The Wealth Of Poverty

      The class warfare rhetoric that the Obama administration and the rest of the Democrat party have inundated this country with for the last four years, belies a progression towards and even more sinister Leftist agenda. They are creating a society where the poor are given the trappings of wealth while at the same time the wealthy are depleted of more and more of the fruits of their labor. This causes a general decrease in the incentive to work hard and be successful because it has become more likely that one will receive the same benefits if they don't.
     If some readers doubt what I say, one only needs to look at government programs for the poor which use taxpayer money to provide cell phones, air conditioning, car repairs, child care, food and housing in addition to a myriad of other benefits. In fact, the federal government now spends almost 80 billion dollars a year just to feed people through the Department of Agriculture's multiple food stamp programs. And this figure has almost doubled in the last four years under the Obama administration. The problem has grown to such epic proportions that entitlement spending now constitutes two thirds of the entire federal budget. James Madison is roiling in his grave over the complete bastardization of his beautiful document that served this country and the world well, up until the last few decades.
     James Madison, primary author of the U.S. Constitution, and the other Founding Fathers created a society where people could succeed or fail on their own, without the shackles of a bloated and out-of-control central government. Today the federal government has become so consuming and powerful that not only does it gobble up almost a quarter of the nation's total output, but it dictates to businesses like banks how they should operate. The two thousand page financial regulation law, known as Dodd/Frank, places thousands of onerous regulations on the financial industry for the purpose of making sure that no institution grows too large. And the codification of bailouts within the legislation protects too-big-to-fail institutions from the consequences of their bad decisions. The new law, which is still being written two years after it was passed, is responsible for hundreds of small community banks having to shut their doors as a result of not being able to afford the compliance costs.
     Government intrusion into the banking industry via regulations has become so cancerous that financial companies now spend 1.2 man hours ensuring compliance with federal regulations for every man hour they spend on their actual business functions. Many industries are similarly regulated by people who know little or nothing about the businesses of which they have become defacto chief operating officers. These frivolous government regulations cost businesses money and make it less likely for entrepreneurs to even start a business. And for each regulation there is at least one bureaucrat charged with enforcement who sucks up taxpayer money in the form of salary and benefits.
     So what, you may ask, does over-regulation have to do with the wealth of poverty? Plenty. The larger government is, the more impoverished the people are. There are no examples in history where a large and all-consuming government produces a thriving and prosperous society. This is the result of government's innate inability to create wealth and its ever present corollary of wealth destruction. Don't get me wrong, I think a certain amount of government is necessary, but the founders knew that the wealth confiscation by government had to be limited for the society at large to have the best chance of prospering. Sadly, today's Leftists who control the government and much of our culture have traded prosperity and the morality of capitalism for their own twisted definition of equality and fairness.