President Obama and the Democrats found themselves in a position of falling popularity and support. As a result, they began a campaign discussing the importance of the safety net and bemoaning “income inequality”. For decades they’ve attacked Republicans as mean spirited, and heartless because they don’t support the safety net with the same single-minded zeal that Democrats do. Republicans and conservatives need a counter to the visual of the safety net in order to paint a picture in American’s minds of the reality of the safety net in this country.

Trapeze Artists

The term safety net has its origins in one, two, and three ring circuses. Every American can picture a net strung out below a high wire or trapeze act, and imagine a circus performer making a mistake, plunging downward only to be caught by the safety net supported and saved. It’s this visual that the left has relied upon for years to sell their social programs. Today however, the reality of that safety net is a much different picture! Republicans and conservatives need to speak to the intent to the safety net. When circus performers fall and are saved they don’t just lay there in the net waiting for the next circus performer to fall, potentially landing on top of them. After getting saved, performers make their way to the edge, and get off. By vacating the net, it’s left fully prepared and able to catch the next performer who slips and falls. What we have in America today is a safety net that’s full of people and one supporting an enormous and growing weight. The reality of the cost of all of those people in the safety net is that it threatens to bring down the entire tent upon not only the people in that net, but also down upon the rest of the American people who support it.

The visual that needs to be discussed is of an crowded and sagging safety net stretching toward the ground, bending the very supports that are holding up the net, the high wire, and the tent. Given our massive national debt, the strain upon those supports is becoming unsustainable. If we don’t relieve some of the pressure in the safety net it will go plunging to the ground leaving no safety net for the future at all. Republicans are labeled as heartless when they attempt to reform social welfare programs. The truth is, that it’s heartless to lie to the American people and tell them that there’s no limit to how much money can be spent on the social safety net. For the vast majority of people, the net is intended to be a temporary situation, not a way of life. There are, of course, those who are mentally or physically handicapped who will never be able to work and support themselves. They are the exception! Most of the people in the safety net are intended to get off, making room for the next person. Our country has spent over $20 trillion on wealth redistribution for the safety net. It’s possible to conclude that if not for the war on poverty, the United States wouldn’t have a national debt at all. The humane thing to do is to save the safety net for current and future generations. The only way to do that is to reduce the weight that’s in the net.

Sadly, Pres. Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the rest of the Democrats continue to pass laws, regulations, and presidential orders that are the equivalent of tossing cinder-blocks onto the safety net. Obama care alone will cost US taxpayers over $2 trillion, and is the equivalent of dropping an entire pallet load of cinder-blocks on the safety net! It’s only a matter of time before Democrats, progressives and liberals collapse the net. When it goes it will bring the high wire, the trapeze and the big top itself down upon the American people.

It’s this visual that needs to be conveyed, used over and over and over again and hammered home every time the safety net analogy is brought up. Republicans are trying to save the safety net. That is the humane thing to do. Democrat policies will collapse it, and nothing could be more inhumane than that!