"The words of a President have an enormous weight, and ought not to be used indiscriminately."
"What conservatives say is that we will protect you against idealism, we will protect you against the liberal faith that government can make something straight from the crooked timber of human nature."
-George Will on "The Colbert Report"
Stephen Colbert: "What's the difference between conservatives and liberals?"
George Will: "It's the difference between truth and confusion, basically..."
"Duty is not collective; it is personal."
Months ago, I pontificated on the prevalent American ideology of the last thirty years...infantilism. George Will coined the phrase back in the mid-1970s, describing the basic political position of the vast majority of Americans as being intensely desirous of a full, heaping, frequently replenished platter of government services without the commensurate willingness to pay for those services in the form of higher taxes...willing the ends while abhorring the means...an ideology that any six year old could comprehend and embrace...
Today's Field Poll of California's registered voters reveals, unshockingly, that infantilism is alive and well in The Golden State...67% of California's voters wanted the budget deficit chasm closed with spending cuts and not tax increases, and 70% favored a two-thirds legislative majority to raise taxes (thereby rendering tax increases very nearly impossible to enact).
However, those same voters, when polled, opposed by the same margins, cuts in the following areas of the state budget...
Water storage and supply facilities (63% opposed cuts here)
Mental health programs (66% opposed cuts here)
Higher education, including public universities, colleges, and community colleges (67% against)
Child care programs (66% opposed cuts here)
Health care programs for low-income Californians and the disabled (72% against cuts here)
Public schools (73% opposed cuts here)
Law enforcement and police (74% opposed cuts here)
The only area where a clear majority of polled voters favored making cuts was state prisons. While undoubtedly expensive, the prison system is at most 10% of the overall state budget.
Californians remain, like most of their countrymen, wildly unwilling to pay for all of the government services that they clamor for...and therein lies the great dilemma of modern governance in the greatest democracy in the world.
"Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong."
"I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say."
"Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten, someone will intercept it before it reaches you."
"Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped."
-Calvin Coolidge
Obama should heed the first quote, Biden the second, I personally struggle with the third, and the whole country would benefit from taking the fourth to heart...
I've acquired an admiration for our thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, the poster boy for limited government and parsimonious behavior...I'm hereby instituting a daily tribute to that paragon of "masterful inactivity" in The White House...here is the first installment of Coolidgeisms...maxims and morsels of insight from the president who napped two to three hours a day...
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb; Education will not; The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
-Calvin Coolidge
