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Townhall...
Return America to
Main Street
By Star Parker
Although my organization’s home office is in Washington, DC, I log some
150,000 miles a year flying around the country.
Traveling back and forth from the nation’s capital provides good
perspective on the bold contrast between the realities there and the
rest of America.
Washington is booming today while working Americans in cities across
the rest of our nation struggle to see the economic light of day.
Washington Business Journal reports that, based on their latest annual
job growth data from February 2010 to February 2011, DC is the number
one job market in the nation. Compared to a national unemployment rate
which just dropped below 9 percent, the Journal reports unemployment in
the DC area at 5.9 percent.
According to the S&P/Case-Schiller Index, the leading index of home
prices in the US, the latest composite of home prices from 20 cities
from around the country shows an annual decline of 3.1 percent. Of the
20 cities in the composite, only two showed annual home price
increases. San Diego – barely – at 0.1 percent, and Washington, DC with
a solid increase of 3.6 percent.
Yes, DC is booming, its malls are filled and the wine flows in our
capital city’s fancy, expensive restaurants.
The Democrat regime has been good to Washington.
Although our president famously campaigned about purging Washington of
“special interests,” I wrote then that this was ridiculous. The
business of Washington is special interests. So anyone with an agenda
to grow the federal government by definition grows these many special
interests. And the data bears this out.
Combined lobbying expenditures in our nation’s capital for 2009 and
2010, the first two years of the current administration, were at an all
time high $7 billion.
Over the course of eight years under the Bush Administration, when
federal spending increased at the highest rate since the Johnson
Administration in the 1960’s, a little over a trillion dollars was
added to annual federal spending. The Obama Administration has managed
to add on another trillion in less than three years.
Yes, friends, the great sucking sound we hear today is the liberal
regime in Washington sucking the living daylights out of this nation.
Almost 80 percent of Americans feel today that the country is on the
wrong track. Last November, voters fired one quarter of the sitting
Democrats in Congress in the name of change.
Now Republicans in congress, in response to this voter mandate, have
tried, in their first shot at the federal budget, to cut back one
hundred billion dollars out of four trillion dollars in 2011
expenditures and Democrats have cried foul.
One hundred billion dollars is wasted in Washington on any given day by
the time Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi have finished
breakfast.
Democrats have dusted off their predictable talking points. Cutting a
hundred billion out of four trillion is “extreme.” Yet, somehow
fourteen trillion dollars of debt is not.
Or pushing to cut three hundred million from Planned Parenthood is
“ideological”, but spending three hundred million dollars of taxpayer
funds on Planned Parenthood to begin with is not.
Or perhaps most pathetic of all. That furloughing “non-essential”
federal government workers, when the federal government is taking one
quarter of the American economy, would “harm” economic recovery.
Giving USA, that tallies charitable giving, reported that the $303.8
billion in private charity that Americans gave in 2009 was the largest
annual drop since they started reporting this information in 1956.
It time to return America to Main Street. Main Street should not be
strangling while Washington parties. Republicans hear the wheezing on
Main Street and want to get the oxygen back to where it belongs.
It’s time to get this nation back on track. On this there is no
compromise. There is just right and wrong.
Read it at Townhall
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