• • In your opinion, which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future... big business, big labor, or big government?
One chart says it all.
Gallup
64 percent believe big government, which has gotten far bigger over the last three years, especially with Obamacare being passed by Obama and Democrats when they controlled the House of Representatives, Senate and the White House, is a bigger threat to the country in the future.
Only 26 percent feel big business in the bigger threat and just 8 percent said big labor.
More concerning to Democratic leaders and Obama should be the Gallup finding a little farther down in the report.
While top Democratic leaders and Obama continue to try to grow big government bigger, Democratic voters are starting to fear big government more and more.
Since 2009, there has been a 16 percentage point increase in Democrats believing "big government is the biggest threat to the nation." In 2009 that number was only 32 percent, now it is 48 percent.
Gallup's bottom line:
Americans' concerns about the threat of big government are near record-high levels. The Occupy Wall Street movement, focused on "fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations," has drawn much attention and a large following. Still, the majority of Americans do not view big business as the greatest threat to the country when asked to choose among big business, big government, and big labor. In fact, Americans' concerns about big business have declined significantly since 2009.
Over the last few decades Democratic and Republican lawmakers have been guilty of expanding government but in the 2010 midterm elections, GOP politicians were handed control of the House of Representatives and given a net gain in Senate seats, because they campaigned and promised to spend less, fight tax increases, and limit big government expansions.
They have fought to keep those promises in the last year and Conservative voters have held their feet to the fire to make sure they continue to do so.
Democratic leaders, led by Obama, continue to try to raise taxes and push for more stimulus aka government spending or "investment", showing they did not learn the lesson of the 2010 midterms or simply chose to ignore it.
The White House has raised the stakes in the negotiations over the renewal of $200bn in stimulus measures for the US economy, seeking to link their fate to separate legislation to fund the government.
The move by Barack Obama, the president, marks a high-risk attempt to corral Republicans into a compromise in Washington’s end-of-year fiscal warfare, since it increases the odds that some federal agencies could shut down as early as Saturday.
The White House has been pressing Congress for months to pass an extension of payroll tax cuts and emergency jobless benefits that are due to expire at the end of the month, on the grounds that if they lapsed it would do serious damage to the US economy.
Republicans have accepted the need to preserve these forms of stimulus in 2012. But the bill they proposed – and will be voting on Tuesday in the House of Representatives – does so in a way that the White House and many congressional Democrats reject. It pays for the measures by curbing the pay of federal workers, rather than imposing higher taxes on wealthy Americans as Democrats want. It also includes several other provisions – primarily an expedited approval process for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project – that Democrats are opposed to.
The Obama experiment has failed. It is time for Democratic lawmakers to start listening to the people they are supposed to be representing and stop pushing for bigger government or they risk losing control of the Senate and the White House in November 2012.
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