A column by David Brooks of the New York Times appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer today and since it was quite insightful, I’d like to quote pertinent parts here. Brooks opines that the Congress is “led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, and their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.”
He describes their agenda thus far as a “leftward surge” and says it has had three parts. “First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money.”
The second part according to Brooks was the Pelosi/Obama budget, which “is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion.” (That’s on top of the existing debt which is already far too large by the way. )
The third part is healthcare. He says that “the Democratic healthcare bills do almost nothing to control healthcare inflation… The House bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit in the first three years according to the Federal Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8% payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France.”
I would add one other recent liberal agenda item which the House voted on recently to Brooks’s list of the “leftward surge” in Washington, and that’s the House’s wrong-headed passage of the Cap and Trade (Cap and Tax) bill. Foisting a huge new energy tax on the American people which will drive up the cost of everything we buy, and send jobs overseas, is another example of the liberals running wild in Washington.
Brooks ends his column by making two final observations. First, that even though “Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney… Democrats have allowed her policy values to carry the day.” And second, by noting that the more moderate Democrats in Congress are usually “bought off by the leadership at the end of the day.” That’s a real shame, because the American people could be suffering the consequences of bad decisions being made in Washington right now for a long time.