It's Not About Philosophy; It's about Common Sense

From Big Government:

It’s Not About Philosophy-It’s About Common Sense by Thomas Del Beccaro


*Recently Jonah Goldberg as the question: When Did the Rules Change? Today, I offer this explanation . . .



American politics today is said to be rather partisan. Perhaps we do live in what could be called The Divided Era of American politics. Although, it should be noted that we have lived in far more partisan eras such as the time Federalists and Anti-Federalists engaged in a far more fearsome battle than today with noble results. But even if we do live in The Divided Era, perhaps the most important dynamic driving American politics today is not a philosophical divide between Republicans and Democrats, or between Conservatives and Liberals. The dynamic driving politics today is the simple belief that government is so far out of control as to completely defy common sense.







Recently, I spoke to someone who told me he was a Democrat years ago when he lived in Pennsylvania. Until recently, he thought of himself as a moderate Republican. Now, however, he has been having thoughts that he is a “right winger.” I asked him what in particular was making him think that way. The answer was simple: government spending beyond rationality.



Note the issue driving him was not a fight over spending priorities as we used to know. It was not a question of guns or butter nor a tension between education funding and law and order. His concern was that government spending was so far past what common sense could justify. Countless Americans think just like that former Democrat turned potential right winger because of examples like this:



•Obama says that he inherited a trillion dollar deficit (not true) – yet he forged ahead with a trillion dollar “stimulus” spending bill which featured far more spending than stimulus.

•One day Obama says we must get spending under control yet the month before he pushed a new trillion spending program – the Health Care Bill.

•Nancy Pelosi claiming that unemployment checks create jobs.

•Nancy Pelosi claiming that millions of dollars for condoms should have been in the stimulus bill because that spending would have a stimulus effect.

•Nancy Pelosi demanded the passing of the Health Care Bill so we could “see what was in it,”

•Obama saying “my policies that got us out of this mess,” and, of course

•Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see adding to a national debt already 5 or 6 times larger than yearly federal revenue.

On a more local note of irrationality, there is city manager of a town of 36,000 people near LA making $800,000 per year while the police chief of that same town makes nearly 50% more than the police Chief of Los Angeles – a city more than 100 times larger! When asked about it, the City Manager “was unapologetic, saying he could earn just as much in private business.”





There are countless – literally countless – more examples of government spending that average Americans simply can no longer fathom. To them, such spending does not raise questions of political philosophy but, instead, physical sanity. And so for them, a trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there has become real money. So real, that recently, government debt topped a poll as the number one concern.



That sentiment is even more magnified than usual because so many are amidst their own struggles. As such, they are far less sympathetic to the cries of more government by a government whose deficits are now destroying the wealth of average Americans in the form of lost home values, impending taxes and lost stock values. Voters see and understand the correlation between debt and prosperity because it simple common sense that you cannot spend far more than you have for very long. Government’s insistence to the contrary for so very long and in such great dimensions has been in defiance of common sense and defiance of the people’s trust.



In sum, 2010 is shaping up to be a year that Lincoln predicted would occur when he said that “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Fortunately, there is just enough common sense around to know just that.