Israel Matzav

Spengler: America won't survive four more years of Obama

1) Dependency on government handouts: As Dick Morris points out in his latest book Here Come the Black Helicopters!, 20% of Americans received some kind of means-tested government check in 2008, when George W. Bush left office. Now 32% of Americans get some kind of means-tested support — food stamps, disability, welfare, and so forth. That’s a third of the country. Transfer payments are now fully one-fifth of personal income, as I observed in an essay last year. Obama’s arbitrary and perhaps illegal changes in welfare work requirements create a cycle of dependency, as the Romney campaign has warned. They also create a built-in majority for the welfare state. Morris observes that the shift to dependency gives the Democrats a majority on paper. The only question now is turnout. Give this another four years, and the number of Americans who have a stake in economic growth will be a minority of the population.

2) Religious commitment: The Pew Institute’s bombshell survey released this week showed that the number of Americans not affiliated with any religion rose from 15% in 2007 to almost 20% in 2011, and that the unaffiliated are much likelier to vote Democratic (63% of unaffiliated lean Democratic vs. 48% of all registered voters).

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3) European-style birth rates: “The overall fertility rate for women in the U.S. — defined as the number of newborns per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 — was 63.2 last year, down from 64.1 in 2010 and the lowest rate since the government started collecting these statistics in 1920,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 3. Most ominous was the crash in Hispanic fertility: “Hispanic women between 20 and 24 saw their fertility rate drop to 115 last year from 165 in 2007.” Religious commitment and child-bearing are closely linked, as a number of analysts have pointed out (I review the relationship in my book How Civilizations Die).

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4) Declining patriotism: In 2002, 60% of Americans agreed with the statement, “Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior,” according to a Pew survey. In 2012 the proportion dropped to 49%. For the first time, a minority of Americans believe in American exceptionalism.

5) National debt: Suffice it to say that during the past 12 months, foreigners bought almost half ($600 billion) of the $1.3 trillion in new debt paper issued by the Treasury to cover Obama’s deficits. And the Chinese actually dumped $165 billion of Treasury securities during those 12 months. Someone should update Gov. Romney’s talking points: We can’t borrow from the Chinese because the Chinese don’t want to lend to us.

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6) Nuclear weapons in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism as American power collapses overseas.

We are becoming a  different people, more like the feckless, infertile, dependent Europeans and less like the men and women who built this country. We aren’t there yet. But we have lost so much ground under Obama that we do not know whether the country will pass a point of no return during a second Obama term.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Campaign 2012

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:27 AM