One of the best columns of the year was written by a columnist for The Telegraph.  Janet Daley’s column is titled:  The truth is that politicians are telling lies.  She writes truth about big lies that will effect your future and it is worth reading in its entirety.  Excerpts:

Was 2012 the year when the democratic world lost its grip on reality? Must we
assume now that no party that speaks the truth about the economic future has a chance of winning power in a national election? With the results of presidential contests in the United States and France as evidence, this would seem to be the only possible conclusion. Any political leader prepared to deceive the
electorate into believing that government spending, and the vast system of
services that it provides, can go on as before – or that they will be able to
resume as soon as this momentary emergency is over – was propelled into office
virtually by acclamation.

So universal has this rule turned out to be that parties and leaders who know
better – whose economic literacy is beyond question – are now afraid even to
hint at the fact which must eventually be faced. The promises that governments
are making to their electorates are not just misleading: they are unforgivably
dishonest. …

…This is not an ideological argument about the moral advantages of a smaller
state: it is simple economic necessity. As the man said, there’s no money left.
And the only ways that anybody can think of for the state to get more of it are
either futile (taxing the “rich”) or destructive of any possibility of recovery
(more borrowing). What began as a banking collapse has turned into a crisis of
democratic politics. Is this what we have to look forward to? The process of
campaigning and voting will be an irrelevance: all parties will tell pretty much
the same lies. Whichever one is marginally more credible than the others will
gain power (probably in coalition with another bunch of liars), and then have to
do what needs to be done in whatever desperate, underhand ways it can devise.
Nobody will feel that he got what he voted for, because what he voted for was
impossible.

 Time Magazine claimed that one of the primary reasons that President Obama deserved to be their “Man of the Year” was because he was able to capture the votes of the large segment of the population who don’t know anything about politics and don’t normally pay any attention to it.  He mobilized the “Political Fools for Obama” demographic.  Impressive achievement.

The people who vote for a living now outnumber the people who work for a living.

People warned us that our democracy would fail when citizens realized that they could vote themselves benefits from the public treasury.  We’re there.  Economist Northrup Beuchner writes:

We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the model for civilized governance that has dominated Western civilization since WWII. That model has been provision by the state of all or most of the needs of its people combined with the popular election of the government. Or, in other words, the welfare state plus democracy.

What we are seeing in Europe is that that model is inherently unsustainable. The concept of individual rights is the only standard for government action that puts an objective limit on what the government can do. The post-war leaders of Europe were completely ignorant of that standard. They adopted instead the principle that the primary function of government is to assure its citizens’ welfare. Since there is no limit in principle to the free benefits people would like to get from their government, politicians competed for their citizens’ votes by promising and providing more and more welfare. The political parties that promised the most benefits won the elections.

As for the winner of the last big election, President Obama, is increasingly comfortable in his lies.  They seem to be working well for him.  Few in the media even question his absurd claims, so the politician with the worst record of debt creation in history, the one who has not advanced a single credible plan to deal with this disaster, can still stand before a microphone and tell us how very concerned he is about the debt, and calmly assure us that he is working very hard to deal with it.  Those are the lies.  Here is the truth about his plan from Daniel Halper:

Spending will increase 55 percent over the next decade, if President Barack Obama’s budget plan goes into effect. The finding comes from the Republican-side of the Senate Budget Committee, which notes that Obama’s “Proposal Would Spend $880 Billion Over Already Projected Increases.”

Here’s a chart, detailing how Obama’s plan would bring spending from $3.62 trillion in 2013 to $5.63 trillion in 2022:

“The President’s last fiscal cliff offer once again increased spending rather than reducing it,” writes the minority-side of the Senate Budget Committee. “His plan does claim $800 billion in spending reductions over ten years, but these claims are more than offset by new spending increases: increasing spending above BCA limits ($1,200 billion); paying for the doc fix ($400 billion); new transportation stimulus spending ($50 billion), and; a one-year extension of unemployment insurance ($30 billion).  After subtracting the president’s savings from his spending increases, over the next 10 years the President’s proposal actually spends $880 billion more – $44.368 trillion versus $43.488 trillion – than currently projected spending levels.  In the next two years alone, the President’s plan would spend $255 billion over current projected spending levels ($156 billion higher in FY13 and $99 billion higher in FY14). Overall, spending would increase 55% under the President’s plan, from $3.6 trillion in FY13 to $ 5.6 trillion in FY22.”