Dependence On Government Has Grown 23% Under Barack Obama
I’m a baseball fan, and in the world of baseball we are endlessly looking for the statistic that boils down a player’s worth, all of what a player brings to a team, into one number. In the world of politics, at least as the President is concerned, I wonder if there is any statistic that matters more than dependence on the government.
Is there any political goal more important than having a nation of self-sufficient citizens? And is government dependence (or the lack thereof) not the measure of self-sufficiency? Both of those things being true, the growth in government dependence would seem to mark a failure of policy and, by extension, those who make the policy.
In America, under President Obama, dependency on government has grown by 23%. From that, we can conclude that Obama and the current leadership in Congress have been failures:
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 expansion in Medicaid and changes to the welfare system, along with a sharp rise in food stamps, the study found.
“You can’t get around the fact that policy decisions made over the past two years, on top of those made over the past several decades, are having a large effect on the pace of growth of the index,” said William Beach, who authored the Heritage study.
Unless someone wants to argue that increased levels of dependence on the government is a positive, this is failure. Especially when paying out on government benefits is the largest part of our nation’s budget. A budget, I might add, that is routinely running a deficit of over $1 trillion.
We should want government policies that make Americans self-sufficient, though I suspect that some (who would no doubt not admit to it publicly) are fine with government dependence. Citizens who are dependent on the government are citizens who can be controlled.