The compassionate conservative lie

Break it down into its particular parts, and Wehner’s “compassion” represents nothing more than an empathetic case for an unalterable expansion of the entitlement state, a concentration of federal power, and a greater forced redistribution of wealth from the taxpayer to the non-taxpayer. It also helps permanently redefine the very terms of what poverty is, and what percentage of the population ought to receive assistance of some kind. This is how you end up with 41% of the children born last year being paid for by Medicaid (and the poorer the state, the higher it goes – it was 70% in Louisiana), and why people end up trapped in an entitlement ghetto from which raises costs to a prohibitive level for any exit into self-sufficiency.

What’s more, the government do-goodism Wehner favors really doesn’t do much good. Wehner acknowledges this, and blames it on a lack of competence. But it isn’t a lack of competence that made the Bush presidency only expand entitlements, not cut them. It isn’t a lack of competence that makes Medicaid’s outcomes in many cases worse than being uninsured. And it certainly wasn’t a lack of competence that made No Child Left Behind the unmitigated domestic policy failure of a candidate who promised to be “the education president”. In all cases, the problem is the fact that it was a bad policy to begin with. Smarter people than Bush education advisor Margaret Spellings, who just left Mitt Romney’s policy team in a huff over insufficiently Bush-like policies, would’ve just made it more efficiently bad.