An interesting graph and opinion piece from Investors Business Daily related to a discussion held on this blog earlier this week:

Far from ‘favoring the rich,’ as many believe, our tax code is massively redistributionist, sending literally trillions of dollars into low-income homes and far less into wealthy homes. This may be good or bad, depending on your point of view, but the fact is it’s happening. And those who argue that recent tax cuts ‘benefit the rich’ ignore the reality.

A new study by the Tax Foundation shows the extent of the redistribution. The lowest-earning one-fifth of households, it says, get about $8.21 in total government spending for each dollar of taxes paid. Households deemed ‘middle income’ get $1.30 in return for every dollar sent to Washington. The rich get back 40 cents.

Looking at both taxes and spending in a representative year — 2004 — the study found an estimated $1.03 trillion to $1.53 trillion was ‘redistributed downward’ from the two highest-earning income quintiles. That’s a lot of redistribution.

Today, some 44 million Americans pay no taxes at all. Meanwhile, the upper 5% of all income earners in 2004 paid 57.13% of all taxes, up from 35.01% in 1980. In other words, the U.S. tax code is becoming more progressive, not less.

The piece continues to explain why this redistribution of wealth is a bad thing for our country:

No one minds helping the truly needy. But as with welfare in the pre-1996 reform era, reliance on government can become a habit — imposing huge costs on our national economy.

Worse, a ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitude seems increasingly the norm. Once a nation of stoic, self-reliant individualists, America now seems full of people who think other taxpayers owe them something. They see the ‘system’ as a giant cow to be milked — and damn the cow.

Indeed.

There is a famous quote, and I’m forgetting the source so I’ll simply paraphrase it here, which says that our democracy will only survive until the citizens learn that they can vote themselves gifts from the national treasury.  If the quote’s author is at all prescient I fear that we may well be nearing the last era of American democracy as it was founded by the father’s of this country.

And no, that’s not hyperbolic.  We have strayed that far off the tracks laid for us by those learned men.