…Heritage’s Jonathan Butcher and I detail Yuval Levin’s theory of government failure in “The Not-So-Great Society.” Levin explains that large-scale government programs fail for three reasons:

    1. “Institutionally, the administrative state is ‘dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety.’”
    2. “Culturally and morally, government efforts to ‘rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility [have] undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government.’”
    3. “Fiscally, large-scale federal programs supporting the welfare state are simply unaffordable, ‘dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.’”

Federal government efforts to improve education have been dismal. Even if there were a constitutional basis for its involvement—which there isn’t—the federal government is simply ill-positioned to determine what education policies will best serve the diverse local communities across our vast nation.

The sooner we can acknowledge that improvements will not come from Washington, the sooner we’re likely to see students flourishing in learning environments that reflect their unique needs and desires.

Let’s restore “equal justice under the law,” secure the border, and bring education back to the local district where it can be properly guided. These are not radical ideas, but don’t expect the mainstream media to tell you that.

Anything the government touches gets worse.

To quote Milton Friedman:

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Freedom’s Death Knell

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Author: R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D

There is an old saying “Death by a thousand cuts,” which of course means slowly destroying something by small increments. Well, the Biden regime’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is at it again, diminishing your freedom one regulation at a time. They recently announced new, impossibly restrictive emission standards that will, they hope, force more people to buy electric vehicles (EVs). This, in spite of strong evidence, that less than 15% of the American people have any desire to buy an EV. Dictators do not care what you think.

What is worse, you are already paying for every EV sold in America through subsidies and other government programs and incentives. The Texas Public Policy Foundation reported that as much as $48,000 of the cost of an EV is paid by you the taxpayer spread over 10 years, not the owner. This amounts to $22 billion of your taxpayer money. This is similar to Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, which does not forgive anything; it merely passes the debt onto other taxpayers. That is how Marxism works, and how a regime stays in power, by using government actions to buy votes.

Who is buying these EVs you might ask? Well, it is primarily wealthy Democrats in blue states like California, Washington, New Jersey, etc. The ten states with the lowest EV ownership are red states. See a pattern here of the Democrats rewarding themselves?

The new unattainable emission standards are expected to result in one-third of all cars manufactured will be EVs by 2027 and two-thirds by 2032. Not only will this restrict your ability to find and purchase an internal combustion vehicle, but will dramatically raise the price due to lack of supply to meet the demand. The Biden regime is also extending these impossible emission standards to trucks, including long haul trucks. The American Trucking Association stated that the new EPA standards are “entirely unachievable.” Imagine driving across country in an 18 wheeler and having to stop every 200 miles, find a charging station, and wait several hours before you can start up again. Think what this will do to the cost of moving goods. By the way, the Biden regime’s EPA announced these new restrictions a few days after the Hertz rental company announced they were selling one-third of their Tesla EV fleet because no one wanted to rent them. They also fired the executive who was responsible for the shift to EVs.

So here is the bottom line. This country was founded on freedom and liberty. Conservatives want to preserve our county and its freedoms. Purchasing an EV should be a free choice–not a government mandate. We are in the era of “Big Government” that the Founding Fathers warned us about. Marxism is government control of all aspects of people’s lives. Restricting travel is taking away our freedom one piece at a time. It is past time for all conservatives to band together and insist that the size of the federal government be dramatically reduced. Start by eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency (Dictatorship), the Department of Education, and firing the new 85,000 IRS agents. It is now or never.