Barak Obama regularly calls Americans to sacrifice - warning that things are going to get worse before they can get better. Yet our economy is better than it was during the Carter administration, and Reagan's solution of tax cuts and deregulation brought us out of it without further suffering. By very definition, the plan of President Obama and his Democrat colleagues in the House and Senate will cause greater suffering rather than relieve it. Obama and the Democrats will increase the burden on Americans and drive us further into debt as a nation.

Obama often repeats that government is the solution. That's true at this moment in time, but only because the government is the only entity that can provide tax relief and get out of the way by reducing regulation. But that's not his plan. He wants to increase our burdens and make us more completely dependent upon the government.

And President Obama, in his books, has alluded to his philosophy - he admired Marxism. The following story can be found in many liberal blogs - used to criticize Republicans - but clearly finds it parallel in Obama and not Bush:

During those final days of the collapsing Marxist experiment in the Soviet Union, Soviet novelist Chingiz Aitmatov retold the following story, which has been paraphrased here.

On one occasion, so it was narrated, Stalin called for a live chicken and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before some of his henchmen. Forcefully clutching the chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch,” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some bread crumbs in his hand. Incredibly, the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the legs of his trousers. Stalin threw a handful of grain to the bird, and it began to follow him around the room, he turned to his dumbfounded colleagues and said quietly, “This is the way to rule the people. Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on them they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.”

- Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God, (Word Publ., Dallas: 1994), pp. 26-27

Whether for your health care, for your right to work, or for feeding your family, President Obama and friends want to be sure that you have nowhere else to turn - that you'll 'cling to the legs of his trousers'. The President has expressed it in his books, he's campaigned on the underlying premises, and he's signed several executive orders to advance this very goal.

We who believe in freedom, who want to enjoy the fruits of our labor, need to work now to bring conservatives - of any party - to the majority in Congress and the U.S. Senate.