More Than Half Of All Americans Are Suckling At The Government Teat

This is right out of an Ayn Rand novel,

“Slightly over half of all Americans — 52.6 percent — now receive significant income from government programs according to an analysis by Gary Shilling, an economist in Springfield, N.J. That’s up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the 28.3 percent of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55 percent, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President’s Reagan’s move to scale back the size of government.

That two-decade shrink-the-government trend now appears over, if for no other reason than demographics. The aging baby-boomer generation is poised to receive big payments from Social Security and government healthcare programs.

…Mr. Shilling’s analysis found that about 1 in 5 Americans hold a government job or a job reliant on federal spending. A similar number receive Social Security or a government pension. About 19 million others get food stamps, 2 million get subsidized housing, and 5 million get education grants. For all these categories, Mr. Shilling counted dependents as well as the direct recipients of government income.”

I’m sure that liberals love the idea of having half the country parasitically receiving income from the other half of the country, but the Founding Fathers would have been absolutely appalled and disgusted by it — with good reason.

America has been an economic success not because of the government or because of socialism, but because of capitalism, liberty, and self-reliance. So, the more people we have in our society riding on the backs of everyone else via government money, the farther we get from sending the message that people need to be independent and take care of themselves and the worse off we will be economically and morally as a nation.

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