[StBernard] "Goodbye, America!"

[Westley Annis]

A good commentary by Ann Coulter
 


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Goodbye, America!  It Was Fun While It Lasted. 


It's bad enough when illiterate jurors issue damages awards in the billions
of dollars because they don't grasp the difference between a million and a
billion.  Now, it turns out the Democrats don't know the difference between
a million and a trillion.

Why not make the "stimulus bill" a kazillion dollars?

All Americans who work for a living, or who plan to work for a living
sometime in the next century, are about to be stuck with a trillion-dollar
bill to fund yet more oppressive government bureaucracies.  Or as I call it,
"a trillion dollars and change."

The stimulus bill isn't as bad as we had expected -- it's much worse.
Instead of merely creating useless, make-work jobs digging ditches -- or
"shovel-ready," in the Democrats' felicitous phrase -- the "stimulus" bill
will create an endless army of government bureaucrats aggressively
intervening in our lives.  Instead of digging ditches, American taxpayers
will be digging our own graves.

There are hundreds of examples in the 800-page "stimulus" bill, but here are
just two:

 

First, the welfare bureaucrats are coming back.  For half a century, the
welfare establishment had the bright idea to pay women to have children out
of wedlock.  Following the iron laws of economics -- subsidize something,
you get more of it; tax it, you get less of it -- the number of children
being born out of wedlock skyrocketed.

 

The 1996 Welfare Reform bill marked the first time any government
entitlement had ever been rolled back.  Despite liberal howling and
foot-stomping, not subsidizing illegitimacy led, like night into day, to
less illegitimacy.

 

Welfare recipients got jobs, as the hard-core unemployables were coaxed away
from their TV sets and into the workforce.  For the first time in decades,
the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate stopped spiraling upward.

 

As proof that that welfare reform was a smashing success, a few years later,
Bill Clinton started claiming full credit for the bill.

 

Well, that's over.  The stimulus bill goes a long way toward repealing the
work requirement of the 1996 (Republican) Welfare Reform bill and rewards
states that increase their welfare caseloads by paying unwed mothers to sit
home doing nothing.

 

Second, bureaucrats at Health and Human Services will electronically collect
every citizen's complete medical records and determine appropriate medical
care.

 

Judging by the care that the State Department took with private visa records
last year, that the Ohio government took with Joe the Plumber's government
records, that the Pentagon took with Linda Tripp's employment records in
1998, and that the FBI took with thousands of top secret "raw" background
files in President Clinton's first term, the bright side is:  We'll finally
be able to find out if Bill Clinton has syphilis -- all thanks to the
stimulus bill!

 

HHS bureaucrats will soon be empowered to overrule your doctor.  Doctors who
don't comply with the government's treatment protocols will be fined.
That's right!!  Instead of your treatment being determined by your doctor,
it will be settled on by some narcoleptic half-wit in Washington who
couldn't get a job in the private sector.

 

And a brand-new set of bureaucrats in the newly created office of "National
Coordinator of Health Information Technology" will be empowered to cut off
treatments that merely prolong life.  Sorry, Mom and Pop, Big Brother said
it's time to go.

 

At every other workplace in the nation -- even Wal-Mart! -- workers are
being laid off.  But no one at any of the bloated government bureaucracies
ever need fear receiving a pink slip.  All 64,750 employees at the
department of Health and Human Services are apparently absolutely crucial to
the smooth functioning of the department.


With the stimulus bill, liberals plan to move unfirable government workers
into every activity in America, where they will superintend all aspects of
our lives.

 

Also, thanks to the stimulus bill, the private sector will gradually shrivel
and die.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of
servicing the bill's nearly trillion-dollar debt will shrink the economy
within a decade.

 

Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way
they are and ask, 'Why?'  I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why
not?'"

 

The new liberal version is: There are those who look at things and ask, "Why
on earth should the government be paying for that?"  I dream of things that
never were funded by the government and ask, "Why not?"

Ann Coulter
2/11/09