Kevin Bryant

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In a post Obama speech recap, the Hill made an excellent point.

Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) stood to applaud heartily after Obama said:

“Some of you sincerely believe that the only solution to our economic challenges is to simply cut most government spending and eliminate government regulations.”

Mr. President if you would practice this simple concept, we may crawl out of this hole.

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Hey Guys,
I was blessed to have the month of August to be back in  South Carolina and out of Washington, DC.  I had the opportunity to visit with many of you during our “listening tour” which took me to almost every corner of the District!  Thank you for taking the time to come and share your thoughts and concerns with me so that I can truly represent your voice in the Nation’s Capitol!

The attached video sums up the time well spent in the District.  I hope you will take a moment to view it.

The upcoming Presidential primaries have reinvigorated the now long-standing diversion of how a candidate can appeal both to social conservatives and fiscal conservatives.

However, I do not differentiate “social” matters from “fiscal” matters. I have a moral obligation to protect the unborn, and I have a moral obligation to guard freedom. I do my moral duty when I keep sexually explicit material labeled “educational” out of schools.

I likewise have a moral obligation not to waste the taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. It is immoral not to give the taxpayer a very precise accounting of every dollar we spend. It is immoral to ignore the principle in God’s word: “The borrower is slave to the lender” and continue to pile up unsustainable amounts of debt.

These principles perfectly contrast that of the socialist left. Government, in the socialist scheme, becomes the agent of immorality; teaching us to ignore the 10th commandment, “thou shalt not covet”. A socialist government tells us we are deserving of services paid for with someone else’s money. As soon as the 10th commandment is fully ignored, then the first commandment is forgotten, “thou shalt have no other Gods before me”. Government then becomes the god of the people, and it effectually enslaves them. The inevitability of that sequence of events recently unfolded right before our eyes.

Some of the rioters in England recently confirmed this attitude. One of the participants was asked “why are you doing this to your own local people?” The reply was “It’s the government’s fault…because of all the rich people that own businesses that’s why all this is happening”. This convoluted response actually illustrates the ultimate effect of the welfare state.

The United Kingdom offers a textbook case. Statistics from 2010 indicated that five million people received unemployment benefits. The staggering factoid was that about twenty-eight percent of those on unemployment had been there for nine of the last ten years. This “economic” fact translated into an equally staggering set of “social” facts.

Alcohol deaths in the U.K. have doubled over the last two decades. During 2004-2005, nearly a third of those under 25 had multiple sexual partners. Nearly 19% of all households had no one working in 2009.

The immorality of perpetual “welfare” led to the immorality of crime and vice. This socialist model failed in the Soviet Union, is failing in Europe and will ultimately fail in America unless we change course.

Barry Goldwater wrote “Indeed, this is one of the great evils of Welfarism – that it transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal without his knowing it.”

Conservatives must resist the effort to divide issues along lines of “fiscal” and “social”. They merely are the two sides of the same coin—the coin that the government wants to take from you and give to someone else.

Kevin Bryant represents Anderson County in the South Carolina Senate. He can be reached at www.kevinbryant.com.