WILLIAMS: Mourning in America

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

We must prepare ourselves for another four years of excessive spending, class warfare and unremitting political correctness.

Ronald Reagan succeeded wildly running for president with the slogan “It’s morning in America.” Would anyone believe it if a candidate tried that now? The most optimistic any of us could muster in the past decade was “hope and change,” and hope, as Baruch Spinoza said, is a form of sadness; it’s what you cling to when the present is too hard to bear. Now that even hope and change have left us, what are we to do?

It’s not morning in America; it’s mourning in America. We need a sense of urgency. Things will not simply work out on their own; we must fix them before it is too late, and there is not much time left until then.

Let me officially welcome you to the new America.

In the new mourning America, we borrow money from China to give it away to those in our country who do not work.

In the new America, we shut down the government rather than cut 1 percent of the budget.

In the new America, we create government programs to fix the problems created by previous government programs.

In the new America, we take from the rich to give to the poor and to those too big to fail.

Can we handle another four years of Barack Obama as president?

He has ignored our biggest problems. He talks incessantly about confiscating wealth from the rich; he never talks of paying down the debt. He goes on comedy shows, he tells us his picks for college basketball, he counsels LeBron James; he does not tell us why we should support his agenda.

His only solutions to our economic problems are taxation and spending; if economic policy were that easy, why not spend infinitely? Why not $1 trillion for the American Jobs Act rather than half a trillion? Why not $2 trillion? If it were that easy to fix the economy, we wouldn’t need a Harvard Law graduate as president; anyone could do it.

He is seemingly made of talking points. How many times has he used the phrase “fair share” since he returned from Martha’s Vineyard? He will not explain to us how “spreading the wealth around” is “good for everybody.” He asserts these ready-made, dead thoughts as though either they were self-evident or we were too stupid to understand the issues. We simply must be “fair,” which means letting him decide what is fair, and spread the wealth around, which means stealing from one group of people simply because they have something to steal, and giving to another group of people simply because they have nothing to steal.

I don’t want to live in Mr. Obama’s twilight America. I want to live in a free America, where businesses and entrepreneurs aren’t tripped up everywhere by government bureaucrats who think they know better than anyone else.

I want to live in an America where we don’t kill a third of the next generation, then punish the other two-thirds with $50,000 worth of sovereign debt each.

I want to live in an America where we take care of one another, instead of counting on the government to do so at 10 times the cost.

I want to live in an America where we let people buy what they want, rather than bribing them to buy what they don’t want by distorting the market with artificial incentives.

The sun is going down - we don’t have much more daylight before it’s too late to fix things. Our task is hard, but not as hard as failing to do it.

• Armstrong Williams, author of the 2010 book “Reawakening Virtues,” is on Sirius Power 128 from 7 to 8 p.m. and 4 to 5 a.m. Mondays through Fridays. Become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/arightside, and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/arightside. Read his content on RightSideWire.com.