The Press-Dispatch
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Opinion C-2 Wednesday, November 20, 2013 The Press-Dispatch Observations by Thomas Sowell Tea Party crossroads Third parties have had an unbroken record of failure in American presidential politics. So it was refreshing to see in the Tea Party an insurgent movement, mainly of people who were not professional politicians, but who nevertheless had the good sense to see that their only chance of getting their ideals enacted into public policies was within one of the two major parties. More important, the Tea Party was an insurgent movement that was not trying to impose some untried Utopia, but to restore the lost heritage of America that had been eroded, undermined or just plain sold out by professional politicians. What the Tea Party was attempting was conservative, but it was also insurgent — if not radical — in the sense of opposing the root assumptions behind the dominant polit- A Farm Bill in name only By Ed Feulner To paraphrase a famous Mark Twain quote, suppose you passed a farm bill. And suppose you passed a food stamp bill. But I repeat myself. Hard as it may be to believe, 80 percent of the farm bill being hammered out by the Senate and the House of Representatives is made up not of agriculture programs, but of food stamps. And if that sounds upside down to you, you clearly don't live "inside the Beltway," where Orwellian logic is the order of the day. Why are food stamps rolled into the legislation? They're included "purely from a political perspective," Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, said earlier this year. "It helps get the farm bill passed." At least it used to. House members who had tired of this business-as-usual practice rebelled this year, and managed to pass a version of the farm bill that (unlike its Senate counterpart) took food stamps out. When The Washington Post editorialized about the House bill, it listed this among the legislation's "good points," adding: "[F]or the first time in many years, representatives passed agriculture-support programs separately from food stamps, ending the old log-rolling arrangement between urban and rural delegations that insulated both programs from scrutiny on the merits." Unfortunately, this is Washington, where most politicians do their hardest work insulating programs from scrutiny on the merits. Most Americans, however, favor the House's action. In a "Food Demand Survey" conducted by Oklahoma State University, people asked whether they supported or opposed the following statement: "Separate the food stamp program from the farm bill and debate its merit separately from farm supports and subsidies." Support came in at 73 percent. Separation isn't the only issue though. The entire purpose of separating food stamps from agriculture programs is to achieve real reform. While there's a lively debate going on regarding food stamp reform, that's not the case when it comes to other troubling provisions of the farm bill. As has been the case since FDR was president, agriculture policy is a governmentrun behemoth that would make a Soviet central planner blush. The most expensive single farm program subsidizes about 62 percent of the premiums that farms pay for crop insurance. Yet instead of finding ways to reduce the load on taxpayers, the House and Senate versions would expand this program. Or take the sugar program. Sugar prices have generally been double the world price for decades. It's largely due to the government dictating how much sugar can be sold, and imposing quotas on imports— quotas designed solely to protect the market share of domestic producers. Every sugar-sweetened product costs more to make, adding to everyone's grocery bills. Both the House and Senate Continued on page 3 No spin zone—by Bill O'Reilly The French way Readers of The New York Times must have been confused the other day when the paper ran an article titled "Under Strain, France Examines Its Safety Net." Because the Times is ultra-liberal on its editorial page—pretty much advocating every entitlement possible—the hard news story seemed somewhat out of place. It chronicled the enormous benefits that French citizens receive. Paid child care, free higher education, free health care, a mandatory five weeks of paid vacation, monthly government payments for each child, two years of government-paid unemployment insurance, generous pensions—the list is endless. But there is huge trouble in the socialist paradise. Times reporter Alissa J. Rubin wrote this: "The spiraling costs of cradle-to-grave social welfare programs have all but exhausted the French government's ability to raise the taxes necessary to pay for it all, creating growing political problems for President Francois Hollande, a Socialist. . . . Investors are shying away from the layers of government regulation and high taxes." The French economy is stalled because employers must pay 48 percent of every worker's salary to the government. That means that for every $1,000 a hotel clerk receives in gross pay, another $480 goes from the hotel to Paris. So fewer jobs are created and more French people are unemployed because employers get hammered when they hire anyone. But that's OK for many over there. Rubin's article quotes an unemployed guy named Louis Paris: "You cannot take away guns from Americans, and in the same way you cannot take away social benefits from French people. They won't stand for it." There are about 66 million people living in France; about 314 million reside in the USA. Yet the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama want to create a French-style nanny state here despite the evidence that France is falling apart economically. Does that make any sense? And how can an ultra-liberal newspaper such as The New York Times continue to advocate a nanny state when its hard-news pages are full of stories about Greece, Italy, France and other countries in dire economic trouble because of entitlement debt? The answer lies in crazy ideology. Some liberals (and conservatives on other matters) are so committed to their philosophy that they don't care about reality. As long as the program fits into their utopian vision, they'll support it, no matter what the consequences. Here's backup for that statement. I submit that President Obama and all the Democratic politicians who voted for Obamacare never even read the proposed bill. Nancy Pelosi admitted it. So now, when chaos reigns, they act surprised that things aren't working. There comes a point when ideology has to be put aside and what's good for the country must be embraced. France is a selfish nation that is going down the drain economically because the folks there want stuff and economics be damned. The United States is not far behind. Points to ponder—by Ford Bond A Question of Death over Life Life is a precious commodity. Few philosophers have been able to encapsulate its meaning and its beauty. The Holy Scriptures hint at the inadequacy of words to describe life; James writes in his general epistle, "For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away." Just a few weeks ago, a 32 year old Indiana resident Timothy Bowers, suffered a spinal cord injury due to falling about 16 feet from a tree stand. Bowers chose "to re- move himself from life support systems," and died a few hours later. Bowers was married just last August and just found out that he was to be a father. Few of us will face an end of life issue this acute. Bowers was injured before dark on a Saturday afternoon. Early Sunday afternoon, his family asked that he be brought out of a medically induced coma so that they could give him the bad news and offer him a choice. The Indy Star reported they told him "he had shattered his spine and that he would likely spend the rest of his A woman's perspective—by Mona Charen How to appeal to the 'White Working Class' The spectacularly dreadful debut of Obamacare represents the greatest political opportunity for conservatism and the Republican Party in two generations. Big government stands rebuked. It has overreached, overpromised, and, embarrassingly, failed to deliver. Even if the website's gremlins are banished, and even if Obamacare purrs along like a BMW from now on, voters will be disillusioned. They will be disappointed because the president and his party promised that the program would provide coverage to the uninsured, expand the services provided at no charge to customers, cover those with pre-existing conditions, oblige insurers to keep adult children on their parents' policies, remove lifetime caps, and offer free preventive care. At the same time, no one would pay a penny more) (In fact, everyone's premiums would decline by $2,500.), and no one would lose access to the plan they were happy with or be obliged to switch doctors. Oh, and not a dime would be added to the deficit. It's been said that the Democrats are the Santa Claus party. For generations, they've succeeded politically by delivering benefits and sending the bill to future generations. That is how we've accumulated a national debt that is, according to the commission appointed by President Obama, north of $86 trillion. (Republicans have contributed as well.) If Democrats had structured Obamacare the same way—benefits now, costs put off into the indefinite future—they would not be in immedi- ical trends of our times. Since those trends have included the erosion, if not the dismantling, of the Constitutional safeguards of American freedom, what the Tea Party was attempting was long overdue. ObamaCare epitomized those trends, since its fundamental premise was that the federal government had the right to order individual Americans to buy what the government wanted them to buy, whether they wanted to or not, based on the assumption that Washington elites know what is good for us better than we know ourselves. The Tea Party's principles were clear. But their tactics can only be judged by the conContinued on page 3 ate trouble. But Republicans had succeeded in influencing the political culture enough that Democrats feared they could not pass another new entitlement (even one relying solely on Democratic votes) that did not at least pay lip service to deficit neutrality. That's how they came up with the convoluted tangle of exchanges, subsidies, mandates, taxes, regulations, and Medicaid expansion that is currently nose-diving. Because Democrats attempted to keep Obamacare deficit-neutral, someone had to pay. Voters might have thought that privilege would go only to the rich. But substantial numbers of middle-income Americans are finding that the new law, rather than delivering a benefit, is taking something away from them. Some are losing money, as their premiums rise; others are losing coverage, as their plans are cancelled. Voters may accordingly be newly receptive to the Republican message of skepticism about big government. But an opportunity is not a silver platter. Writing in The American, Henry Olsen scans Andrew Levison's new book "The White Working Class" for clues about how Republicans can appeal to this group. Levison, a liberal, hopes to help Democrats craft their messages, but his research is consistent with that of Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics and others suggesting that white voters without college degrees are more hostile to free enterprise and small government than many Republicans would like to believe. Members of the white working class, Olsen notes, are "suspicious of the idea that business leaders and financial experts have their interests at heart . . . . Well over half believe that business makes too much profit and that Wall Street does more to hurt than to help the economy. Three-quarters believe that a few large companies hold too much power. These voters do see government as a problem, but they also believe that big government is not the only obstacle in their paths." Working class whites strongly oppose free trade, immigration, and even (by 50-39) attempts by government to encourage "traditional morality." Sean Trende calls them Perot voters. They don't support the idea of big government, but they believe government should do more to help the needy, even if it means increasing deficits. Half agree that the poor's lives are hard because government benefits don't go far enough. These voters don't identify with the Republican message of entrepreneurship and "You built it." They are not especially ambitious but instead want a secure job and reliable government services. They're offended when slackers, illegal immigrants and other nondeserving groups get government support (and that includes bankers and big business). This is not to suggest that Republicans simply parrot what voters tell pollsters. There is always room for leadership, persuasion and principle. But Republicans cannot begin to take advantage of the political opening created by the disappointment of Obamacare and craft an effective message of Republican reform until they've shed some outdated assumptions about the electorate. life connected to a breathing machine, unable to walk and never able to hold the baby that his wife was carrying. Then they ask if he "would he rather be disconnected from the respirator." What a question to ask an injured man less than 24 hours after his fall. Medically and ethically, without the ventilator, he would be dead, and it was advance treatment that was keeping him alive. This is the moral dilemma that advance life support creates. What makes me ponder is the brevity of time between the accident and the decision. Fewer than 24 hours had elapsed from the time he was injured to the time he chose death. His wife said, "The last thing he wanted was to be in a wheelchair . . . He would never be able to give hugs, to hold his baby. We made sure he knew that, so he could make a decision." She continued, "Even if he decided the other thing, the quality of life would've been very poor. His life expectancy would be very low. He had such a strong faith that it didn't surprise me (that he made the decision) . . ." He was ready to go to heaven; he was ready for God." "We just asked him, 'Do you want this?' And he shook his head emphatically no." Doctors asked Bowers the same questions and got the same responses. Then they removed the tube. With family close by, he died a few hours later. The question remains is this a good decision? I contemplate if they really asked him to choose death over life i.e. "Even if he decided the other thing, his quality of life would be poor. He would not be able to xyz." Was this a question or a directive? I wasn't there. Medical ethicists remind us that many people who face a severe and life changing injury will say that they don't want to live. This is a normal reaction. In addition, it is common for these same people who desired death to have a change of mind when given time to think about the future and receive spiritual advice and embrace life as it has become. I must ask when end of life Continued on page 3 The P Dispatch ress- MR. AND MRS. FRANK HEURING, PUBLISHERS ANDREW G. HEURING, EDITOR JOHN B. 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