FAILED LIBERAL IDEAS

FAILED LIBERAL IDEAS

FAILED LIBERAL IDEAS (The Heritage Foundation List)

Liberal ideas are a lot of things: dangerous, wasteful, unconstitutional, even socialist at times.

MOST LIBERAL IDEAS HAVE FAILED . . . miserably!

Liberals love to call themselves compassionate. So why do their ideas so often end up with catastrophic results on the people they're intended to help?

They call themselves progressive. Truth is, though, their ideas are recycled schemes that continue to blow trillions of dollars on bloated, failed programs that take the country backward.

They talk about personal liberty like they invented it. But everything they do butts into every corner of your personal life.

In short, many liberal ideas are recycled failures that backfire and can't get simple concepts straight.

1. The War on Poverty

In their compassion for the poor, liberals earmarked $50 billion in 1964 to provide medical care, housing, cash transfers, and food subsidies to ease the plight of the disadvantaged.

Hatched by social engineers who cooked up President Lyndon Johnson’s "Great Society," the War on Poverty spawned a welfare mentality that has trapped the poor in a web of dependency, spent $16 trillion—without making a dent in the poverty rate—and will burn through another $10.3 trillion over the next 10 years.

2. The U.S. Department of Education

President Obama proposed a new education reform package called "Race to the Top," which includes increased federal funding to states whose public schools improve student performance.

The U.S. Department of Education has spent trillions of tax dollars growing a bloated, top-down bureaucracy, but American public education still lags behind other countries. Now, President Obama wants to bribe states with billions more if they give in to additional federal interference in their schools: "If states show that they’re serious about reform," says President Obama, "we’ll show them the money."

If these ideas are so good, why do liberals have to pay people to use them?

3. The U.S. Department of Energy

Created in the 1970s as one of President Jimmy Carter's bright ideas, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has seen its mission evolve from basic research and development to spending billions to commercialize technologies that aren’t yet viable—and might never be.

Despite funding numerous projects that never get off the ground, the U.S. Department of Energy has seen its budget grow by more than $11 billion in the last 10 years—a 76% increase! Because our nation is looking for spending to cut, the DOE might be the place to start. Instead of focusing on opening new sources of energy, the DOE pushes politically correct pet projects that are expensed to the American people.

4. The Community Reinvestment Act

Liberals created the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to encourage private lenders to meet the needs of borrowers in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

The CRA spawned sub-prime mortgage lending, which boomed starting in the mid-1990s under President Bill Clinton. When the bubble burst, millions of sub-prime borrowers—the low-income people the CRA was created to help—found themselves owing more than their homes were worth. This set off the foreclosure cascade, tipped the economy into a prolonged recession, and plunged many families into poverty after they lost the homes they couldn’t afford but that Washington induced them to buy.

5. 'Comprehensive' Immigration Reform

Senate liberals' latest immigration proposal offers multiple "paths to citizenship" for foreign nationals who are in America illegally.

They’re touting their Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2011 as the complete and real solution to America’s immigration problems. Hoping Americans will ignore history, though, liberals’ current manipulation is as catastrophically irresponsible as the amnesty law Congress adopted in 1986, which more than quadrupled the population of people here illegally.

If $16 trillion hasn’t made a dent in the poverty rate, isn’t it kind of ridiculous to think another $10.3 trillion will solve the problem?

And if President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus didn’t create jobs, isn’t it ridiculous to think another $450 billion “jobs plan” will do the trick?

Of course it is.

President Obama and his liberal cohorts in Congress, however, don’t see a problem with recycling failed liberal ideas from the past and spending the country into oblivion to enact them.