Vin Suprynowicz

A record 49 percent of Americans live in a household where someone receives at least one type of government benefit, according to the Census Bureau. That’s up from 46 percent in 1975 and 18 percent in 1940.

In fact, 63 percent of all federal spending this year will consist of checks written to individuals for which the government receives currently no services, the White House budget office estimates.

Handouts.

Yes, many were “earned” — see military pensions and disabilities. Nonetheless, those figures will climb. The 75 million baby boomers have only begun to retire, while President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul — if it survives — will put taxpayers and employers on the hook to extend insurance coverage to 30 million more people.

“The more households that are benefiting from the programs, the more difficult it is to rein in their costs,” says Bob Bixby, head of the Concord Coalition, a Virginia-based group that promotes balanced budgets.

Duh.

If anything, the Census Bureau’s number may be understated. Parents with children in the government schools may not be accustomed to the notion that their families are on welfare, but plenty of federal money does now flow to local school districts through the U.S. Departments of Education and Agriculture on the basis of “need.”

The increasing reliance on the federal “safety net” comes as a congressional supercommittee faces mounting pressure to identify and recommend a paltry $1.5 trillion in savings, backloaded over the next decade, which might as well mean “after the lost continent of Atlantis resurfaces.” But Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican who sits on the supercommittee, says the swelling number of beneficiaries is “very distressing” even to those who hope to reach even this paltry goal, because it means much of the population is “hooked on government” and will oppose any cuts.

The number of Americans receiving food stamps alone is up 72 percent over the past five recessionary years, to a record 45.3 million, Bloomberg News reports. Their annual cost, projected this year to reach $80 billion, tops the yearly budgets of most federal agencies.

And Michigan announced this week that owning a Cadillac will no longer “count against” people applying for food stamps, there.

Another cost-driver is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The more than 2 million Americans who have served in one of the theaters have begun claiming promised health-care and education benefits — and those medical bills alone could reach $55 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, complains that opinion polls show the public wants neither benefits cut nor higher taxes — except on “the rich,” of course, by which each person polled means “someone richer than me.”

Are we surprised? Once a working majority come to believe they’re “entitled” to government handouts — once any feeling of shame over being thought to be “on the dole” vanishes — it was inevitable that the majority would be quickly converted into a mob of mendicants, demanding handouts to be funded by looting an ever-shrinking pool of tax-paying “suckers.”

To wit: A Bloomberg News-Washington Post poll earlier this month found more than four-fifths of Americans opposed reducing Social Security or Medicare benefits, and a similar percentage said they didn’t want taxes increased on the middle class either — although they favored raising them on “the rich,” despite the fact the National Taxpayers Union reports the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans already pay 58 percent of federal personal income taxes; the wealthiest 10 percent already pay 70 percent of all such taxes.

“None of this adds up,” says Sen. Conrad.

There are solutions. The problem is that what might be most just and effective diverges from what is declared politically palatable.

The Constitution, which each federal lawmakers swears an oath to protect and defend, limits federal spending to a short list of subject areas contained in Article I Section 8. It does not say Congress can spend on anything that “promotes the general welfare,” or “regulate any thing that moves in interstate commerce.” But at this late date, where shall we find a high court or a chief executive who will lower the boom on such excesses, trimming federal outlays by 90 percent overnight despite the predictable moaning and wailing?

For that matter, a century or two ago, when most government expenditures were funded by excises and property taxes, the right to vote was largely limited to land-owners and the “wealthy” who paid the import duties on luxury goods, on the sensible theory that only those who actually paid the taxes should have a say in how they were spent.

Largely as a result, government was small; the freedom to spend one’s own earnings as one saw fit — including inventing new technologies and building the profitable factories that gave American workers the highest living standard in the world — remained relatively vast.

But that often had the effect — not always, but often — of disenfranchising racial minorities, which was lamentable. The gradual extension of the franchise to all adults, including those permanently on the dole, is generally thus considered to have been a fine advance for democracy. But of course the Founders were deeply suspicious of direct democracy, which they equated with “mob rule.”

We may be about to learn why.

Those who propose today to eliminate the obvious conflict of interest by limiting the franchise to “net tax payers,” while denying it to “net tax recipients,” face hurdles beyond simply deciding how and where to draw such a line. (Social Security recipients, after all, are now “tax recipients,” since their own “contributions” were spent long ago on aircraft carriers and million-dollar solar-powered outhouses.) They must also deal with the predictable shrieking and hollering of the two generations of knee-jerk statist redistributionists churned out since 1965 by our government youth propaganda camps, who will wail on cue that this is merely a “scheme to let the rich stop paying their ‘fair share’” — with “fair share” meaning “everything they’ve got.”

The other option is that which played out in Weimar Germany in 1923: Debase the currency by printing more and more till worthless paper notes with four and five zeroes litter the streets unclaimed since they will no longer buy a stick of gum, allowing demagogues to blame everything on some limited class of people who “hoarded” liquid assets and thus were able to buy the jewelry and heirlooms of their desperate neighbors for the going price of a can of beans.

(See Adam Fergusson’s definitive “When Money Dies,” 1975, Kimber & Co.)

In central Europe 88 years ago, can we name a minority or class of people who were thus reviled with much amplified vehemence, beginning in 1923? Can we name a political party that prospered by perpetuating and institutionalizing such scapegoating?

We’d better be. For those who cannot remember the past, as my friend A.D. Hopkins so often reminds us, are condemned to having George Santayana endlessly quoted at them.