Punch line: Beleaguered taxpayers may finally put a stop to the sheer waste of government spending … Why? There’s no choice !
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Excerpted from Macleans:: We’re too broke to be this stupid, Mark Steyn, May 27, 2010
Back in 2008, a reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.”
Two years later, we’re a lot less rich. In fact, many Western nations are, in any objective sense, insolvent.
It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.
In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents.
What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it?
The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work.
So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it.
Since the Second World War, the hard-working middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it. We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.
To be “poor” in the 21st-century West is not to be hungry and emaciated but to be obese. When Michelle Obama turned up to serve food at a soup kitchen, its poverty-stricken clientele snapped pictures of her with their cellphones.
In one-sixth of British households, not a single family member works. They are not so much without employment as without need of it.
At a certain level, your hard-working bourgeois understands that the bulk of his contribution to the treasury is entirely wasted. It’s one of the basic rules of life: if you reward bad behaviour, you get more of it.
According to a Fox News poll earlier this year, 65 per cent of Americans understand that the government gets its money from taxpayers, but 24 per cent think the government has “plenty of its own money without using taxpayer dollars.”
There is almost nothing the state won’t pay for. A much-mocked mayor in Doncaster, England, announced a year or two back that he wanted to stop funding for the Gay Pride parade on the grounds that, if they’re so damn proud of it, why can’t they pay for it? He was soon forced to back down.
“Green jobs” is just another of those rich-enough-to-be-stupid scams. The Spanish government pays over $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar-panel assembly line. This money is taken from real workers with real jobs at real businesses whose growth is being squashed.
The social compact of the postwar era cannot hold. Across the developed world, a beleaguered middle class is beginning to understand that it’s no longer that rich. At some point, it will look at the sheer waste of government spending, the other shoe will drop, and it will decide that it no longer wishes to be that stupid.
Full article:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/05/27/were-too-broke-to-be-this-stupid/
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