RealClearPolitics - A Country in Denial About Its Fiscal Future
The budget impasse raises comparable questions. Can we resolve it before some ill-defined crisis imposes its own terms? For years, there has been a "something for nothing" aspect to our politics. More people became dependent on government. From 1960 to 2010, the share of federal spending going for "payments to individuals" (Social Security, food stamps, Medicare and the like) climbed from 26 percent to 66 percent. Meanwhile, the tax burden barely budged. In 1960, federal taxes were 17.8 percent of national income (gross domestic product). In 2007, they were 18.5 percent of GDP.The nation is definitely in denial. The United States has allowed the leviathan to do things that no government does well since this was thought as easy solutions to problems and in some cases to no problem at all. At the time, there was lots of prosperity due to there being lots of healthy and productive young people and a time when the drag on an economy from central planning stupidity was minor. Now, as the demographics have changed, the drag from central planning stupidity and the Marxist wealth redistribution emanating from the core of the Democratic party have hit hard not just the United States but is also manifesting itself currently in Europe.
Governments cannot be tasked with providing healthcare or retirement savings since as we have found out, all of the taxes, every little bit of it, that was collected to provide these benefits in old age to those that paid it have been spent and sometimes on things completely unrelated to retiree health and transfer payments. The money that is supposedly saved on our behalf does not exist. Its a lie. Government has shown that it just cannot be trusted with our money, so why do some fight to either give government more of our money (actually fight to have someone else give more of their money) \ or fight to continue benefits that clearly cannot be sustained indefinitely? Its a mystery to me, people have chosen to suspend reality but I think that at its core the philosophy flows from the 'something for nothing' crowd. We have built and sustained a group of people that somehow feel that since they have the good fortune to have been born within a specific set of national borders that the others that also live within this specific set of national borders owe them a life.
But, since we now have so many people are now dependent upon government for sustenance, we can expect that they will support that government as long as they can. Anyone that tries to take this away will be fought ferociously and no one can argue that it is not normal and its to be expected. However, just because we expect this kind of behavior, it does not make it legitimate that these people have a call on other's earnings. And considering as Marxist Democrats are arguing, that raising taxes on these people that are still productive and earning money is justified and moral, we have to consider that this is just the next step in an oppressive leviathan that will seek to seize what it needs and wants through its supposed legitimate taxing authority. Not only will this fail to raise even a sliver of what is needed, the process is vilifying those that are successful in an attempt to justify seizing their assets to distribute to the population. So, a society that is vilifying successful people where those that work and save are bad and is completely convinced through philosophy or just survival needs that since they were born or now live on a specific piece of property that they deserve the product of other's labors. This will only one day face a day of reckoning and this day is much much closer than we have imagined. That day of reckoning is upon Europe now and is giving us a view of what will happen in the US in the near future.
RealClearPolitics - A Country in Denial About Its Fiscal Future
posted by glenzo @ 12/27/2011 01:31:00 PM
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