It started as an interesting discussion on my show regarding Mitt Romney.
With two wins under his belt heading into the South Carolina and Florida primaries, I posed this question: If Romney wins both of those, then is the nomination wrapped up?
Now the answers to that particular question are less relevant than the more general response it brought from my listeners. We had everything from “I’d vote for your dog (my chocolate Lab’s name is Reagan!) as president ahead of the incumbent” to “I’m a registered Republican and if Mitt gets the nomination, I won’t vote for him.”
I even had one guy say that if Romney was the nominee and the president was re-elected, he thought Iowa should secede from the union. I threw that caller a rope and tried to pull him back into the real world.
But here’s the interesting thing — and it was in fact a common theme. Although many were aware that if anti-Romney Republicans stayed home in sufficient numbers in a currently theoretical general election next November, then Barack Obama would likely be re-elected.
Some felt that the country needed four more years of a lurch to the left in order to guarantee a conservative nominee four years down the road.
That is an interesting way of looking at things. The country needs another wake-up call if you are to follow these feelings to their logical conclusion.
However, I see things differently because of where I grew up. We may already be past the point of no return. We don’t actually have a real number on unemployment. Sure the government wants to tell you it’s down. The mainstream media support that notion because of course the headline figure is 8.6 percent.
The reality is however, that we no longer count those not looking for work and they number in the millions. Add to that the number of people on other types of welfare, food stamps, free cell phones; free child care; three free meals a day in school and all the other tax dollars going out of the treasury and we may already be over the magic number of dependents in our society.
What’s the number? I have always believed it to be 54 percent of the population. When you hit that figure then we are a country that will first look to government to solve our problems. Our personal problems. Our bad luck. Our lack of initiative.
And once the majority of us truly believe that government is the answer, then the jig is up.
The president will in fact have delivered on the one pre-election promise that scared me to death. “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he said five days before the last presidential election.
We apparently didn’t hear him or didn’t believe him, but he has been as good as his word in regards to that promise. You see once the majority of us are dependent on government to survive, then we have in fact become socialist Europe.
Entitlements like Obamacare will grow until we achieve the president’s wish of a so-called single payer system (government healthcare) and will then be regarded with as much reverence as Social Security. It will become untouchable by both the Republicans and the Democrats.
The next step is paying for it. The debt ceiling has been hiked again — now to $16.4 trillion and that will last maybe four months before we face the same crisis all over again.
Taxing the rich won’t seem like such a bad idea even to some conservatives, even though it will solve nothing.
And if a politician in power has the guts to try and do something about it, then there will unfortunately be more than a few blocked interstates and a few cars set on fire. Here the level of violence will be much greater than that which we’ve seen across the pond when someone in authority finally says, “we can’t afford this anymore and so we are cutting back.”
Romney or Obama? Santorum or Romney? Paul or Perry?
It may no longer matter because it may already be too late.
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