That is, if remaining Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and their successors are to live in a nation that even faintly resembles the exceptional America left to us by the Silent and Greatest generations.
Nearly half of all babies are born out-of-wedlock. Charles Murray’s latest book documents America’s middle and lower middle classes “Coming Apart.” Last week, this column described millions of self-employed and under-employed Americans that have gone without adequate health care for at least 20 years thanks to high insurance and medical care costs wrought by market distortions including state health insurance monopolies, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare and malpractice lawsuits.
President Barack Obama lauded last week’s January jobs report that claims over 100,000 net “new” jobs and an “official” unemployment (U-3) rate falling to a five-year low, 6.6%. But as AEI economics reporter James Pethokoukis points out, the “new normal” after five years of Obamanomics ain’t what it’s cracked up to be:
Before the Great Recession, there were 122 million full-time jobs in America. Now, four and a half years into the Not-So-Great Recovery, there are still just 118 million full-time jobs in America. That, despite a labor force that is 1.6 million larger and a non-jailed, non-military adult working-age population that is 14 million larger. To have the same share of civilian, non-institutional adults working today as back then would require some 11 million additional full-time jobs.
The Senator Barack Hussein Obama first campaigned for president promising to “fundamentally transform” America. Five years later, he can honestly claim success. His war on coal, oil and middle class enabling-cheap energy generally has the poor choosing between food and staying warm. The separation of powers envisioned by the U.S. Constitution to protect We the People from tyrannical government are no more. President Obama changes “the law” at will with a fellow Democratic party-controlled-U.S. Senate applauding like a King’s royal court and a cowardly Republican Party leadership afraid to exercise their power of the purse to oppose even obviously impending and ongoing-Obamacare disasters for more than 18 days of a government shutdown. Today we learn that the “condition” the GOP-controlled House may add to a bill raising the debt limit will be to restore pension cuts that they initiated last month in surrendering on the budget bill.
It appears that the delayed roll-out of Obamacare and ongoing jobs depression have finally awakened a majority of Americans to the error of their ways when too many sleep walked to the polls to re-elect Obama, Biden and a Democratic Senate, or remained asleep dreaming of a disability check and food stamps rather than replace them with a Romney, Ryan and Republicans in control of both houses of Congress.
If they remain awake throughout this year’s Democrat-Media attempt to paint the GOP as heartless and the Democrat-Media-for-Hillary blitz that awaits from 2015 on; voters will need to elect tea partier-like conservative Republicans if the United States is to have any chance of restoring what was.
It will also require that the Grand Old Party produce what the first Democrat declared:
“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson
