Bill Clinton didn’t just misspeak, he uttered a Freudian slip when he said that “the Vice President launched a new effort to help make communities more liberal.” That’s exactly what Clinton and Gore have been doing for seven years.
It’s hard to see why the American people or Congress should take seriously or even listen to Clinton’s State of the Union speech when we know he doesn’t tell the truth. All nine Supreme Court Justices showed their wisdom by not attending the speech.
The prevaricating president who told us in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of Big Government is over” has certainly changed his tune. He now wants to create his legacy as a combination of Santa Claus and Big Brother, i.e., a bundle of expensive gifts wrapped in overbearing government regulations.
Clinton proposed at least ninety new programs or expanded programs that will require doubling or tripling their previous budgets. That’s one per minute of his tedious harangue whose costs are estimated to be at least $100 billion a year in new spending.
George W. Bush can say “I told you so.” He’s right to reiterate that we can’t afford to allow any income tax surplus to remain in Washington because the politicians will surely spend it, and Clinton’s speech proves this point.
Clinton wants to spend our money to pay off some of the debt that he ran up in his first administration. It’s much more important that the American people get tax cuts so they can pay off their personal indebtedness, which is now at its highest level in history.
Clinton claimed that he and Al Gore “reinvented government” but it’s the same old tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect. What they reinvented was ingenious ways to channel Chinese campaign funds into their reelection bank accounts.
Clinton has reverted to the old liberal game, perfected during LBJ’s Great Society, of bribing special interest groups with taxpayer handouts. Only the jargon is new, such as when Clinton talks about “investments,” his code word for taxes.
Clinton’s claim that he “ended welfare as we knew it” may be the most bare-faced lie of his speech. Clinton twice vetoed the Republican welfare reform bill and finally signed it only after his focus groups told him that welfare reform was immensely popular.
Although Medicare is headed for bankruptcy, Clinton advanced two massive plans to plunge it further into insolvency: providing prescription drugs to Medicare recipients and letting non-seniors join Medicare. Naturally, the big costs would come only after Clinton leaves the White House.
Clinton is clearly trying the incremental approach to his longtime goal of nationalized health care, which the American people rejected in 1994. He has no plan to address the way the government has locked insurance into employment, the uncontrolled costs, the difficulty in comparison shopping, and the forty million plus people who lack insurance.
All Clinton’s education proposals involve either shifting more power away from parents and educators to the U.S. Department of Education or creating more jobs that will pay dues to the National Education Association, or both. Clinton’s five-pronged plan to control classroom curriculum is proceeding through Goals 2000, School-to-Work, national standards, national testing, and teacher certification.
“Saving Social Security” has become a mantra that is supposed to cover all foolish new spending ideas and denial of tax cuts. The bottom line is that Clinton never put any realistic plan on the table and obviously thinks that Social Security is too useful a political tool to muddy the issue by talking sense.
In proposing yet another program for a national ID card, Clinton wants to require gun owners to have a license. About half of American households own guns and the ability to defend oneself is a right, not a privilege that should be licensed by government.
Clinton flubbed a big opportunity to reach out to the Republican Congress and show that he wants to work with them in rebuilding our national defense. He was silent on the law stating that “it is the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense,” which was passed overwhelmingly by the House and unanimously by the Senate.
Clinton’s pledge to “reverse the course of climate change” shows his delusions of grandeur. Clinton is clever, but he does not have the power to change our climate and it’s dangerous to our liberties to let him try.
The Republican response from Senators Susan Collins (ME) and Bill Frist (TN) was weak, failing even to promise tax cuts. What good is a Republican Congress that can’t give us a tax cut?
