Aug 5, 2017 6 min read

Here’s a newsflash – I’d like to say you heard it here first but you probably didn’t – the Democrats have a new agenda!

There is certainly no doubt that they need a new agenda. The one they have been using has been a failure of epic proportions.

In eight years of misrule under President Obama, the Democratic Party suffered the worst losses in its history. They lost 1,042 state and federal posts. Democratic Senate seats fell from 55 to 46, House seats fell from 256 to 194. Governorships declined from 28 to 16. A total of 958 state legislative seats were also lost. Obama said he could have won a third term if he had been able to run again. Good thing for his party he was ineligible, because there may have been no Democrats left in office at the end of that term.

The morning coffee hadn’t even been poured on Nov. 9 before the Democrats were compiling the blame list for Hillary Clinton’s stunning, yet predictable, defeat. It was, depending on the time, and who you asked, Russian hackers, fake news, a Putin conspiracy, misogyny, a rigged election, or any one of a dozen other conspiracy theories. The root cause, however, is that the Democrats produced nothing for the majority of the American people. The economy was stalled, jobs were scarce, businesses were over-regulated, taxes were high and climbing, Obamacare had failed to deliver on most of its promises, our military had been gutted, illegal immigrants were flooding the nation, crime was increasing in cities. Basically, not much was going well. The root cause was cataclysmic policy failure. Liberalism as an operational strategy simply was not working and has not worked – ever.

Eventually, some Democratic strategists came to the realization that the party needed a new strategy. The old liberal strategy certainly hadn’t worked. Over the period of the past several months, they allege that they have labored hard and long to develop the miraculous new strategy that will rescue the Democratic Party. That strategy was previewed two weeks ago and will be rolled out more fully over the next several weeks.

Guess what? So far, it looks exactly like the old strategy, except it is more liberal, and even less likely to work. So much for the “learn from your failures” concept.

The new strategy is called “A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages.” The concept, we are told, is to avoid repeating Clinton’s attempt to offer something for everybody and, in doing so, offering no coherent economic message. The new agenda will be a purely economic message. You will, I am sure, be surprised to know that it will propose increasing taxes on “the rich,” more corporate regulation, higher wages, higher spending, affordable college and paid family leave. Just in case you wondered if they had run out of populist ways to spend really huge piles of money, there is a $3,000 per year, per child allowance.

All this, of course, will require larger government, more reporting and more personal intrusion.

Let’s take a quick look at some of these proposals.

The child allowance is described as a “universal child allowance,” and is a federal check sent to low-income families. The cost of this program is estimated to be $180 billion a year to “provide low-and middle-income families raising children with a baseline level of stable income.” Since when is it the federal government’s job to provide “stable income” for raising kids? Isn’t this what families do? Couldn’t this be abused? Most importantly, when has economic opportunity ever been generated by taking money from a person who is, presumably, generating money and shifting it to someone who is not, while passing it through the inefficient filter of the government?

Then, there is the ever-popular higher minimum-wage proposal. The deafness of the Democratic policy wonks is on full display here. City after city that has tried this has found that it does not work. Studies confirm that increasing minimum wages actually lowers the effective pay of low-wage workers because businesses are forced to reduce hours and reduce personnel to maintain profit margins – not the “huge” profits assumed by liberals, but any profits at all. Many cities are rolling back minimum-wage increases, but this is apparently lost on the Democratic Party.

Family leave, like a higher minimum wage, is an increased cost to business that must be offset somewhere, frequently by hiring fewer employees or having them work fewer hours.

Infrastructure spending is a favorite of every administration. The real questions are what infrastructure, where and how much? All too often, the projects chosen are pork-barrel favorites of legislators for which the economic return does not justify the expenditure. If we need an example, look at the maglev trains of California. The list is endless. Billions of dollars spent for projects of marginal value when real needs remain unaddressed. Factor in the wasteful impact of prevailing wage laws on state and federal projects, and the truly wasteful nature of infrastructure spending comes into focus.

“Making the rich pay their fair share” is another Democratic favorite. How much is a fair share? According to the IRS, Americans earning over $100,000 paid 80 percent of all income taxes in 2014. In other words, 16 percent of people filing returns paid 80 percent of the taxes. Not only do the highest earners pay most of the taxes, but the lowest earners were actually paid about $25,000 each per year in earned-income tax credits. How much more is “fair”? Studies show that if incremental taxes are raised, tax receipts actually go down as income is sheltered or redeployed.

This plan is so lacking in substance that even the Democrats’ captive media cheerleaders yawned and ignored it.

With their new economic agenda it would appear that the Democratic Party has made major strides toward guaranteeing its failure well into the future.

Dave Ball is a Peters Township councilman, second vice-chairman of Washington County Republican Party and the chairman of Peters Township Republican Committee.