A very large segment of the population has figured out that it can use voting as a tool to get more money and benefits from the government, and that is a very dangerous thing. Once upon a time, the free market was the one that distributed nearly all the wealth in our system. But now the federal government has become a giant deluded "Santa Claus" that distributes goodies to the American people far beyond its actual capacity to do so. In fact, we are borrowing trillions of dollars that we do not have so that our politicians can continue to buy votes with handouts. Look, we will always need a safety net. We don't want anyone in America starving to death or sleeping in the street. However, our current system has gotten completely and totally out of control. Today, there are nearly 80 different "means-tested welfare programs" operated by the federal government. As I have written about previously, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in those programs. Sadly, that does not even count Social Security and Medicare. Tens of millions of Americans are enrolled in each of those programs as well. And when you add in more than 22 million government workers, you get one giant pile of people that are getting money or benefits from the government. In fact, at this point more than half of all Americans are at least partially dependent on the government.
A recent Forbes article by Bill Wilson estimates that over 165 million Americans are government dependents to at least some degree....
New research from Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee Jeff Sessions (R-AL) reveals that this reality may already be here, with more than 107 million Americans on some form of means-tested government welfare.
Add to that 46 million seniors collecting Medicare (subtracting out about 10 million on Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, and other senior-eligible programs already included in Sessions’ means-tested chart) and 22 million government employees at the federal, state, and local level — and suddenly, over 165 million people, a clear majority of the 308 million Americans counted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2010, are at least partially dependents of the state.
That is absolutely staggering.
So why is this happening?
Well, for one thing our economy is not producing enough good jobs. Millions of our jobs have been shipped out of the country, and of the jobs that remain, only 24.6 percent of them are considered to be "good jobs" at this point.
So millions of families are really hurting. In fact, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time.
This week, Joe Biden declared that "the middle class is coming back", but that was a giant lie.
The truth is that the middle class is being absolutely shredded. More Americans fall out of the middle class every single day. Right now there are more than 100 million Americans that are considered to be "poor" or "near poor", and the number of Americans on food stamps has risen by more than 14 million since Barack Obama entered the White House.
No, the middle class is definitely not coming back. Poverty is exploding all around us and every single day even more Americans become dependent on the government.
And that is how the social engineers like it. They don't want us to be strong and independent. They want us to be weak and groveling and dependent on them.
So who is paying for all of this?
Well, it sure isn't the wealthy. They have become absolute masters at avoiding taxes.
And it sure isn't the poor people. Most of them don't even pay any income taxes.
So who is paying for all of this?
Hard working middle class Americans are, and our children and our grandchildren are.
Both Democrats and Republicans see nothing wrong with stealing trillions of dollars from future generations so that they can shower their constituents with benefits that we simply cannot afford.
What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is beyond criminal. I am amazed that more people are not completely outraged by all of this.
Obama, Bush, Clinton and our Congress critters have showered the American people will trillions of dollars that have been ripped off from Americans that have not even been born yet. They seem to think that it is really funny that they are going to stick them with the bill.
I find it absolutely revolting.
But very few of our politicians will even discuss seriously cutting back the benefits that we have promised to hand out.
Nobody wants to be the bad guy.
And more specifically, very few of our politicians are willing to risk their careers in order to do what they know is right.
We are becoming a society that is completely and totally addicted to government money and government benefits.
We expect the government to take care of us from the cradle to the grave.
In many ways, the government has actually become a god to millions upon millions of Americans.
And the social engineers like it that way.
They want the government to be as large and as powerful as possible.
In fact, they don't even want us taking care of each other.
Earlier this year I wrote about how feeding the homeless is illegal in many major cities all over the United States.
Sadly, this trend has gotten even stronger since that time.
According to USA Today, more than 50 American cities have now passed "anti-camping or anti-food-sharing laws"....
Philadelphia recently banned outdoor feeding of people in city parks. Denver has begun enforcing a ban on eating and sleeping on property without permission. And this month, lawmakers in Ashland, Ore., will consider strengthening the town's ban on camping and making noise in public.
And the list goes on: Atlanta, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, Oklahoma City and more than 50 other cities have previously adopted some kind of anti-camping or anti-food-sharing laws, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.
So what are we supposed to do?
If it is illegal to help the homeless and it is illegal to be homeless, what is left?
The answer is obvious.
We are supposed to let the government take care of everything because the government is our super-powerful nanny that always knows what is best.
In the end, however, this system is going to collapse. It is unsustainable by nature and the weight of our 16 trillion dollar national debt is absolutely going to crush us.
Millions of Americans realize that the system is failing, and that is why so many of them have started to prepare for the worst.
This even includes members of Congress. For example, just check out the following excerpt from an article about U.S. Representative Roscoe Bartlett....
Deep in the West Virginia woods, in a small cabin powered by the sun and the wind, a bespectacled, white-haired man is giving a video tour of his basement, describing techniques for the long-term preservation of food in case of “an emergency.”
“We don’t really think of those today, because it’s so convenient to go to the supermarket,” he cautions. “But you know, you’re planning because the supermarket may not always be there.”
The electrical grid could fail tomorrow, he frequently warns. Food would disappear from the shelves. Water would no longer flow from the pipes. Money might become worthless. People could turn on each other, and millions would die.
Remember, this is a member of the U.S. Congress that is saying these things.
Any rational person can see that our current system is unsustainable by any definition.
Many of our politicians continue to insist that it can be "fixed" if you will just allow them to "tweak" it a bit.
Sadly, they are all lying to you.
A few small changes here and there is not going to change anything.
We need radical reconstructive surgery in this nation, and unfortunately that is not even being presented to the American people as an option in 2012.
We are just going to keep doing more of the same and we are going to keep expecting different results.
And that truly is insanity.
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/more-than-half-of-all-americans-are-at-least-partially-dependent-on-the-government
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