As a lens to view liberal incompetence, take Senator Chuck Schumer as an example. Here is a man who has voted at each turn to cripple Wall Street’s competitive position in the world with Sarbanes-Oxley, and Dodd-Frank. In light of the Deutsche Börse takeover of the NYSE he is now fighting to keep NYSE at the beginning of the name of the combined NYSE Euronext/Deutsche Börse exchange, because he wants the world to know that New York is still the center of the financial universe.
If Senator Schumer wanted to support NYSE, 2011 is the wrong time to start. NYSE and the rest of American finance have been undercut at every turn by Schumer and his liberal allies in the Senate. Today an American icon, the NYSE, is being sold off and the Senator wonders what happened. Typical of liberals to diminish something and then try to prop it up with phony symbolic gestures.
The same thing has been happening in states across the land where liberal Democrats and RINO Republicans have been putting off the hard business of balancing state budgets in a meaningful way. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger used I.O.U.s to pay state liabilities, and budget gimmicks have been used to defer the punishment in New York, Illinois, Rhode Island and many more.
In the face of these years of backing away from real reform, the people of Wisconsin and Ohio have elected a couple hard-nosed governors. Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Governor John Kasich of Ohio have called the bluff of state workers, putting forward plans for major cuts in their contracts. The budgets of these states are in shambles. Public sector employees should never have been allowed to collectively bargain, and Walker and Kasich are rolling back that terrible mistake.
The two are not the only governors willing to take a scalpel to the state budget. Governor Rick Scott of Florida is all-in in an attempt to fix his state’s budget, and even Democrats Andrew Cuomo and Jerry Brown of New York and California are proposing major cuts in their states. You know things are bad when Jerry Brown and a Cuomo are up for major cuts to a budget.
The inspiration for this tough stance is undoubtedly Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey. His win in 2009 was the first hint that the country was ready for a change, but not the false change promised by President Obama. Christie has been a freight train rolling down the tracks of reform in New Jersey, where conditions have been made terrible by a Democratic legislature and former Governor Jon Corzine.
Christie gave a speech to the American Enterprise Institute recently and he blew the roof off the place. Christie called the “investments” that Barack Obama touted in his State of the Union speech the “candy” of American politics. He called the Washington games and political strategies irresponsible. He rightly called for raising the age for Social Security retirement benefits and reforming both Medicare and Medicaid and upbraided Republicans and Democrats in Washington for not getting it done. Watch his speech below and decide if you want people like Chuck Schumer symbolically preserving America’s greatness, or people like Chris Christie restoring America’s greatness for real.
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