Daily Archives: 17 April 2012

Dependency

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Are we reaching a tipping point?  The Director of the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation, Bill Beach, says,

We have found that one out of five Americans are significantly dependent on the federal government for the basics of life[.]

These figures illustrate his point:

Individuals in Dependence Index (the right side) measures the number of individual Americans who depend on the Federal government for such things as housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance—things that once were considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions.  This isn’t just a Progressive problem, either.  As the figures show, the increase in Americans’ dependency on government handouts—which is to say, on the largess of incumbent politicians—has been going on for decades.   The number of dependent Americans has tripled in the last 50 years—that’s two generations: we’re raising our children with a preset habit of dependency.

Indeed, today by other measures, about 40% of Americans are either “dependent” or “reliant” on federal checks, and 70% of the population takes more out of the federal government in benefits than it pays in taxes.

There’s another dimension to the problem, too.  Beach also points out that

Sending out all those checks and aid now takes up a whopping 70 percent of the federal government’s budget. With the U.S. borrowing 43 cents of every dollar it spends, it’s plunging the country deeper and deeper into staggering levels of debt.

This figure illustrates the magnitude of the problem from another perspective:

Meanwhile,

Forty-nine-and-a-half percent of all the people in the United States are not paying an income tax….  With half the country not contributing to the general revenue and with a third getting money from Uncle Sam, Beach worries it could permanently—and dangerously—warp the nation’s politics.

This is not something even the greatest economy in the world can afford to do for much longer.

We’re rapidly moving from a nation proud of our individual capacity, confident in our ability as individuals to take care of our own responsibilities, and firm in our moral obligation to, in John Adams’ words, “acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining [our own] safety and happiness” to a population of people that are increasingly dependent on—beholden to—a large, controlling, and so intrusive, central government.

We can’t sustain this economically.  This reversal of our moral foundation is even more unsustainable.

Taxes, Fairness, and Equality

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President makes a big deal of his Progressive concept of “fairness,” and he makes no bones about his desire to use taxes to impose his fairness on the rest of us.  He also says plainly that his tax moves are “gimmicks” intended solely to impose his fairness, and they are not at all intended to be any sort of mechanism for improving our economy.  Fairness over growth—and he channels Theodore Roosevelt in the process.

Let’s explore this Progressive concept and an alternative concept of what is fair.

Candidate Obama said in a 2008 interview with Charlie Gibson,

Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.

Last week, President Obama said,

There are others who are saying: “Well, this is just a gimmick. Just taxing millionaires and billionaires, just imposing the Buffett Rule, won’t do enough to close the deficit.”  Well, I agree. … I’d just point out that the Buffett Rule is something that will get us moving in the right direction towards fairness….

What the Progressives want is equal outcomes, all in the name of “fairness.”  Progressives insist that there comes a time when we’ve “made enough money,” and after that, we should “spread the wealth around.”  But is this truly fair?

What our Declaration of Independence talks about is

…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness[.]

What John Adams talked about was

All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

What Theodore Roosevelt talked about, what he opened his “New Nationalism” speech with, was a desire for

an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him

These all add up to equal opportunity.

“Fair share” is President Obama’s refrain.  Everyone should pay it.  Yet the top 10% of Americans by income paid nearly 70% of the total personal income taxes collected by the Federal government in 2008.  The bottom 50% paid nearly 3% of the total that year.  Further, the rich may be getting richer, but they’re also paying increasingly more in income taxes.  In 1999, those top 10% paid a little over 66%, and the bottom 50% paid 4%, of the total.

Under what economic system, though, is it most possible for a man to “show the best that there is in him,” to fully realize the potential in the opportunities open to him: a system where the most successful have their success truncated by having a government-defined excess trimmed off and given to another man, a system where the less successful are given, without effort of their own, a part of the earnings of another?

Or a system where each man can, indeed, achieve his fullest potential independently of the possible outcomes for others, even when that results in unequal outcomes?  After all, unequal outcomes are inevitable since while each of us is equal in our rights, equal before our Creator, we are not at all equal in our innate talent, our work ethic, our degree of interest in this or that endeavor.