American Thinker

by John L. Smith

    The modern Democrat party has built its political power on promising government solutions to problems that its own policies often perpetuate. Whether the subject is foreign aid, hunger, unemployment, failing cities, or dependence on public assistance, Democrat politicians rarely ask what caused the problem or whether decades of government intervention have actually made it worse.

    Instead, they use suffering to demand more spending, more programs, and more centralized control. The result is a self-perpetuating system in which government failure becomes the justification for still more government.

    Many potential 2028 Democrat presidential candidates spoke at the National Urban League’s 2026 conference in Nashville. Among Kamala Harris’s sound bites was her claim that more than 600,000 people around the world had died because of President Trump’s USAID budget cuts.

🚨 KAMALA JUST PULLED A NUMBER OUT OF THIN AIR AGAIN

    She claims Elon + Rubio’s DOGE cuts to USAID “killed” 600,000–700,000 people.

    That’s not a statistic.

    That’s fan fiction.

    DOGE didn’t kill anybody.

All they do is lie. pic.twitter.com/8np50Ksmco

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) July 31, 2026

    Her estimate is extremely difficult to prove, as is often the case with political rhetoric. It is conjecture, a guess, or even a lie, crafted for its attention-grabbing horror.

But suppose the number is accurate. The cuts took effect only in 2025, while U.S. taxpayers have funded USAID programs for decades. If 600,000 people tragically died during the past 18 months, does that mean tens or even hundreds of millions are alive today because of all those previous years of USAID spending  How can you even prove that

More importantly, can we in the United States really save everybody, all the time, everywhere  Can the United States really do absolutely everything for everybody, all the time

Is it wrong for us to take care of our own people before taking care of everyone in other countries who, incidentally, do not and probably never will pay U.S. taxes

    Kamala projects a sincere belief that Republicans—and especially President Trump—are responsible for every failing everywhere in the world. Democrats think big to confuse people and capture their imaginations and votes. Perpetual problems and the Democrat party: You cannot have one without the other.

    And even as the Democrats insist that we save the world, they campaign that we are failing to feed our own people. Death’s helper, hunger, is a major Democrat party talking point this year. Almost anywhere you see or read political news, Democrats are quoted repeating phrases such as:

• Food insecurity
• Going hungry
• Depriving children of food

    Thoughtful Democrat party members—and all thoughtful Americans—are still waiting for a candidate who will ask, “If this is your major concern, why, in every city governed by Democrats for decades, can parents still not afford to pack lunches for their children ” Follow-up questions might include asking:

• Why are so many people in long-term Democrat-governed cities such as Chicago and Baltimore unable to find good-paying jobs
• Did Democrat party policies deliver the wrong courses in their schools
• Did Democrat party zoning laws and complicated building-permit requirements scare away job-creating businesses
• Did Democrat party politicians convince people that they were so beaten down that they must be permanently nursed by Democrat-passed programs

    They might also observe that the employees of those Democrat-funded governments and NGO earn real money, receive real pensions, and have no trouble paying their bills or feeding their children.

If we cannot create an economy in our own 50 states with job and career opportunities that pay a living wage, how can American taxpayers prevent hunger and death across the planet

    But rather than answering these questions, Democrats double down. Their “Team Democrat” rhetoric and projects this year include repetitive claims of starvation across our land:

• End Hunger Now
• The Food Assurance and Security Act
• The Senior Hunger Prevention Act
• School Lunches for All

    If your roof has a hole in it, do you want your landlord to patch the hole or give you a free bucket  Providing free lunches in public schools is easier than making communities attractive to job-creating entrepreneurs.

    If people cannot feed their children, they need jobs, not food stamps. It is the old saying: Teach people to fish, and they eat every day; give them a fish, and they eat for only one day.

    The Democrat party seems to perpetuate problems and then fool voters into believing those problems can be addressed only through Democrat laws and programs. Yet the available facts show that Democrat influence and control often create the very problems Democrat officials claim only they can fix, whether at home or abroad.

    Claims about “food deserts,” for example, ignore how restrictive zoning and inadequate protection for residents and businesses make opening grocery stores difficult. Unchecked crime discourages entrepreneurs from risking their money by opening stores in troubled neighborhoods.

    Some of the clearest explanations of politicians’ failure to address these primary causes can be found in Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics. In an essay summarizing some of these principles, he wrote:

    Prices, in fact, do tend to be higher – and the quality of service and products lower – in stores in low-income neighborhoods. But the knee-jerk assumption that this represents exploitation or racism ignores economics... [C]rime, shoplifting, vandalism and riots have raised the costs, both directly and by causing insurance rates and the costs of security to be higher.

    Let us hope that Republicans, Independents, and thoughtful Democrats work hard to counter the politicians who have built their careers and retirement packages on Great Society programs that have failed to accomplish what they promised ever since LBJ tried to give us both guns and butter. Instead, we got Watts and Vietnam—unintended consequences in the extreme.

    (For a timeline of these events and their causes and effects, see Amity Shlaes’s 2019 book, The Great Society: A New History.)

    America mistakenly wandered out of the land of the free and the home of the brave and into a land of taxes upon taxes, exemptions and credits, loopholes and deductions, programs and policies, rules and regulations, and subsidies with strings attached. And still, Democrats double down:

•     Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said in February 2025, “We have to fight this in the Congress. We have to fight this in the streets.”
•     House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), also speaking in February 2025, told Americans to “fight” the Trump administration “in the streets.”

    In some Democrat-run cities, it seems plausible that a city council chosen by lottery could hardly do worse than the politicians who have long controlled Chicago, Baltimore, and other chronically dysfunctional cities.

    Maybe—just maybe—America needs much less taking to the streets and much more freedom for local communities to govern themselves, rather than being forced to conform to federal “aid” programs.

    People power has been stolen by the very party that has spent all these years shouting, “Power to the people.”

    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a man who survived Soviet Russia’s prisons established to punish those who dared disagree with their rulers, wrote: “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free they are not equal. If they are equal they are not free.”

Will we heed the warning

    John L. Smith is a pseudonym.