Live Liberal :: LESS ABOUT ME, MORE ABOUT WE.

With apologies for overlooking most of the 17th and 18th centuries, it was later in the 19th century that liberals in Congress initiated and passed the Morrill Land Grant Act. This Act granted land in virtually every state to build a university for higher learning. Shortly thereafter, public universities placed higher education within the reach of most Americans at about the same time that universal public education, a liberal idea, became the norm. At the turn of the century, the liberals in Congress initiated and funded sewer and water systems, food safety laws, and founded the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health. During this same time, truth in advertising laws and product labeling were put into effect by liberals over the anguished protests of conservatives who insisted it would be too expensive and a burden to business.

Early in the 1920's, liberals in Congress and throughout the States gave women the right to vote. In the next couple of decades, our society was dramatically improved by too many changes to mention here, but a few of them will give you a taste of what the "New Deal" and the "Fair Deal" and the "Great Society" accomplished. During these periods, liberals gave us labor laws and workplace safety laws and rural electrification and Social Security and the TVA and the National Weather Service and the interstate highway system and the GI Bill and the Peace Corp and the space program and the FDIC and public broadcasting and the civil rights movement and the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the internet and the Family and Medical Leave Act to give a few examples.

Conversely, if we just look at the years of 1980-1993 and 2000 to the present, years of conservative ascendancy, we see a steady growth in income inequality, a drop in savings, a rise in personal debt, the increasing need for two family incomes, an increase in poverty, a decrease in charitable giving among the rich (but an increase among the poor), the largest national debt ever, seeing the USA move from the greatest creditor nation in the world to the greatest debtor nation in the world, a severely weakened US dollar, and the largest foreign investment in and ownership of our businesses and industries.