If the Great Recession ended in 2009, and the economy is so
much better, then why are government assistance rolls going through the roof?
The short answer is that the economy is still awful, media
cheerleading notwithstanding, and unemployment is still rampant. Businesses are
wrestling with Obamacare and are reluctant to expand. The official unemployment
number is just below 8 percent, but the real number, which includes people who
have given up looking for jobs or are working part-time while looking for work,
is closer to 15 percent.
The increases in public assistance have been truly stunning.
Enrollment in food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
has risen 70 percent since 2008, when 28.2 million collected food stamps. Now,
nearly 48 million people get food stamps – 1 in every seven Americans.
Nearly two million people have been added to Social Security
Disability. It’s what many people go on when their unemployment benefits run
out. Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, has exploded from 45
million recipients in 2008 to 54 million.
Another reason for the boom in federal and state assistance
is that the Obama Administration has been loosening requirements to get more
people enrolled. Seeing a new flow of
cash from Washington, many states have gone along.
In 2009, 17 states and territories eased eligibility
requirements, “in some cases waiving any policy that restricted the assets a
family could retain,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The change didn’t mean
the majority of SNAP beneficiaries had large savings accounts. Rather, it meant
that states were no longer checking, according to state guidelines and program
officials.”
Remember how government pressure to virtually abandon
eligibility requirements for mortgage loans induced millions of people to
borrow money they could not hope to pay back? When the housing bubble burst and
crashed the stock market in 2008, it sucked billions out of people’s life
savings that were tied to stocks.
Now, even as the economy is sputtering, the
federal government is pumping up another huge bubble of debt, with taxpayers
directly on the hook.
The trend toward making more people dependent on government
aid –and expanding a reliable liberal voting bloc – is no accident. The Obama
Administration has been aggressively pursuing this, even buying advertising to
get people to sign up for various programs, especially food stamps.
As the Journal puts it, “by expanding the pool of potential
applicants, they [government officials] are redrawing the landscape of
government assistance.”
At the same time, they are accomplishing what Barack Obama
promised five days before his inauguration in 2009: “fundamentally transforming the United States
of America.”
The only force capable of stopping this transformation of
America from a self-governing republic into a socialist welfare state is the
renewed energy and commitment of America’s Tea Parties. Fearing retribution, several liberal U.S.
senators have already announced that they won’t run for re-election in 2014.
They probably don’t want to have to explain why they backed
Obamacare, which by then will be exposed as the expensive, dangerous
monstrosity that gave birth to the Tea Party opposition – and will fuel another
uprising in 2014.
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ReplyDeleteMr. Knight is correct. President Obama is transforming America into a nation of dependent takers. The United States, like the democratic socialist states of Europe, is running out of other people’s money. The European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund’s secret solution to the economic crisis created by Europe’s redistributive economic policies is unfolding in Cyprus, which saw the government seize private bank accounts to fund collapsing nanny-state programs. “Doubtless there was a non-voluntary conversion of deposits …,” said Cypriot Finance Minister Michalis Sarris, “but we now have a reformed banking institution that is ready to play its part in the Cyprus economy.” Victims that saw their savings confiscated were given stock in collapsing Cypriot banks.
ReplyDeleteHere in America, the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing programs do likewise by printing trillions of new dollars that devalue American savings, raise the cost of food and fuel and stick the taxpayers with worthless IOUs in the form of U.S. Treasuries.
Last October, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Fiscal Cliff report said Washington spending accounts for 4% of U.S. GDP. In 2012, U.S. GDP was 2.2%. In real terms, then, the U.S. economy contracted. The CBO also said that without government spending, inflation would be 0.5%. That’s an amazing statement in light of the Fed’s unprecedented printing of an estimated $10 trillion. That means without government intervention, the U.S. dollar would be in a deflationary spiral.
Contrary to the mainstream media’s propaganda, the U.S. is not in a recovery (sluggish or otherwise) and not entering a “double-dip” recession. We are in an economic depression, which is masked by government spending and the Fed’s open-ended quantitative easing – both of which are unsustainable.
American voters are about to learn that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Hope and Change, in the end, is no match for the immutable laws of economics. And that voters, who sanction government-sponsored theft, are, in the end, its ultimate victims.
Mr. Curmudgeon
Tea Party Tribune