Politicians pose the greatest social risk to Americans.
Many of you may recall that a Democratic operative secretly recorded Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, telling sponsors that” 47 % of the people who did vote for the president no matter what” because they are “dependent upon state… believe that they are patients… believe the government has a responsibility to care for them… these are people who pay no income tax.”
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Even so, I could have said it was a bad idea to accuse the majority of the public of being a bunch of moochers. Coming from a large cat like Romney, it reeked of condescension.
Furthermore, Romney happened to be right. And what he said back next is still true today. But in modern politics, asking people to pay for their personal life is an action of self-immolation.
In a recent Gallup surveys, an incredible 9 in 10 young people help socialized treatments, paired with higher fees on the rich. What are the chances of backing expensive utopian experiments when there is n’t a bill in the mail? 9 in 10 young women would now be hoisting Gadsden flags on their lawns and sticking “taxation is theft” bumper stickers on their cars if we flattened federal taxes and made everyone pay their” fair share” or even one-tenth of their share, for that matter.
That’s never going to happen, because the incentives of contemporary politics are dangerously distorted. Americans anticipate paying the less the government spends the more. The more dependency it creates, the less self-reliance it expects.
A new study, which revealed a mind-blowing spike in government dependency, was just published in The Wall Street Journal. In 1970, safety-net funding accounted for the significant income in fewer than 1 % of all counties in the country. By 2000, 10 % of counties were getting a significant share of their income from federal and state safety-net and social programs. Today? More than half of all U.S. counties received at least a quarter of their income from government programs.
While people on the left like to grouse about “income inequality”, they never mention that every year, nearly$ 2 trillion, about the GDP of a mid-sized European country, is transferred to low-income Americans through hundreds of programs, from Medicaid to food stamps to refundable tax credits. Right now, there are 42 million people on food stamps.
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It would be beneficial if the government were rescuing people from poverty, but it is also creating a permanent underclass.
We can only afford this enormous transfer of wealth because, by every measure, we are the richest people on earth, and it’s not very close. Americans with low incomes lead richer lives than the general population of almost any other country. But how long can it continue if a growing number of voters rely on the efforts of their neighbors? What happens when this group becomes the most crucial component of winning an election?
Indeed, our tax base is shrinking. Progressivism adores Scandinavian countries as examples of ethical governance. Well, everyone pays exorbitantly high taxes in those nations. In the United States, the top 5 % of earners pay 66 % of all our federal taxes. Our entire economy is dependent on the prosperity of a small percentage of people.
The left gets irritated when you make this point out, arguing that low-income residents are still subject to various local taxes of all kinds. Indeed, they pay tons of invisible taxes. Sales taxes are just one. High corporate taxes are just another type of sales tax. As are tariffs.
Perhaps the most perverse invisible tax of all is the reckless spending that spurs inflation. None of it even comes close to covering the enormous debt that the federal government incurs annually. Every plutocrat that Democrats claim is profiting from the misled profits of capitalism could be bankrupt, and it would hardly make a difference.
Our debt, incidentally, is a massive generational tax. In 2023, the federal government spent$ 6.13 trillion, more than half on entitlement programs. Last year’s deficit of$ 1.7 trillion was more than the entire budget of the U. S. government in 1993. Ten years ago, the federal budget was$ 3.4 trillion. Does it feel like nearly doubling our “investment” in the federal government has paid off in more effective governance?
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 , There was once a political party that offered, at least, some performative objections to profligate spending and, on rare occasions, even slightly bent the doomsday trajectory. Today, the Republican Party does n’t even pretend to want to cut spending. Our politics have turned into a war between victimhood and class warfare. And it’s going to end in disaster.