The Beginning of the End?

Ed Fuelener from Heritage made some very valid points about the Stimulus Debacle:

This bill has been advertised as an economic stimulus bill—despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will actually weaken our nation's long-term economic growth. While the stimulative utility of the bill is, at best, questionable, it would unquestionably rewrite the social contract between the American people and their government. For example:

• The bill reverses the bipartisan and highly successful welfare reforms of 1996 and drastically expands the welfare state. For instance, it will start rewarding states for adding people to their welfare rolls, rather than for helping them find gainful employment. And contrary to long-established practice, it will entitle able-bodied adults without children to receive cash assistance.
• It does extreme violence to the concept of federalism—bailing out states that have spent irresponsibly at the expense of taxpayers in states that have been fiscally prudent.
• It greatly shifts the responsibility and power over health care delivery and decision making from individuals to government. Among other things, it would create a new federal health board to decide which medical services are "effective" in America, paving the way for government effectively to overrule the clinical decisions of private physicians.
• It deliberately censors religious speech and worship on school campuses by prohibiting use of any "stimulus" funds for facilities that are used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school of divinity.

The list goes on. These and similar provisions will mean fundamental changes in our society. In many instances, the bill would establish policies that directly challenge widely held American values.

And he makes several valid points. What a lot of Democrats seem to fail to understand is how invasive the Stimulus Package is, not just in the amount of wasteful government spending that it provides, but in the ways that it fundamentally changes the game.

Most disturbing to me is the new government board that deals with health care. We have already seen time and time again how government intervention into health care leads to disastrous consequences. There are reasons that Europeans who can afford to come to the U.S. for appropriate health care do, and it has a lot to do with the fact that government run health care systems there are ineffective, backlogged, and full of red tape. But this Democratic Congress had potentially changed all that and established a new board that will determine what is best for your health, not you. Does that seem like something you want to see. Do you want a bureacucratic Washington body making decisions for the health care of your parents or kids? Of course not.

Fuelner is right in that this stimulus bill is a dangerous precedent for America; the beginning of the end of the country as we know it. I take solace only in the fact that the American people will see through this charade and see this bill for what it is; a liberal Christmas list designed to take money and freedom away from average Americans...