By John J. Duncan Jr.
Democrats all over the country are gleeful because of one word – affordability. They seem to believe that if they shout this word enough, it will stop the downward slide their party has suffered over the last several years.
However, they should not celebrate too soon. A CNN poll on December 18 said Democrats in Congress have never rated as low as they are now, with a minus 55 number, meaning unfavorable in the high 70s as opposed to favorable ratings only in the low 20s.
Even longtime Democrat consultants Ruy Texeira and John Judis wrote a book about three years ago entitled “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?”
They wrote: “In the past few decades, the Democratic Party has undergone a seismic shift. Kitchen-table issues like the economy and public safety have been overshadowed by more elitist topics like identity politics, gender ideology, defunding the police, climate change, and the vaguely defined yet rigidly enforced ideology of anti-racism, which sees white supremacy as the force behind every institution in America.”
What the Democrats don’t seem to realize, or wouldn’t admit even if they did, is that they are the ones primarily responsible for making everything so unaffordable.
First, the Democrats for many years have been a socialist party that has never seen a department or agency to which they would not give big spending increases. They have led this nation into a $38 trillion national debt. They also have caused many state and local governments to go deeply into debt, too.
All this wild spending has led to almost unbelievable inflation, causing most things to cost many times more than they did 25 or 30 years ago. Can you believe there are pickup trucks that cost almost $100,000?
Inflation and the fact that government at all levels has taken and continues to take more and more private property have made houses unaffordable for most Americans, especially young couples. The high taxes in Democrat-run cities and states, and less and less private property even in Republican-run cities and states, mean that new houses have to be built on postage-stamp-size lots and that more people are being forced into apartments and townhouses.
Crowding more and more people into smaller and smaller living areas means less privacy and more traffic and crime and disputes between neighbors.
Too many politicians have proudly created or expanded parks. We now have so many thousands of local, state and national parks and recreation areas that most are hardly used and will not be used unless we find some way to put our entire population on permanent vacation.
Also, sometimes I have seen stories that say “Judge saves land from development.” They should read “Judge makes it harder for young people to buy homes.” The same should be said for nature conservancies that always leave life estates for the donor’s family, but then leave out other young people.
These donations also mean less property on the tax rolls at the same time that teachers, firefighters and police want more raises, which means that taxes have to keep going way up on remaining private property.
What Democrats and socialists do best is take what is a very minor problem for a very few people and turn it into a major problem for everyone. There is no better example of this than what the federal government has done in regard to healthcare.
If there was one lesson I could get through to students, it would be that on anything the government subsidizes, costs are going to explode. You just don’t have the same pressures or incentives to hold down costs and operate efficiently that are in the private sector.
Before the mid-1960s and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, medical care was less than five percent of the GDP, and almost everyone could afford it. Now it is approaching 20 percent, and only people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and major college football coaches can easily afford it.
During my first term in Congress, I was invited to speak to an American Medical Association meeting in Colorado Springs. The then head of the AMA said in his talk that he had told his members they should not oppose Medicare because “doctors would get their share.” And, boy, have they.
I play golf with several doctors, and when I told one of them this story about Medicare, he said, “It’s made us wealthy.” In every government program, there are always some who get rich while most end up paying a lot more than they get back.
Thank goodness we don’t buy food the same way we pay for medical care. The only way we can ever hope to bring down medical costs would be to get the government out of the way and get it back to being between the doctor and the patient, but unfortunately, there’s no hope of doing this unless or until the whole system collapses.
I could give many other examples, but I will stop with just one more. It shocks students at the University of Tennessee when I tell them it was just $90 a quarter when I started there in 1965. The Democrat leader, Rep. Steny Hoyer, said the University of Maryland was just $87 a semester when he started there a few years earlier.
People could work part-time, as I did, and pay all their tuition. Nobody got out of school with a debt unless they bought a car or partied all the time. Then, colleges and universities started pushing the student loan program, and now students get out owing many thousands, and college presidents and administrators make some of the highest salaries in this country.
Student loan debt has grown to more than a trillion and a half, and an article in Reader’s Digest a few years ago was entitled “Student Loan Slaves”. I saw one study several years ago that said college and university fees were 450 percent higher than they would have been if there were no loan program. Most students think it is one of the best things that ever happened to them; actually, it is one of the worst.
As Ronald Reagan and probably many others have said, if someone says they are from the federal government and are here to help you, watch out.
