This week John Stossel writes about a study by economist Gary Schilling that flatly proclaims that over half of the country feeds at the public trough.

One out of five Americans works for some level of government or for a firm that depends on taxpayer financing. One in five also draws Social Security or a federal pension. That number will grow as the baby boomers move on to Social Security, which, let’s not forget, is a transfer program.

Among other recipients of largess: Nine million are on food stamps, 2 million received housing subsidies, and 5 million go to school on the federal taxpayer.

The handouts go to the well off, too. Farm programs and corporate subsidies benefit big farmers and big business, and wealthy people draw large Medicare benefits. The Cato Institute says there are nearly 1,700 federal subsidy programs spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

According to Michael Tanner’s “Leviathan on the Right,” federal domestic spending under President Bush has risen 27 percent in real terms, while discretionary non-entitlement spending has gone up 4.5 percent a year. (Clinton’s annual increase was “only” to 2.1 percent.)

Who’d have thought that a Republican president would challenge Lyndon Johnson’s spending record?

Government is “that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else,” wrote Frederic Bastiat, the great laissez-faire economist of Nineteenth-Century France. Of course, everyone cannot live at the expense of everyone else, but people who understand nothing about economics try, egged on by politicians looking for an election-wining coalition.

Stossel ends on this extremely dour note:

Thomas Jefferson said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

It’s sad that that’s no myth.

Sad indeed.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 4:33 am and is filed under Government Waste. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.