Consequences are never to be considered. Only intentions.

Yeah, maybe they got a little be too enthusiastic there. It seems the media made a classic statistical error, namely small sample size. They polled themselves and found they were solidly in the democratic camp and loved obama and figured that must apply to everyone else in the country.

Don’t think it can happen here? We already have a leftist state media that fawns over everything Dear Leader says, after spending 8 years parsing everything GWB said even down to critique of pronunciation.

Read the COTUS lately? Know what “ex post facto” and “bill of Attainder” mean? http://chl-tx.com/instructorsview/the-constitution-of-the-united-states/

Now, for the pessimism:
As Antonin Scalia said about another issue (death penalty, IIRC): it’s a one-way ratchet. The government will continue to expand, since there is no real way to stop it or even to reverse it.

It’s not just people getting used to benefits, as Mat explained; it’s that people believe that they are paying for them. (I emphasise the “belief” as opposed to the reality because the burden of paying for these things falls upon future generations, when financed with debt, or the wealthy, when financed with current funds.) It’s not just that you have to stop giving out freebies; you have to convince people to not get something they think they paid for.

For the suggestions:
If the Republicans were to start acting like conservatives and be serious about cutting back government, they would work on a balanced budget amendment. Many state governments have them and can get things to work. Aside from the fact that this might force politicians to deal with M/M/Social Security, it would also slow down expansion: during economic good times, the government would be aware that it would have to save money for the lean years that inevitably happen during recessions and would have an excuse to not throw money around when times are good (which leads to, as night follows day, much howling when those programmes are cut during a recession when “the people need them the most”).

Last I heard, Washington, DC has an unemployment rate of about 5%. It’s basically leaching off the rest of the nation.

If only politics were an indicator, I would agree with this. However, if they ram all this stuff through, they may lose in the short term, but I suspect that they’d win long term. The bills going through Congress will increase government control and make people even more dependent on the bureaucrats.

Take the example for Britain. Their bureaucracy is virtually the largest employer in the world. The sheer number working in the government means that they’ll never get rid of their system. It’s too damn big and those people working in it will not voluntarily get rid of their own jobs. As with Britain, so with the US (eventually).

Plus, once you get people slotted into these programs, they’ll get used to them and you’ll never get rid of this stuff. It will be politically TNT to touch (think Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare; they’re politically untouchable). As I just mentioned, you can’t touch Social Security and M/M because people are too used to the system, however badly there needs to be an overhaul for that (and we need to reform both of those because they will break us financially, much like the health care topic).

So while I think that, yes, the Democrats can potentially lose big politically, by ramming these programs through, they can ultimately win the war (much will depend on how far the idealogical left is willing to go to push this stuff through). As I said before, we conservatives need to be thinking more on those levels (and in multiple dimensions) in order to combat this. Unfortunately, as your post shows, we’re still thinking along one-dimensional lines (the politics).