Tag Archives: Iain Duncan Smith

Overlooking The Obvious

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The U.K. Express posted an article yesterday about President Obama’s visit to the United Kingdom. The article included some interesting observations:

The article reports:

But senior Tory Iain Duncan Smith said it was “strange” for the president to advocate a surrender of power to Brussels that Americans would never accept.

The former Cabinet minister said: “I have a huge amount of respect for America’s unrelenting commitment to the patriotic principle of self-governance.

“President Obama and his predecessors have ferociously protected the sovereignty of the USA and I wish we could say the same of our leaders.

“What I do find strange is that he is asking the British people to accept a situation that he patently would not recommend to the American population.”

The former Cabinet minister said: “I have a huge amount of respect for America’s unrelenting commitment to the patriotic principle of self-governance.

“President Obama and his predecessors have ferociously protected the sovereignty of the USA and I wish we could say the same of our leaders.

“What I do find strange is that he is asking the British people to accept a situation that he patently would not recommend to the American population.”

The former Cabinet minister is overlooking one basic fact. Regardless of whether or not President Obama was actually born in America (just for the record, I believe he was), he does not represent the basic values of America. President Obama does not have a lot of respect for American sovereignty. He has allowed the United Nations to dictate American policy regarding refugees from Syria, and he has supported United Nations treaties that would clearly undermine American sovereignty and the U.S. Constitution. I think his stand on the United Kingdom and the European Union is perfectly consistent with his core beliefs. Because of the legacy of his father regarding the British, he sees both Britain and America as imperialistic countries. There is nothing in his background that has taught him to respect or value the sovereignty of western countries.

This is another example of President Obama moving away from the friends of America. He has not treated the British with the respect they deserve since he took office. Hopefully the next American President will repair the damage President Obama has done to our relationships with our allies.

The Unintended Consequences Of Accountability

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This article has two sources, an article in the U.K. Telegraph posted on March 30 and an article posted at Real Clear Politics yesterday.

As the British government struggles to keep pace with the expenses involved in providing a safety net for its citizens, some government programs are being phased out and combined with other programs. One of the programs under scrutiny is the sickness benefit program.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary. is attempting to combine dozens of different out-of-work benefits into a single payment with the aim of ensuring an individual is always better off working than collecting benefits. As part of that process, there is an assessment of the people on the sickness benefit program to determine whether or not they are fit to work. Some 878,300 people on that program decided to come off the program rather than submit to the assessment. We need to learn from this experience.

The article at Real Clear Politics looks at disability payments in America:

In 1960, when vastly more Americans were involved in physical labor of some kind, 0.65% of workforce participants between the ages of 18 and 64 were receiving Social Security disability insurance payments. Fifty years later, in a much healthier America that number has grown to 5.6%.

In 1960, 134 Americans were working for every officially recognized disabled worker. Five decades later that ratio fell to roughly 16 to 1.

I am sure that in most cases disability payments are warranted. In fact, I am sure that everyone who is disabled does not necessarily look disabled. I can think of one example in particular where a person received severe neck damage in a work-related car accident and on some days appears to be perfectly normal. On other days, that person can barely move. Unfortunately, there is no way of predicting which days are which. However, I do think there are people among us who would rather ride in the wagon than help pull it. The problem is that at this point we have too few people pulling the wagon and too many people sitting in the wagon.

Government workers have no incentive to cut disability payments–their jobs depend on administering these programs–if you cut the programs, you might have to cut the number of administrators. Government spending has become like the hamster on the exercise wheel–it keeps moving (and growing) but nothing is actually being accomplished.

If we are serious about ever balancing the federal (and states) budget, we need to take a serious look at who is receiving payments from that government and what the basis for those payments is. Until we are willing to help people enter the workforce instead of helping them enter generations of dependency on government, we will not solve our financial problems.