The Free Lunch Agenda

Conservative commentators and economists, especially George Will, have given lectures and speeches and have written columns about the moral hazard that is rising in the country. If you saw it, I hope you were appalled at the new study that shows virtually half of all Americans do not pay federal income taxes. Forty-nine and half percent of Americans pay no income taxes and receive most of the benefits; thus, they have no vested interest in curbing the size of government of which they are dependent on. Conservatives have known this to be a problem for some time, but liberals ignore the socio-economic consequences. They ignore it because it is an integral part of their  agenda. More people dependent on government equalizes outcome, and you do that by getting everyone to feed on a government program.  President Obama is fully behind this agenda, hence the dark day when Obamacare was passed.

I’m glad that Jack Cafferty of CNN’s The Situation Room mentioned the decrease in tax participation on his blog this past winter.  Nevertheless, the left will stringently advocate that such expansion of government programs and reliance on them are net positives.  We see this with Valerie Jarrett and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney idiotically stating that unemployment checks promotes economic growth.  However, we on the right know that such absurd endeavors offer no incentive for the unemployed to seek employment and that spending of other people’s money to keep them perpetually lethargic is fundamentally unfair.  On ABC’s This Week last January, Austan Goolsbee, the former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for President Obama, had the temerity to say that the economy had a huge boom last quarter, but is being weighed down by government shrinking too rapidly.  Is the government shrinking too rapidly?

According to MyGovCost.org, which is an affiliate of The Independent Institute, the Obama administration has permanently increased the size and expenditure of government by 16.5% in four years.  In fact, the site states that government expenditure is one-sixth bigger today than originally projected four years ago.  Investors Business Daily revealed earlier this month that government dependency had increased by 23%  in two years!  That is 67 million people reliant on a federal program.  You cannot have a shrinkage of government when 67 million people are added onto a federal program and total federal spending has increased.  Mr. Goolsbee is dead wrong.

This is the left-wing dependency agenda. It’s the delivery of free lunches for 151.7 million Americans.  To make a comparison, the number of people in 1984 who did not pay federal income taxes was at a mere 14.8% or 34.8 million Americans.  If the president wants to talk about the fundamentally unfair landscape of America, he should focus on the people who don’t contribute one cent to the government coffers.  Half pay their fair share so the other half can coast through life.  It is serfdom in all but name.  Yet, the president wants to keep expanding government spending, taxation, and destroy freedom and personal responsibility in the process.  With half of the country not paying any income taxes, it makes the future passage and signage of the Ryan budget into law even more politically treacherous, even though it strives to avert inevitable fiscal disaster.  Without a doubt, the slothful will fight to keep their goody bag as we slowly become a dictatorship of the lazy.