The Principal Difference between Democrats and Republicans

In 1972 I was eligible to vote for President for the first time.  I had just returned from three years in Vietnam.  While there I had fallen in love with history and read widely in history and literature.  I was a 24 year old idealist, full of compassion and love for my fellow man and very disturbed about the nature of our involvement in Vietnam.  I voted Democratic.

By the time the next Presidential election came around I learned that raising and supporting a family was a tough job, made tougher by ever rising inflation and ever rising taxes.  I also noticed that I was working two jobs and my wife was working and we were just scraping by.  Yet, I would go into a grocery store and see someone buying groceries with food stamps, living off of welfare and breeding more children to draw even higher welfare checks.  Somehow it didn't seem fair.

I also noticed that the Democrats seemed to ignore anyone working for a paycheck and always seemed to campaign in so called "hard hit" areas in which the majority of their constituents were welfare folks. In my studies I learned that President Johnson, a Democrat, has started "The Great Society" legislation in 1965.  Since that first legislation we spent trillions of dollars building public housing for the poor, gave out welfare checks generously, gave preferential treatment for college entry and job selection to minorities, supported every huge labor union pay raise and our national debt just kept rising as we spent for programs unpaid for.

I also witnessed the growth of huge government agencies to supervise all of these programs.  Soon government workers were making twice or three times what the average citizen was making with far better medical and retirement benefits. 

I learned that Democrats are like "children"; they buy everything they want, want everyone to love them, want to forgo any kind of self discipline and let someone else clean up the messes and pay the bills at a later date.

Until recently, conservative Republicans believed in self-initiative, downsizing the government bureaucracies and keeping the government as much out of our lives as possible.  So, like Ronald Reagan had to do after Carter, it will eventually come down to the "parents", the Republicans, to regain their conservative values and clean up the huge mess that has been made by both the free-spending Bush and the wildly extravagant Obama.

Only this time we may not be able to do it.  The latest estimates are that we will be paying 45% of all tax revenues on interest on the national debt by 2015.  Sad.