The greatest moral hazard in American life is politics.
Many of you probably remember 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney being secretly recorded by a Democratic operative telling donors that “47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what” because they are “dependent upon government … believe that they are victims … believe the government has a responsibility to care for them … these are people who pay no income tax.”
Even I could have told you that accusing half the electorate of being a bunch of moochers was a bad idea. Coming from a fat cat like Romney, it reeked of snobbery.
Also, Romney happened to be correct.
And what he said then is even truer today. But in contemporary politics, asking citizens to pay for their own life is an act of self-immolation.
In a recent Gallup poll, an amazing 9 in 10 young women support socialized medicine, paired with higher taxes on the wealthy. What is the risk in backing pricey utopian experiments when there’s no bill coming in the mail? Now, if we flattened federal taxes and compelled everyone to pay their “fair share,” or even one-tenth of their share, for that matter, 9 in 10 young women would be hoisting Gadsden flags on their lawns and sticking “taxation is theft” bumper stickers on their cars.
That’s never going to happen, because the incentives of contemporary politics are dangerously distorted. The more the government spends, the less Americans expect to pay. The more dependency it creates, the less self-reliance it expects.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a new study that found a mind-boggling spike in government dependency. In 1970, safety-net funding accounted for the significant income in fewer than 1% of all counties in the country. By 2000, 10% of counties were getting a significant share of their income from federal and state safety-net and social programs. Today? More than half of all U.S. counties drew at least a quarter of their income from government aid.
While people on the Left like to grouse about “income inequality,” they never mention that every year, nearly $2 trillion, about the gross domestic product of a midsized European country, is transferred to low-income Americans through hundreds of programs, from Medicaid to food stamps to refundable tax credits. Right now, there are 42 million people on food stamps.
It would be one thing if the state were lifting citizens from poverty, but it is creating a permanent underclass.
Delusions of Adequacy 