Obama's America: From World Superpower to Welfare State

America finally knows what President Obama meant when he said he intended to “fundamentally transform America.”  He aimed to make this country unrecognizable to its Founding Fathers, and he’s done just that.

Obama has reversed the role of the federal government – instead of looking like the world’s hegemonic superpower, we look more like the world’s most innovative social welfare state to be envied by all of Western Europe.

This year defense spending will sink to its lowest levels in our nation’s history; meanwhile, entitlement spending will reach new highs.

This is part of an astounding overall trend in our federal government’s spending habits. The Heritage Foundation reports, “Defense spending has declined significantly over time, even when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are included, as spending on the three major entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—has more than tripled.”

In 2012 alone, Heritage reveals an immense gap between defense and entitlement spending—defense comprised 19% of total outlays, while entitlements reached a gargantuan 62% of federal spending.

This is a complete perversion of what the Founding Fathers intended.

As former Senator James Talent wrote, providing for the common defense is the “priority job” and “the only mandatory function” of the federal government.

He wrote in the Heritage Foundation, “Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution lists 17 separate powers that are granted to Congress.  Six of those powers deal exclusively with the national defense—far more than any other specific area of governance....”

Indeed, America’s early presidents and Congresses respected and stayed true to this bedrock conception of the federal government.

The Office of Management and Budget acknowledges before the 1930s, most federal spending went toward “national defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest on the public debt,” and in 1929, “71 percent of federal outlays fell into these categories.”

But, today, the opposite holds true.  Our federal government devotes nearly that same amount to the welfare state even though the Constitution only makes a cursory mention of providing for the general welfare.

Taken together, our country has strayed perilously far from the America our Founding Fathers envisioned, and in doing so, we are expediting our fall from greatness.

Where is the America that toppled the Soviet Union, put the first man on the moon, and conquered the great frontier?  That America is quickly becoming a distant memory.

Instead, we are striving to become a liberal Utopia, all the while ignoring that this sort of idealism precipitated the all-consuming debt and economic travails we see just across the Atlantic Ocean.

America must reject the premise that our Constitution is outdated, cliché and therefore invalid and demand that our government reflect the core principles that made us the greatest nation on earth.

It’s time to thwart Obama’s twisted plan or perhaps the foreboding words of President Ronald Reagan will one day ring true:  “We’re in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor.  Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.”