A Nation of Government Dependents

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Most of us are in some way dependent upon the central government. It's only ignorance of our dependency that permits many to deny it.
American government, at least as older citizens know it, is nearly extinct. Politicians are killing it by encouraging governmental profligacy and dysfunction at the federal and state levels and in many local jurisdictions as well. But they are doing so with a complicit citizenry.

It took several generations, but, in order to win and hold office, America's political class has encouraged unrealistic expectations among citizens by promising more than government can consistently and sustainably deliver.

Americans are witnessing the failure of progressive governance in the United States. Many Americans have already been victimized. Unless America changes course quickly we will all be victims.

We are living in an era when unsustainable entitlements are considered mandatory expenditures, and annual "discretionary" government expenditures, much of them on questionable programs never envisioned by America's founders, are relentlessly compounded by ballooning baselines.

Politicians have created a permanent underclass in America accustomed to receiving their "livelihoods" from one or more government programs. But the problem of inflated expectations is far larger and more complex than entitlements and public welfare.

The numbers are staggering. According to a Census Bureau report for the first quarter of 2009, of a little more than 300 million Americans, nearly 139 million -- or 46.2% of us -- were receiving benefits from one or more federal programs.

The largest programs are familiar ones: Social Security (46,509,000), Medicaid (70,818,000), Medicare (42,566,000) and the Food Stamp program (36,096,000).