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\u2019s up from 46 percent in 1975 and 18 percent in 1940.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Handouts.<\/p>\n
Yes, many were \u201cearned\u201d — see military pensions and disabilities. Nonetheless, those figures will climb. The 75 million baby boomers have only begun to retire, while President Barack Obama\u2019s health-care overhaul — if it survives — will put taxpayers and employers on the hook to extend insurance coverage to 30 million more people.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more households that are benefiting from the programs, the more difficult it is to rein in their costs,\u201d says Bob Bixby, head of the Concord Coalition, a Virginia-based group that promotes balanced budgets.<\/p>\n
Duh.<\/p>\n
If anything, the Census Bureau\u2019s 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 \u201cneed.\u201d<\/p>\n
The increasing reliance on the federal \u201csafety net\u201d 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 \u201cafter the lost continent of Atlantis resurfaces.\u201d But Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican who sits on the supercommittee, says the swelling number of beneficiaries is \u201cvery distressing\u201d even to those who hope to reach even this paltry goal, because it means much of the population is \u201chooked on government\u201d and will oppose any cuts.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And Michigan announced this week that owning a Cadillac will no longer \u201ccount against\u201d people applying for food stamps, there.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cthe rich,\u201d of course, by which each person polled means \u201csomeone richer than me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Are we surprised? Once a working majority come to believe they\u2019re \u201centitled\u201d to government handouts — once any feeling of shame over being thought to be \u201con the dole\u201d 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 \u201csuckers.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019t want taxes increased on the middle class either — although they favored raising them on \u201cthe rich,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cNone of this adds up,\u201d says Sen. Conrad.<\/p>\n
There are solutions. The problem is that what might be most just and effective diverges from what is declared politically palatable.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cpromotes the general welfare,\u201d or \u201cregulate any thing that moves in interstate commerce.\u201d 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?<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwealthy\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Largely as a result, government was small; the freedom to spend one\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmob rule.\u201d<\/p>\n
We may be about to learn why.<\/p>\n
Those who propose today to eliminate the obvious conflict of interest by limiting the franchise to \u201cnet tax payers,\u201d while denying it to \u201cnet tax recipients,\u201d face hurdles beyond simply deciding how and where to draw such a line. (Social Security recipients, after all, are now \u201ctax recipients,\u201d since their own \u201ccontributions\u201d 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 \u201cscheme to let the rich stop paying their \u2018fair share\u2019\u201d — with \u201cfair share\u201d meaning \u201ceverything they\u2019ve got.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201choarded\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
(See Adam Fergusson\u2019s definitive \u201cWhen Money Dies,\u201d 1975, Kimber & Co.)<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
We\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-election"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sWqFl-901","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":903,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions\/903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}