Left and Right: Part IV

Without a doubt we have seen over the last 4-6 years a trend toward increasing size and power of US government at the hands of the Democratic Party.   While most of the country was feeling the pinch of an economic downturn in late 2008 and throughout 2009, the Washington, D.C. was one of the few areas that showed an increase in the number of jobs, and these jobs were those of federal workers.
The powerful public employees unions, especially the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), lobbied the Democratic-controlled Congress and the White House to obtain a nearly $1,000,000,000,000 dollar stimulus package much of which went to create or save SEIU jobs or jobs represented by other public service employees unions.  In the run up to passage of this stimulus act,  the most frequent visitor to the White House was none other than Andy Stern, then President of the SEIU.

The SEIU is a major donor to the Democratic Party, and it is clear that President Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were engage in political payback.  If you go to the SEIU website you will see that the positions taken there are indistinguishable from the positions represented on the website.

Labor unions in the US have a long history of being very leftist and favoring big government.  But the prospect of government employees being unionized scared even the likes of left-leaning President Franklin D. Roosevelt and AFL-CIO President George Meany! See FDR Warned Us.     

President Obama, in defending his stimulus package, would often state a metric  "created or saved XXX jobs."  It seems that in light of how much of the stimulus went in to preserving or creating new unionized government jobs, the emphasis would clearly be on the "saved" aspect.  He did indeed save lots of government jobs, for which the SEIU will generously thank him this re-election season, but his creation record was very poor, even for a creator of government jobs.

Nonetheless, the point of this post is that the Democrats have done their utmost in the last few years to grow the size of government and with it the size of the national debt.  Because of this, most people would clearly label the Democrat party the left-wing party, even though they probably don't all mean to say that it is extremely left-wing as was the Communist party.  But government which tends toward totalitarianism is always a cause for alarm.