Many today look at the too-far-left democrat party and declare that they are trying to create a socialist state. With the exception of Bernie Sanders, I do not necessarily believe the Biden administration set out to create a socialist America. Having said that we need to take a deep breath and look at the current direction of the U.S. Are we headed for socialism?
First, we can look at the short-hand version….Eight Steps to Socialism. This list is commonly attributed to Saul Alinsky; however, this particular list did not appear in either of his two books. Whomever actually wrote it, it is a pretty scary list.
Saul Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community activist and political theorist. Alinsky synthesized his theory of political agitation is his famous 1971 book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. His book is considered a founding text of modern community organizing and a classic of radical-leftist agitation-propaganda theory. Barack Obama received a comprehensive course in Saul Alinsky during his years as a community organizer in Chicago, an experience Obama recalled as “The best education he ever had.”
The Alinsky equation is summarized in his famous Rule # 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Can this happen in our great country? Consider the Obama/Biden rhetoric about wealthy Americans (although they both are in that category); make the rich a target and scapegoat for all of our ills, divide and conquer, demonize some to extract power for others.
Obama and Biden have both told us, countless times, that their intent is to “transform America.” The Alinsky model is certainly transformative. BTW another prominent Democrat, Hillary Clinton, has also often been linked with Alinsky because she wrote her senior thesis entitled “An Analysis of the Alinsky Model” while she was a student at Wellesley College in 1969. Anyone surprised?
Here are the Eight Steps to Socialism, read them and draw your own conclusions about the Obama/Biden transformation:
1)Healthcare– Control healthcare and you control the people.
2) Poverty – Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control– Remove the ability to defend themselves from the government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (food, housing, and income).
6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the government and schools
8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with the support of the poor.
Does any of this sound like what is happening to the United States? Whomever actually wrote the 8 steeps, merely simplified Vladimir Lenin’s original scheme for world conquest by communism. Joseph Stalin described his Russian converts as “Useful Idiots.” Is that what we are becoming?
Back to the title of this piece, WHERE IS AMERICA HEADED AS OF NOVEMBER, 2021? At its core socialism is about economics. To accomplish those eight steps a number of economic factors and action should be considered.
MASSIVE GOVERNMENT SPENDING, what are the consequences (I will continue to emphasize this word)? Spending, in and of itself, is not always bad, for example massive government spending for the “New Deal” in the 1930s was unprecedented and served a specific purpose to solve a specific problem, that problem being the Great Depression with its 25% unemployment. The goal was, “relief, recovery and reform.”
The New Deal spending was designed to put millions back to work and the work was to produce the likes of dams, national parks, infrastructure. For example, the Civilian Conservation Corps hired 4 million workers over nine years to conserve public lands, plant forests, build dams and maintained roads and trails. The Works Progress Administration put 8.5 million people to work. When a project was completed, the spending stopped. Each project provided a positive for every American.
Consequences? New Deal spending along with the onset of World War II rapidly took the U.S. out of the depression and transformed America into an energetic, confident, prosperous and envied world leader.
Contrast the positive and lasting impact of the New Deal with the potential consequences of massive spending today:
- It will continue to increase the size of an already massive federal government bureaucracy.
- Much of the new massive spending is for new entitlements which will continue to grow, the funding for which will never end and will never be scaled back.
- Entitlements lead to unprecedented government control over the daily lives of every American, cradle to grave.
- With size and control, comes government regulations and the resulting negative impact on entrepreneurial spirit and economic growth.
- Massive federal regulation and control leads to reduced states’ rights.
- And most importantly today’s massive spending is a stake in the heart of perhaps the most important 55 words ever written: Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today’s massive federal government spending powers are certainly not based on “consent of the governed” but we the people are on the hook to pay for every cent of this spending
INCREASED TAX BURDENS are the consequences of massive government spending. Corporate taxes, wealth taxes, death taxes, increased individual income taxes on the wealthy, taxes on capital gains and perhaps taxes on unrealized capital gains. All of these taxes targeting the wealthy to pay their (yet to be defined by Biden) “fail share.” Consequences of massive tax increases are reduced capital investment (the life-blood of capitalism), disincentivization to expand and grow, reduced entrepreneurial spirit and the rich moving their wealth out of the U.S. Yes, the rich can leave; France thought it was a great idea to soak the rich with high taxes and, in 2016 alone, over 12,000 millionaires departed their homeland. France has been forced to back off on their taxing-the-rich policies.
The bottom-line consequences of overtaxing the rich are REDUCED GROWTH LEADING TO ECONOMIC STAGNATION. Over the last 20 years, the European Union, which featured socialist and semi-socialist states, had almost zero economic growth.
DEBT and the consequences therein. A highly reliable measure of a nation’s economic wellness is to look at the ratio of debt compared to its productivity. When Obama took office, January 2009 the U.S. ratio of debt to GDP was about 77%, considered reasonable and far below other industrial nations. Today, after a decade-plus of deficit spending our debt to GDP ratio is about 127%. When over 100% it speaks volumes about our ability or inability to repay the debt. Consequences? Additionally, a 2013 study by the World Bank found that if the debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 77% for an extended period, it slows economic growth.
INCREASING THE MONEY SUPPLY consequences: Massive spending leads us down the path to artificially increasing the nation’s money supply, aka “printing money.” In 2020, the money supply was increased by almost $4 trillion, by far the largest annual expansion in U.S. history. Consequences: increasing the money supply beyond the needs of economic growth leads to inflation and in many countries, it has led to hyperinflation. Venezuela’s inflation, for example, has risen by over 1 million per cent. But, you say, that can’t happen here. It already has. During the Civil war, the Confederacy of southern states found itself short of finances (it could only raise 46% of the cost of war from taxes and bonds) so it increased the printing of money to pay for materials and soldiers. However, with economic output falling, this caused inflation of 700% in the first two years of war and reaching a peak of over 5000% by 1865.
CONCLUSIONS: The above economic factors, massive spending, massive tax increases, out-of-control national debt and printing trillions of dollars are not necessarily sequential actions and activities; they sometimes overlap and feed off each other’s momentum. But at some point, there is enough confluence of these economic factors that the totality becomes overwhelming, uncontrollable and perhaps irreversible. That is what the Congressional Budget Office keeps telling us when they conclude that the massive government spending, entitlements and debt are “unstainable.”
What has happened in just the past ten months has caused alarm bell to ring loud and clear. More and more of us are asking what is going on, where are we headed, what will our country be like in the next few years? Optimism is waning. Our feel-good spirit is being crushed. Is the “American dream” no longer a possibility? This is not a good place for a country to be.
It is as though President Biden climbed to the top of a very large snow-covered hill on 20 January, made a big round snow ball and tossed it down the hill. We watch it roll and grow in size (government). We see it gaining weight (government control). Half way down the hill it becomes obvious that it is becoming an uncontrollable mass (thousands of pages of multi-trillion-dollar legislation that no one has read) that may have the potential to be a destructive force to all classes of Americans. That is, a disincentivized wealthy class as government takes an ever-increasing percent of their wealth to the point that there is no more to take. Destruction of the middle class as the need for more and more taxes negatively impacts their well-being and kills their entrepreneurial spirit. At the lower end of the spectrum are the masses that will have lived every phase of their life with a government handout; child care, rent, housing, heating, cell phone, food, paid time off, unemployment compensation, medical, education, social security. Cradle to grave generational dependence and none of it requires recipients to get a job.
Surely socialism cannot happen to America. But, what if…..
- What if we cannot stop printing money?
- What if we cannot control today’s inflation and it begins increasing by factors of tens or hundreds (as it has in so many countries in recent history)?
- What if we do nothing about deficit spending and national debt ($28 trillion now) that is increasing at a rate of $45.5 per second!!?
- What if interest rates go to 6% and the interest on our debt consumes so much of the budget that we cannot provide for an adequately sized, trained and ready military force for national security?
- What if all of the above leads our enemies to conclude that we have reached the point of no return and are vulnerable to multiple attacks by various means?
- What if social security goes broke (currently scheduled to be insolvent by 2033)?
- What if Medicare goes broke (currently scheduled to be insolvent by 2026)?
- What happens if the government checks stop coming to the masses who have become government dependent?
- What if the wealthy find a way to hide their wealth or find a new place to live (as previously mentioned, in 2016 France lost over 12,000 millionaires because of the exorbitant wealth tax)?
- What if our borders remain unsecure and the world’s masses become ours to feed, cloth, house, educate, and care for?
- What if Medicare-for-all becomes reality with an estimated yearly cost $3.2 trillion?
- Etc.
This is not just my personal what-if list, this has become the concern of millions of Americans, especially our middle class, the greatest middle class in world history. What is happening before our eyes could cause our middle class to become nonexistent.
The United States is not, currently, a socialist nation. Our economic vitality remains generally decentralized which is a necessity for a stable republic. But as the power of government grows our rights correspondingly diminish and ultimately socialism is maintained by force.
History, of course, is not a pre-determined straight line. Wise leaders have steered civilizations away from bad decisions. Are we blessed with a wise leader today? Just take a quick look back 10 months and you draw your own conclusions.
On 20 January, 2021 the nation listened to President Biden’s impassioned inauguration speech about being a leader for all Americans and that the centerpiece of his administration would be to bring unity to America. The immediate reviews of the speech by all media and most politicians were glowing accolades. But before the ink was dry on praise for his words, he was busy at his desk, also on 20 January, signing the first of 40 executive orders he would issue in his first two weeks in office.
For the most part those executive orders were specifically designed to counter Trump initiatives, policies, and accomplishments. Remember, in November, 2020, 73.6 million Americans voted for Trump and that total was 7 million more than any sitting president in history had received. My sense is that a significant portion of the 73.6 million votes were not cast because they liked his tweets, personality or leadership style; they voted for Trump because of the numerous policies he put in place that positively impacted all Americans. How did Biden’s knee-jerk actions in the first 48 hours contribute to his “unity” promise? Within 48 hours our country had transitioned from a Trump-promises-made, promises-kept administration to a promises-made, promises-go-to-hell Biden intent. That’s authoritarianism in a nut shell. That’s power and control personified. That’s a formula for tearing down this great country and it seems to be working out just as planned. Do we have a leader we can believe in, who we can trust, who is looking out for the best interest of every American?
“The borders are closed.”
“We have gotten control of the border.”
“I have been to the border before; I know it well.”
“We will get all Americans out of Afghanistan.”
The Afghanistan evacuation was, “most extraordinary.”
“If you make less than $400,000 a year, you will not pay one more cent in taxes.”
“My Build Back Better agenda costs zero dollars.”
President Biden, 2021
CONSEQUENCES. I took the liberty to highlight that word with underline throughout this missive. Why? What I have attempted to portray is the reality of our potential future. “Reality the quality or state of being actual or true.” Reality is something we have to debate individually by relying on history, research and the wisdom of others. I leave you then with this thought. Every day in his publications, Rip McIntosh, who I am proud to call my friend, leaves us with this important message…. “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality.” Ayn Rand
Think about the potential consequences of what is happening to our great nation, draw some conclusions and, if appropriate, speak out against the reality and the consequences.
Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com