EDITORIAL: What if Democrats win it all?

Barack Obama would be the 44th president, not the 47th.

One thing missing from the article is that the government already has majority control of the private economy, which none of the other presidents had. Based on this the government can now control economic output with taxes as the input and legislation as the regulation, i.e. a regulated market economy. "In a regulated market, the government regulatory agency may legislate regulations that privilege special interests, known as regulatory capture." - Wikipedia If we hand it all over to the Obama, Reid and Pelosi, we will transition to a liberal elistist socialism and they will use regulatory capture to remain in office and expansion of taxes to indenture us to that socialism. There will be no swinging of the pendulum. Either you take the job the regulated market offers or lose your social benefits, its called indenturement but instead of debt bondage, it will be tax bondage.

This is a poorly written article and one that's not grounded in reality. There will be resistance to liberal Democrat spending should Obama win. The first will be the conservative Blue Dog Democrats in Obama's own party. Most of these Dems skate on thin ice in their home districts and must show their fiscal conservative credentials every time they return. Should they break them, they will be ushered out at the next election. In addition, Obama has not campaigned from the far left. He's campaigned from the center. The GOP has, once again, campaigned from a theocratic perspective socially (particularly with Palin on the ticket), and the center fiscally. I've never been sure how anyone can call those 'small government' policies. The social policies are just as intrusive and controlling as having the government's fingers in my back pocket fishing for loose change.

Thank you for saying things that needed to be said. I'm a Dem but this wouldn't even be a moderate Dem bunch running the show. No "appeasers," as we moderates have been called, in charge. John McCain does have an ability to work with Democrats. He would be able to keep the situation from getting out of hand and keep the country from going completely bankrupt.

I believe the Democrats will start looking at changing how 401Ks work. There are already proposals in academia and Liberal think tanks that outline what Liberals, I'm sorry, I mean "Progressives", think needs to be done wrt 401Ks. We already have had some Democrat House members starting to repeat the Liberal trope about government subsidies (if the government lets you keep some of what you earn it is a "subsidy") when it comes to 401Ks. For 401Ks the claim is that the government is unfairly subsidizing 401Ks by exempting contributions from the income tax and not taxing the employee for employer contributions. There is also talk that 401Ks should be expropriated by the government and the assets sold off. In exchange the owner of the 401K would be given a special private social security account that will pay out an additional benefit (like an annuity) when a person retires and starts getting social security. This is not the partial privitization Conservatives call for where essentially the extra SS taxes we pay that go into the general trust fund, or part of them, would instead be used to fund specific "personal" accounts. Instead the account is "funded" by selling the assets of one's 401K, the proceeds of which of course go into the general fund to pay for day-to-day operations of the government (an excellent way for Obama to spread the wealth around). In exchange, your personal SS account would get some amount of special government security placed in it or some form of an IOU that will determine what additional amount you will receive in retirement will be. For instance, one proposal was that a person would get up to $500 per month from the special account in addition to the normal SS check. The following link gives some details including names of one of the academics and liberal think tank (is that an oxymoron?): http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB122477680834462659.html

This is how it works - you do a good job, you get re-elected. Republicans, as a group, have done a bad job - they're out!. And Democrats are in, until they do a bad job. Neither party consists of only timid lambs following their president, and this time more and more will be speaking their conscious (e.g., the bailout). That's the way it works.

I was taken aback by the second paragraph of your editorial comparing a democratically-elected, one-party majority to despicable totalitarian regimes like China, Cuba, Eritrea, Laos, Vietnam, Syria, Korea. To compare an Obama win--coupled with a Democratic Party majority--to these totalitarian regimes is, at best, ignorant and, at worst, a very partisan distortion of the facts. Maybe the author of this editorial should go back to civics class and review the way the majority of democracies on this planet rule their countries. I'm speaking about countries with parliamentary democracies like the United Kingdom, Japan, or Germany, although there are many, many more. The most important executive in these parliamentary democracies--the Prime Minister--is given nearly absolute power because he or she has a majority of votes in their legislatures. The Prime Minister then executes his or her executive plan with little restraint until either losing a vote of confidence or the legislature itself is voted out of power (or--in some cases--the majority party ditches the Prime Minister but remains in power). This is how most democracies in the world work, certainly not how totalitarian regimes rule. For the Washington Times to imply otherwise in an unbalanced, uneducated, and unfair editorial against Barack Obama is shameful.

We are not a parlimentary democracy, we are a Republican form of democracy, majority democracy. Most parlimentary governments have proportional representation and no confidence votes for balance and dynamic change. The balance in our form of government supposed come from the separation of powers. Obama has already professed a desire to a living Constitution and circumventing the judicial constraints simply by supporting "economic justice" adjudication through judicial activism. If he suceeds, this will place all three branches under the control of a single political party, not very well balanced and highly susceptible to corruption. He has talked to Emanuel (a Clinton "attack dog") as chief of staff and right after that the McCain supporting newspapers were kicked off his plane. You combine that with the eight years of congressional blame politics and the animosity toward conservatives in the Congress, the possibility of establishing a ninth circuit Supreme Court, the economy with the government as a major stockholder, a mainstream news media that has become an Obama guard dog instead of a first amendment watchdog and a socialist agenda president who we know absolutely nothing about and there all the makings for a totalitarian government. No, the article isn't shameful, it is a look at the reality the mainstream media has been filtering for the past six month's.