Government Dependency Will End in Chaos
By Ron Paul
The media insists on characterizing statements about dependency on government handouts as controversial, but in truth such statements are absolutely correct. It’s not that nearly half of Americans are dependent on government; it’s actually more than half. If one includes not just people on food stamps and welfare, but also seniors on Medicare, Social Security and people employed by the government directly, the number is more like 165 million out of 308 million, which is 53%.
Some argue that Social Security and Medicare benefits are a right because people pay into these programs their whole lives, or that we need a government safety net in place for people who fall on hard times. However, this all becomes a moot point when the funds people depend on become worthless due to government default or rampant inflation.
This is less an issue of dignity or dependence on government, and more about the deceitfulness of government promises.
The Fed recently announced that it plans to keep interest rates near zero and keep buying near worthless assets from banks indefinitely. This enables Congress to spend without having to take deficits or the debt seriously and there is every indication they intend to spend with impunity until the system collapses. There are no brakes on the runaway train. The federal debt ceiling law does nothing to limit spending. The ceiling will have to be raised yet again perhaps before the year is out. What is happening in Greece with austerity measures and riots in the street will happen here within a decade according to some realistic estimates if we do not find some way to fiscally restrain our government.
There is little point in a debate about being entitled to healthcare or food or shelter from fellow taxpayers if the whole system has collapsed. And, with the way our politicians have taken over and mismanaged vast amounts of resources, collapse seems almost unavoidable. Yet the number of Americans who have significant dependency on government is dangerously high, and I honestly fear for them.
Worse, corporate welfare is also at an all time high with no signs of diminishing. Though it is hard to quantify, Tad Dehaven at Cato has estimated that the government spends nearly twice as much on corporate welfare than on social welfare. Both parties are equally guilty. More and more, the business sector is learning to rely on taxpayer largesse in one form or another. They used to be solely concerned with providing a better product to the consumer at a better price. Now, success on Wall Street depends entirely too much on having the best lobbyists on K Street. If one includes the employees of “private” businesses who depend on government contracts, grants or bailouts, there are even more people dependent on government in some way.
Government does not create resources when it taxes people and prints money; it merely redistributes the wealth, while supporting a massive, wasteful bureaucracy along the way. Government is a giant, blood-sucking parasite on our otherwise healthy economy. For too long we have entrusted too much economic power and influence to irresponsible politicians in Washington. It’s the chaos that ensues after they run the system into the ground that will be so painful for so many people. But realigning our economy with the free market and away from government mandates and handouts must happen in order for it to thrive again.
The answer is not to keep asking government to do more. The answer is to extricate our economy and ourselves from the grasp of Washington DC as much as possible now, before our dependency becomes our downfall.
DaveL says:
“However, this all becomes a moot point when the funds people depend on become worthless due to government default or rampant inflation.’
You are counting on the intellect of the average American to understand that.
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9th October 2012 at 5:31 pm
Eddie says:
How can Americans not vote for this man?
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9th October 2012 at 6:31 pm
Welshman says:
Good Doctor gets it, and he could not even speak at the convention. They treated him like dirt. I registered Libertarian the other day.
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9th October 2012 at 6:51 pm
card802 says:
Welshman,
I registered Libertarian about seven months ago. The more people I talk to the more amazed I am that more people are not registered Libertarians as most people agree with the philosophy, but just don’t care to take the time to really understand. They continue to listen to the msdia, or the party.
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9th October 2012 at 7:24 pm
Ron says:
We sure live in a great country where people take care of each other.We go to the other side of the planet and kill people to preserve our freedom.What other country is willing to do this?
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9th October 2012 at 9:16 pm
AWD says:
Ron Paul is the last honest man in Washington. Even he is saying it’s too late, a collapse is inevitable. That pretty well seals the deal for me. Game over.
He says we are spending twice as much on corporate welfare as social welfare. That would mean $1 trillion on social welfare, and $2 trillion on corporate welfare? The budget is $3.4 trillion, doesn’t quite add up.
He’s also scared for those dependent on the government. I’m scared for the people that aren’t dependent on the government.
I know you’re getting tired of seeing this graph. At what point of welfare spending will the collapse happen?
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9th October 2012 at 9:29 pm
DaveL says:
I was watching a TV commercial about the Wounded Warriors program and I asked myself why there had to be a request to donate to a private organization to help wounded vets. Why isn’t this the government’s obligation? Then I thought…if we need to do more to help our wounded, why don’t we take that 2-4 billion that people pay into the Universal Service Charge on your phone bill that is used to give FREE PHONES and MINUTES to La Shonda and Billie Bob, and give that money to something useful?
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9th October 2012 at 9:30 pm
flash says:
When the government in collusion with corporations strip a country of blue collar jobs and then attempt to prop the economy up with credit and services. what else is to be expected other than a systematic collapse of the middle class and a creation of a state dependent lower class.
I couldn’t find a chart comparing the two , but unemployment rate almost mirrors the entitlement spending rate in the two charts I did locate.
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9th October 2012 at 9:18 am
Administrator says:
“Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.
That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents.”
Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, 2003
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9th October 2012 at 3:14 pm
GreasedUpWillie says:
There is a link in the article to a site called think by numbers that had the break down of corporate welfare vs. social welfare.
But before we look at the details, a heartfelt plea from the Save the CEO’s Charitable Trust:
There’s so much suffering in the world. It can all get pretty overwhelming sometimes. Consider, for a moment the sorrow in the eyes of a CEO who’s just found out that his end-of-year bonus is only going to be a paltry $2.3 million.
“It felt like a slap in the face. Imagine what it would feel like just before Christmas to find out that you’re going to be forced to scrape by on your standard $8.4 million compensation package alone. Imagine what is was like to have to look into my daughter’s face and tell her that I couldn’t afford to both buy her a dollar sign shaped island and hire someone to chew her food from now on, too. To put her in that situation of having to choose… She’s only a child for God’s sake.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. Thanks to federal subsidies from taxpayers like you, CEO’s like G. Allen Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland was able to take home almost $14 million in executive compensation last year. But he’s one of the lucky ones. There are still corporations out there that actually have to provide goods and services to their consumers in order to survive. They need your help.
For just $93 billion a year the federal government is able to provide a better life for these CEO’s and their families. That’s less than the cost of 240 million cups of coffee a day. Won’t you help a needy corporation today?
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9th October 2012 at 4:18 pm
GreasedUpWillie says:
Here is the actual link.
http://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/corporate-welfare/corporate-welfare-statistics-vs-social-welfare-statistics/
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9th October 2012 at 4:22 pm
Breaking: Government Issuing $3300 Checks To Every American » iPandora says:
[...] Corporate Welfare + Social Welfare = Collapse Transmorgify:More Posted by Matthew at 10:21am Tagged with: Congressional Research Service, Daily Caller, Google, Health Care, medicare, social security, United States, Welfare /* [...]
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9th October 2012 at 12:25 pm