OCTOBER 17, 2008 A Liberal Supermajority Get ready for 'change' we haven't seen since 1965, or 1933.
If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.
Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.
The nearby table shows the major bills that passed the House this year or last before being stopped by the Senate minority. Keep in mind that the most important power of the filibuster is to shape legislation, not merely to block it. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.
- Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.
Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.
The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.
- The business climate. "We have some harsh decisions to make," Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the "Issues and Legislation" tab on Mr. Waxman's Web site for a not-so-brief target list.
The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.
- Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is "card check." Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The "Employee Free Choice Act" would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.
The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union "contract" after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.
- Taxes. Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for "the rich," substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.
- The green revolution. A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority. Cap and trade would hand Congress trillions of dollars in new spending from the auction of carbon credits, which it would use to pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. Huge chunks of GDP and millions of jobs would be at the mercy of Congress and a vast new global-warming bureaucracy. Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.
- Free speech and voting rights. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the "community organizer" left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress -- Democratic, naturally.
Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.
- Special-interest potpourri. Look for the watering down of No Child Left Behind testing standards, as a favor to the National Education Association. The tort bar's ship would also come in, including limits on arbitration to settle disputes and watering down the 1995 law limiting strike suits. New causes of legal action would be sprinkled throughout most legislation. The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the end of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts. Google and MoveOn.org would get "net neutrality" rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time.
It's always possible that events -- such as a recession -- would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn't turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama's agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton's was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore's BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.
In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today's left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for "change" should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.
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JRaup
October 19, 2008, 2:00pm
Guest User
This is not 1965 or 1933. If the Dem's get their "super majority," they will go one of two ways: 1. They will pass everything they possibly can as quickly as they can; 2. They will temper their agendas, with an eye on holding on to power. If they go route 1, the back lash against them will be huge. They will have at most two years to achieve everything they want. If they go route 2, they buy themselves two more years, and then have to make one hell of a case to stay as the supreme party. Now this is all dependent upon the rest of the universe just stading by, and no major changes, or some major crisis.
It certainly isn't 1965 by any measure. That was the most gut-wrenching emotional election of our times. It might be 1933 in some ways. When FDR came to office he was confronted with a depression that his predecessor gave almost no notice to, and one startling fact: 95% of the money in the country was in the hands of 200 individuals. Not 200 companies, or 200 of anything else, but 200 people. That is how bad things were.
About two weeks ago we entered into a new economy, like it or not. What we did, in fact, was to catch up to old Spain. That country went from being a premier world power to second rate in just ten years, and the reason for that is simple - all they did with their wealth is 'buy,' just as we have done for the last two decades. So what's that mean?
A long time ago I took a course in economics, which had nothing to do with my degree, but was a 'mandatory-elective' thing - where they shore up a failing department of the college by forcing people to take the courses? About the very first words out of the instructor's mouth were, "There are three ways to create national wealth: you steal it, you dig it out of the ground, or you make something with what you dig out of the ground." Simple as that. Spain had grown rich through theft - they plundered the world until there was no more plunderable world left. We took a different route - we catered to a global market. We sought it out, and sold to it, and when we couldn't sell any more goods to it, we sold our technology. In doing so, we gave away jobs, and disenfranchised our greatest asset - the blue-collar worker.
For a bunch of years, like Spain, all we've been doing is buying, and mostly on credit. We've spend trillions off-shore. In doing so, we've forgotten some really important stuff, and now we're about to pay for that memory lapse dearly. This country got great, and could be great again, if we fell back to fundamentals. We used to make for ourselves, and if someone else wanted some, and we had the capacity, then we'd sell them some. We understood that if you bought a product completely made here it generated eleven times the cash-flow of the purchase price (a product made off-shore generates 1.1 times the purchase price of cash flow). We have some choices now, and those choices will impact us as a people for decades to come. We can either tuck it in, absorb the heavy hit, and go back to 'making for ourselves,' or we can continue to slide. We can see that once again 95% of our wealth is in the hands of 5% of the population and do something about it, or we can be left out. That's how things are now. That's where we are now. Those are the decisions we have to make now. Go decide. It's that simple. Wal-Mart $10 back-packs or Tough Traveler for $80. Wal-Mart generates $11 in cash flow, and Tough Traveler (assuming all their materials are made on-shore) generates $880. It's our time, it's our choice, and it's rocks or hard spots.
It certainly isn't 1965 by any measure. That was the most gut-wrenching emotional election of our times. It might be 1933 in some ways. When FDR came to office he was confronted with a depression that his predecessor gave almost no notice to, and one startling fact: 95% of the money in the country was in the hands of 200 individuals. Not 200 companies, or 200 of anything else, but 200 people. That is how bad things were.
About two weeks ago we entered into a new economy, like it or not. What we did, in fact, was to catch up to old Spain. That country went from being a premier world power to second rate in just ten years, and the reason for that is simple - all they did with their wealth is 'buy,' just as we have done for the last two decades. So what's that mean?
A long time ago I took a course in economics, which had nothing to do with my degree, but was a 'mandatory-elective' thing - where they shore up a failing department of the college by forcing people to take the courses? About the very first words out of the instructor's mouth were, "There are three ways to create national wealth: you steal it, you dig it out of the ground, or you make something with what you dig out of the ground." Simple as that. Spain had grown rich through theft - they plundered the world until there was no more plunderable world left. We took a different route - we catered to a global market. We sought it out, and sold to it, and when we couldn't sell any more goods to it, we sold our technology. In doing so, we gave away jobs, and disenfranchised our greatest asset - the blue-collar worker.
For a bunch of years, like Spain, all we've been doing is buying, and mostly on credit. We've spent trillions off-shore. In doing so, we've forgotten some really important stuff, and now we're about to pay for that memory lapse dearly. This country got great, and could be great again, if we fell back to fundamentals. We used to make for ourselves, and if someone else wanted some, and we had the capacity, then we'd sell them some. We understood that if you bought a product completely made here it generated eleven times the cash-flow of the purchase price (a product made off-shore generates 1.1 times the purchase price of cash flow). We have some choices now, and those choices will impact us as a people for decades to come. We can either tuck it in, absorb the heavy hit, and go back to 'making for ourselves,' or we can continue to slide. We can see that once again 95% of our wealth is in the hands of 5% of the population and do something about it, or we can be left out. That's how things are now. That's where we are now. Those are the decisions we have to make now. Go decide. It's that simple. Wal-Mart $10 back-packs or Tough Traveler for $80. Wal-Mart generates $11 in cash flow, and Tough Traveler (assuming all their materials are made on-shore) generates $880. It's our time, it's our choice, and it's rocks or hard spots.
Good post Ock. And as simply put, it will be a hard sell for all of us. First, there are little products made in this country to purchase. Even our food. And yes these products are ususally at a higher cost as compared to our out sourced products.
Second, it is almost amusing, that in this day and age, where everyone can shop at discount stores and no-label grocery stores, we yet are a country drowning in debt. Credit cards are king. People are in debt, losing homes, filing for bankrupcy. And yet, the idea sold to us that out sourcing would bring us cheaper products has clearly given the people an appetite for even more. So as a society, we continue to buy the foreign made products, making foriegn countries richer while we go further and further into debt.
We, this country, gave away our successful industrial nation (blue collar) to foriegn countries which have become rich while we could slowly decline into poverty.
With all of this said, we still have a government, at all levels, with an even larger appetite to tax and spend at our expense. Government programs and hand outs are plentiful for the taking. Our tax dollar is being spent on convention centers, wooden arrows and other nonsense that is clearly not the job of government to provide. The government appears to be taking over where private enterprise left off. Not a good thing.
The only choice I see for us...the average everday Joe, is to do what we would like our government to do....STOP SPENDING. Stick to thenecessities. Stay with in our personal budget, whatever it should be. Don't depend on others pay for it, like our government does to us.
We clearly have but ourselves to depend on.
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Thank you Ockham----it's alot more simple than we make it......I just hope we dont put all our hope into a Robin Hood.......
we are Pioneering Americans and most important thinking humans with the needs to eat,sleep,drink, procreate etc......let's see if us sheeple look up away from the 'pirates of greed'.........time to find out what we are made of......
as for the 'elected president' (whom ever that may be)----THEY DONT PUT FOOD ON OUR TABLES.......it's the fundamental foundation we seek and it wont be a trickle down effect.......
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
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