No: Nancy Pelosi is bad for Dems but worse for America
Rep. Nancy Pelosi has been dreaming of returning to her role as the speaker of the House of Representatives for more than seven years. It appears she’s finally going to get her second chance — and Americans everywhere should be nervous.
As speaker, Pelosi presided over some of the worst years in modern American history.
While President George W. Bush often gets most of the blame, and unfairly so, for the 2008 economic crash, few remember Democrats had been running Congress for nearly two years leading up to the recession, when Pelosi was the party’s most prominent and vocal leader.
It was Pelosi, along with other Democratic leaders like former Rep. Barney Frank, who routinely called for reducing home lending standards to achieve political goals — directly contributing to the eventual collapse of the financial market.
And according to former Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission member Peter Wallison, Pelosi orchestrated what essentially amounts to a cover-up to hide the government’s role in the crash.
Even worse, Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues attempted to fix the disaster they were partially responsible for by wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on a horrible stimulus package.
The Pelosi-backed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act cost more than $800 billion, and according to analysts at the American Enterprise Institute, George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, Congressional Budget Office and many more, it produced few meaningful results, as evidenced by the fact unemployment rose dramatically in the wake of its passage.
Economist Peter Ferrara, my colleague at The Heartland Institute, analyzed every economic crash and recovery over the past century, and found the ObamaPelosi policies of 2009 and 2010 created the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression.
Pelosi’s failures aren’t limited to economics, either. She was also one of the chief advocates of the Affordable Care Act, perhaps the single worst piece of health care legislation in American history.
Not only did the ACA force millions of Americans out of health insurance policies they liked — after being promised repeatedly that wouldn’t happen — it also subjected tens of millions of families to skyrocketing health insurance premiums and deductibles.
Premiums doubled from 2013 to 2017, and HealthPocket reports the average deductible for an Obamacare Bronze family plan is a whopping $12,186 — well beyond what most people can afford to spend in the midst of a health care crisis.
Even after all of these failures, it appears Nancy Pelosi hasn’t learned her lesson. She’s still saying the best way to solve America’s health care challenges is to repair Obamacare — an impossibility, since it’s fundamentally and hopelessly flawed. And she wants to impose costly renewable-energy mandates in a ridiculous attempt to control the weather and battle climate change.
Pelosi has mocked and ridiculed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, ignorantly referring to the thousands of dollars in extra cash delivered by the tax reform package to millions of American families as “crumbs.”
And she’s called for raising taxes on job creators to fund her numerous proposals to expand the size and power of government — a strategy that would stunt economic growth and increase unemployment.
Pelosi’s policies have failed over and over again, which is why House Democrats took one of the biggest political beatings in U.S. history during the 2010 elections, when Democrats, in a single year, went from enjoying a 79-seat advantage to being stuck with a 49seat deficit.
Pelosi’s policies offer Americans absolutely nothing they haven’t already seen and rejected before: more regulations, higher taxes, less freedom, and fewer health care options. It’s time for something better.