Free Republic

President Obama's re-election campaign has released an interactive web page (named The Life of Julia) that attempted to compare and contrast a future America under Barack Obama to a future America under Mitt Romney. In this interactive site, viewers can click through the life of a fictional character named Julia who is dependent on the government from age 3 to age 67 (and beyond of course). I have to admit, it was weird that Obama campaign didn't talk about the right her parents had to kill Julia before she was born (because human lives are obviously disposable). It is extremely...

In the new Barack Obama campaign piece The Life of Julia, voters can "Take a look at how President Obama's policies help one woman over her lifetime -- and how Mitt Romney would change her story." It is one of the most brazenly statist pieces of campaign literature I can ever remember seeing. Let's, for the purposes of this post, set aside the misleading generalizations regarding policy in the ad (no one is innocent on that account, obviously). What we are left with is a celebration of a how a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government...

A record 5.4 million former workers and their dependents have signed up to receive federal disability payments since Obama took office. At 6% of the potential workforce now, the ratio of persons on disability has more than doubled since the Reagan Administration. Add this to the 70% increase in the number of persons getting food stamps since 2007 and it is clear that the 2008 election of Barack Obama may be ushering in some transformative changes in the way Americans live. “The notion that people want to work is the flaw in Republican thinking,” said Obama adviser David Axelrod. “Work...

Royal Meeker, who was an advisor and long time ally(details, see chapter 4) to Woodrow Wilson, wrote the following: (page 544) In M. Colson's view the poor are poor through their own laziness, inability or thriftlessness; the rich are rich because of their own or their ancestors' virtues. The laws of property and of inheritance are almost above criticism. Any attempt to ameliorate the condition of those living at or below the minimum of subsistence must result in such an increase of the poorer classes that the result will inevitably be a larger number of miserable wretches living at or...

President Barack Obama has proved his adeptness at exploiting the vote pump: Dependence on government has increased by 23 percent under his administration, according to the Heritage Foundation 2012 Index of Dependence on Government.More people than ever before — 67.3 million Americans — depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid or other assistance. Consider: The nation committed more than 15 times the resources in 2010 than in 1962 to pay for people who depend on the government. More than 70 percent of the nation’s spending goes to dependence programs, up from 28.3 percent in 1962 and...

The American public's dependence on the federal government shot up 23% in just two years under President Obama, with 67 million now relying on some federal program, according to a newly released study by the Heritage Foundation. The conservative think tank's annual Index of Dependence on Government tracks money spent on housing, health, welfare, education subsidies and other federal programs that were "traditionally provided to needy people by local organizations and families." The increase under Obama is the biggest two-year jump since Jimmy Carter was president, the data show. The rise was driven mainly by increases in housing subsidies, an...

Government dependence index values Americans are more dependent on the government than ever, according to the Heritage Foundation.Heritage's index, which looks at government disbursements from health and welfare to farm subsidies, jumped 8.1 percent in 2011.The share of Americans who pay no taxes rose to a record 49.5 percent.A record 70.5 percent of government spending went to dependence programs. Heritage Heritage Heritage Heritage

Obama’s plans of hope and change have utterly failed his most ardent constituency. Today, the wreckage is overwhelming.

"The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

An utterly shameless sense of entitlement can  justify just about anything, apparently... ________________________________________ Judge Judy: (you receive) $437/mo from "the government"- which government? 20-something welfare sponge/'music student': (laughs) The, uh, the Ramsey County -uh-  Aid Office, that's where I live, in St. Paul.  You know, they got an aid office where- you can't find no job and you're a student- they give you money to live on -youknowwhatI'msayin... JJ: Well, if you were getting money, why didn't you give Miss Reid any money for rent (Plaintiff/fat roommate chick)? 20sWS: Because our agreement was I didn't have to pay any rent... JJ: What...

Herman Cain responded to the attacks by far left pro-Castro activist Harry Belafonte tonight on Hannity: "I left the plantation a long time ago."

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As more Americans turn to government programs for refuge from a merciless economy, a growing number are encountering a new price of admission to the social safety net: a urine sample. Policy makers in three dozen states this year proposed drug testing for people receiving benefits like welfare, unemployment assistance, job training, food stamps and public housing. Such laws, which proponents say ensure that tax dollars are not being misused and critics say reinforce stereotypes about the poor, have passed in states including Arizona, Indiana and Missouri. In Florida, people receiving cash assistance through welfare have...

Each year for the past two decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that over 30 million Americans were living in “poverty.” In recent years, the Census has reported that one in seven Americans are poor. But what does it mean to be “poor” in America? How poor are America’s poor? For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter. For example, the Poverty Pulse poll taken by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development asked the general public: “How would you describe being poor in the U.S.?” The...

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black reporter named Joe Strickland. He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’ I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today. It...

The debt-ceiling brouhaha diverts attention from the most fundamental economic issue we face: Do we want a European-style welfare state? If we do, how in the world are we going to pay for it? Presidential candidate Barack Obama called for "hope and change," but he was deliberately vague on the "fundamental change" part. In speeches as president both at home and abroad, he appeared to reject American exceptionalism and intimated we have much to learn from Europe, especially its cradle-to-grave welfare state. Obama's juggernaut passage of universal health care, despite severe budget and employment problems and the loss of his...

The 4th of July marks the birth of the nation, and as such is a good time to distinguish between the nation and its Central government, the Savior State. The 4th of July is a fitting day to ponder the reality that we are at Peak Government, and the Savior State is unsustainable. This is a matter of accounting: no nation can spend more than it generates in surplus real output forever. What goes unremarked is the intrinsically destructive nature of our rising dependence on a Savior State. In his book Collapse of Complex Societies, anthropologist Joseph Tainter identified two...

Despite a lawsuit from the Florida Education Association and other public worker unions; Governor Rick Scott signed Senate Bill 2100 into law, meaning all government employees will now contribute 3% of their salaries to the Florida Retirement System.

Beth Haynes writes at Pajamas Media today that Americans need to grow up, and stop thinking we can, in her metaphor, choose and eat cake we haven’t paid for.Her point is good, as far as it goes. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. But as long as we have “Medicare,” we’re going to continue, willy-nilly, to behave as if we think there is one.It is not possible to do otherwise. When people don’t see their arrangements for medical care as a fee-for-service proposition, but rather as a collective “social insurance” scheme, in which the emotion of the...

Those who regard government "entitlement" programs as sacrosanct, and regard those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a world very different from the world of reality. To listen to some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the heart of the present financial crisis, you might think that anything the government fails to provide is something that people will be deprived of. In other words, if you cut spending on school lunches, children will go hungry. If you fail to subsidize housing, people will be homeless. If you fail to subsidize prescription drugs,...

We have created suicidal government; the threatened federal shutdown and stubborn budget deficits are but symptoms. By suicidal, I mean government has promised more than it can deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can't easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government's very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest. Few Americans realize the...

How mean-spirited are House Republicans? So mean-spirited that they would end federally funded cowboy poetry! Last Tuesday, Harry Reid, the majority leader, took to the Senate floor to thunder that this town ain’t big enough for both him and the Mean-Spirited Kid (John Boehner). “The mean-spirited bill, HR 1 . . . eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts,” said Senator Reid. “These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy-poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands...

There is bipartisan agreement across the country that the debt level is out of control. As a result of previous spending and future, unfunded obligations, America faces two outcomes if nothing is done. The first possible outcome is an acute national debt crisis if creditors decide to stop buying our debt. Overnight, government programs could literally come to a screeching halt forcing austerity measures that could spark social unrest and possibly much worse. The second outcome is less drastic but no less worrying, and involves debasing our currency by printing money to pay for spending obligations; destroying existing wealth and...

Illinois' own Dr. Eric Wallace reprimands fellow black Americans in a recent controversial Freedom Journal's Magazine column for the community's misguided devotion to Democrats. He compares voting for Democrats to Pavlov's conditioning experiments:

Black Republican: Black Caucus preaches victimization and dependency By Gautham Nagesh - 11/20/10 05:23 PM ET Congressman-elect Allen West (R-Fla.), who said he plans to become the only black Republican in the Congressional Black Caucus, accused the organization of failing the black community by promoting dependence on government welfare programs. "The Congressional Black Caucus cannot continue to be a monolithic voice that promotes these liberal social welfare policies and programs that are failing in the Black community, that are preaching victimization and dependency, that's not the way that we should go," West said on Fox News Friday. "And those are...

I was just watching Hannity out here on the West Coast. Hannity had said to Bob Beckel that the polls were devastating for the Dems and Bob Beckel said, and I'm paraphrasing, "These (welfare and entitlement) programs that the Democrats have pushed...we thought we were doing the right thing but we actually have created generations of dependency, and now we have to admit that they have not worked and that they were mistakes." Hannity looked like he was in a state of shock when he heard Beckel say this and he responded that it was one of the most honest...

One Saturday morning, as I was sitting listening to the weekly Torah (bible) portion, I had an astounding revelation -- a revelation that there is a human compulsion towards capitalism that goes as far back as biblical times. The portion, Numbers 11: 4-9, told the story of manna from heaven. "... and the children of Israel also wept on their part and said: "Would that we were given flesh to eat! We remember the fish, which we were wont to eat in Egypt; ... the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic; but now...

The worst effect of modern liberalism is not a host of laws and regulations designed to control every aspect of life. Laws can be repealed. The worst effect is not an increasingly intrusive government. Governments can be voted out of office. The worst effect of modern liberalism is the regression of citizens from self-sufficient adults into dependent children who rely on a parentified government to take care of them, make important decisions for them, and take responsibilities off their shoulders. Real children grow up. Childish adults rarely do. And that’s a shame.

How many times do our thoughts to ourselves start with "I wish..." and of course, these wishes just don't come true? I'd say, if you're anywhere near human, rather than superhuman, that's a relatively common occurrance. But what DO you wish for?

The United States faces overwhelming fiscal problems. Our current level of government spending and future entitlement obligations are simply unsustainable. However, as concerning as these fiscal matters are, the biggest problem America faces has nothing to do with economics, but rather psychology. The strength of a nation reflects the character of its citizens. While America was once considered a nation of individuals fiercely independent and self-reliant, her citizens are moving closer to a state of dependence, characterized by irresponsibility and ambivalence. This change has been instigated by the politics of collectivism and the growth of the social welfare state. F.A....

'His heart belonged to you," President Obama told the hundreds of West Virginians who attended Robert Byrd's funeral last week. "Making life better here was his only agenda." Maybe so. But despite the $4 billion in pork that Byrd served his constituents over the past 19 years alone—not to mention the untold billions before observers started keeping tabs—West Virginia remains the third poorest state in the country. Government spending does not prosperity make. When Byrd became senator in 1959, West Virginia ranked No. 39 in median family income, and No. 42 in per capita income. Today, it's No. 48 in...

Today the conservative Heritage Foundation released its 2010 version of the Index of Dependence on Government. In a word, YIKES! Americans’ dependence on government grew by 13.6% in 2009. That’s the biggest increase since 1976 and the fifth largest going back to 1962, when Heritage began tracking dependence. The index measures federal government programs that can crowd out or constrain private sector or local government alternatives.

Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell The Center for Immigration Studies recently put out a study arguing that immigration has had negative effects on California. One of their measures was a comparison of how many people in the state were receiving some form of welfare compared to other states. I found that data (see Table 3 of the report) very interesting, but not because of the immigration debate (I’ll leave others to debate that topic). Instead, I wanted to get a better understanding of the variations in government dependency. Is there a greater willingness to sign up for income redistribution programs,...

When slavery is implemented by force, it is certainly a despicable institution. But is it any less despicable when the slaves are there by choice? The interesting point about slavery is that whether it's forced or voluntary, the master is responsible for the slaves. The master feeds, clothes, and cares for his slaves, some masters better than others. But masters also manipulate their slaves. Eventually, all slaves start to notice the dichotomy between their lives and the lives of their masters. There is an urban legend of a slave owner named Willie Lynch who recognized that slaves needed to be...

Helena Horvatova is proud of her seven children. She lines them up in the back garden of her terrace house and explains that the youngest, aged four months, is called Kevin. 'It is a very British name. We want him to grow up British,' says the 27-year-old Czech mother, who arrived in Peterborough two weeks ago. In broken English, she continues: 'We came to Britain because we wanted a better life for all of our children.' Mrs Horvatova pats little Kevin on his head, before plopping down on a battered bench in the middle of her garden, which is littered...

“I see some young people in the audience,” said President Obama in Ohio the other day. Not that young. For he assured them that, under Obamacare, they’d be eligible to remain on their parents’ health coverage until they were 26. The audience applauded. Why? Because, as the politicians say, “it’s about the future of all our children”. And in the future we’ll all be children. For most of human history, across all societies, a 26-year old has been considered an adult, and not starting out but well into it. Not someone who remains a dependent of his parent, but someone...

Sunday, March 21, 2010 Happy Dependence Day! [Mark Steyn] Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it's hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be "insurers" in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that's clear we'll be on the fast track to Obama's desired destination of single payer...

Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it's hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be "insurers" in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that's clear we'll be on the fast track to Obama's desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis. If Barack Obama does nothing...

An announcement from the Obama administration this week heralds a brand new way to measure poverty. American families will be considered poor if their income falls below a certain specified income level. This is nothing new; in fact that is how we measure poverty presently in this country. But let’s get a little perspective on the poverty measurement system, shall we? Originally, poverty measurements were developed in 1963-1964 by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration. This, from the HHS.gov website explains how we first officially defined poverty in the United States: “The poverty thresholds were originally developed in 1963-1964...

If you wish to see an enjoyable evening with friends become quite animated, then overly hostile, and end in exacting bitterness, ask those in attendance to choose between the following. As an individual citizen, is it more American to believe that you have a personal responsibility to be personally accountable for your actions, and those of your family? Or is it more American to believe that you should wait for the giant collective to take care of you? This did not use to be a controversial concept. Until liberals decided that power is more highly coveted than freedom. Once they...

The so-called "Great Recession" has left Americans depending on the government dole like never before. Without record levels of welfare, unemployment and other government benefits as well as tax cuts last year, the income of U.S. households would have plunged by an astonishing $723 billion — more than four times the record $167 billion drop reported last month by the Commerce Department. Moreover, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans took more aid from the government than they paid in taxes. The figures show the devastating results of the massive job losses last year and indicate that the...

Barack Obama has admitted the need to break his most celebrated campaign promise. Suddenly he is "agnostic" on increasing taxes for people earning less than $250,000. Nine years ago, as an Illinois State Senator, Obama criticized the Supreme Court for not removing a roadblock that forbids Washington to redistribute income. That roadblock is the United States Constitution. Washington routinely redistributes income within American society. When Joe Taxpayer receives government benefits that exceed what he pays in taxes, the effect is what the Heritage Foundation calls a "distributional deficit." Joe's higher-earning fellow taxpayers must fill that deficit. "Each year, government is...

Only two things are infinite -- the expanding universe and Democrats' hostility to the District of Columbia's school choice program. Killing this small program, which benefits 1,300 mostly poor and minority children, is odious and indicative. It is a small piece of something large -- the Democrats' dependency agenda, which aims to multiply the ways Americans are dependent on government. Democrats, in their canine devotion to teachers unions, oppose empowering poor children to escape dependency on even terrible government schools. Unions and their poodles say school choice siphons money from public schools. But federal money funds the D.C. program, so...

"I want to create a new electoral math. I don't want to practice division, I want to practice addition.'' -Obama

We will see.Growing up of Mexican descent in the Southwest, I noticed that politicking often involves the cause of alleviating the suffering of the poor. The Democratic Party has successfully convinced the minority masses in the Hispanic community of their deep desire to lift them out of poverty. Liberal policies of forced equality and equal outcome, hurting the rich and sympathizing with the plight of the poor, have given Democrats the political influence that has turned the Hispanic community into an accessory that they often wear around their political neck during election time -- sparkling for everyone to see their...

With just two days to go, the New Jersey gubernatorial election has turned into a horse race among three candidates, a remarkable development considering that the incumbent, Democrat Jon Corzine, has huge unfavorable ratings. As one radio talk-show host put it: “Who is voting for Corzine?” The answer is simple: people who benefit from big government. In a high-tax, big-spending place like Jersey, much of the burden of funding government falls on a narrow slice of residents who pay steeply progressive taxes, while the benefits of expanding government are enjoyed by those who receive more in services than they pay...

It is almost irresistible for conservatives to snicker as Democrats in Massachusetts hold hearings and seek ways to justify an attempt to change the law in Massachusetts to allow the Democratic governor of the Commonwealth to appoint a Democratic senator--presumably available to vote for President Obama's initiatives. It was just a few years ago when Senator John Kerry was running for president and the governor was a Republican that the Democratic state legislature thought it imperative to change the law to prevent governors from appointing senators. It is just too delicious, the hypocrisy too obvious, for conservatives to ignore. Yet...

Combined with the overall lack of adult supervision in the Congress, I can pretty much say with a great deal of confidence (at least as much as Barack Obama has when he says he can deliver health care at lower cost, and with greater access and no change in your doctor) that what we’ve been seeing since last January is a concerted effort to yoke Americans even more to a dependency on their government that is not only ill-advised but also ultimately tragic. I say ”tragic” because programs like Cash for Clunkers and ObamaCare — both of which are nothing...

Now that Obama is the president, fasten your seat belts. During his first year in office, and particularly during his first hundred days, we are about to witness the most prodigious output of legislation since 1981-2 (under Reagan), 1964-5 (under Johnson), and 1933-36 (under Roosevelt). The combination of top heavy Democratic majorities in Congress and a mood of public fear bordering on panic over the financial crisis and the looming depression will speed his legislation through a compliant Senate and House. We will enter his Administration as the United States, buoyed by an aggressive free market economy. We will exit...

Many years ago, I took a class in behavioral psychology. The professor was a rather sadistic proponent of B. F. Skinner. He loved to experiment in behavior modification using various reinforcement schedules of pain and reward to change the behavior of monkeys. The monkeys were taught to pull a lever to receive a pellet of food. Later, he added the element of electric shock to the reinforcement schedule. Every time the monkey pulled the lever, he would get a shock along with his food pellet. As typical in behavioral experiments, the professor varied the schedule, in this case increasing the...

Dambisa Moyo, the Zambian economist, educated at Harvard and Oxford and a former employee of The World Bank and Goldman Sachs, has created an inspiring, and provocative argument in her book titled “Dead Aid" - Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. It’s a small volume book which suggests that foreign aid to African nations, totaling over a trillion dollars in the past 60 years was a waste. She argues that it's bad for Africa, and for Africans. In her opinion Aid keeps Africa and Africans in a sub servant’s role at a...