Obama’s Change Represents Regression, not Progress

The kind of change represented by Obama’s spending spree (see my last post, Obama Set to Sign Another Budget-Busting Bill) represents regression, not progress, like his and Congressional liberal Democrats' opposition to reducing the price of oil by allowing more off-shore drilling. It seems that Obama and the Democrats misled voters concerned about the deficit and the high price of oil into voting for them, even though they support massive domestic spending and higher prices for oil.

Obama and Congressional liberal Democrats only oppose tax cuts and military spending, not reducing domestic spending, like welfare and pork.

They support higher oil prices in order to force more conservation, while opposing increased drilling for oil, clean coal, and nuclear energy. Indeed, Obama stated during the presidential campaign that the problem was not the higher oil prices, which if adjusted for inflation should have caused the price of gasoline to be over $3.00 per gallon, had risen too quickly, not that they had risen at all. Although he is right that Americans enjoyed decades of relatively low energy prices before the sudden sharp increase in 2005, his lack of opposition to higher energy prices is ideological, not economic, while he was content to allow his supporters to blame Bush falsely for the higher oil prices – as if it is the responsibility of the president to set the price of oil, if he even had the power to do so if he wished – in order to get elected to do the opposite of what the voters wanted. During the campaign, public opinion forced Congress to overturn the moratorium on drilling for off-shore oil, a measure which Bush signed into law, but the Obama Administration has demonstrated no enthusiasm for following through with allowing more drilling.

Liberal environmentalists who opposed Bush and supported Obama had blocked hundreds of licenses for oil-drilling in the area off Alaska that the Bush Administration had tried to open up to more drilling even before the end of the moratorium off the continental coast of the Lower 48 States. Oil prices would have probably risen even higher had Bush not succeeded in 2001 in expanding off-shore drilling in parts of the Gulf of Mexico, let alone being able to end the oil embargoes on Iraq and Libya as a result of his successful foreign policy, for which his critics absurdly blamed him for the opposite intent.

In other words, liberals blocked the increased oil drilling and then blamed Bush for the result of their actions – just like in another example, the mortgage fiasco, when Congressional liberal Democrats blocked adequate regulation repeatedly by the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants implicitly backed by the federal government that made bad loans as a result of the policies of former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, aided by liberal allies of Obama like ACORN. None of the policies of the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats appear to demonstrate that they have learned this main lesson of the mortgage crisis about government distorting the free market unnecessarily that their policies helped to cause. They are still encouraging risky loans while rewarding even those who lied about their creditworthiness to escape from the consequences of their actions.

Change is good only if it represents reform, not just a change for the sake of change for political expedience. It is imperative that conservatives defend their record while exposing that of the liberals in order to implement policies in the best interests of the United States.