The road to serfdom is paved with government checks

Rush Limbaugh went into meltdown rant mode Wednesday over the news from TrimTabs Investment Research that more than a third of the nation’s checks for wages and salaries are signed by Uncle Sam.

According to a CNBC story on the TrimTab findings, government handouts that include unemployment checks, Social Security, Medicare, etc., etc. are now 35 percent of all U.S. wages. This up from a mere 10 percent in 1960.

The article quotes TrimTab economist Madeline Schnapp as saying, “The U.S. economy has become alarmingly dependent on government stimulus. Consumption supported by wages and salaries is a much stronger foundation for economic growth than consumption based on social welfare benefits.”

An editorial in Investor’s Business Daily called it a disturbing trend.

“We know, thanks to TrimTabs, that in Britain 44% of wages and salaries are from the public fisc,” the editorial states. “So, yes, it can get worse. But that'll be of little consolation if America follows Britain over the cliff.

“To avoid the inevitable decline, Washington has to change the policies that have gotten us where we are — and soon. Tax rates need to be lower and flatter.

“Punishing the rich with higher rates and rewarding the bottom half with lower or no rates violates the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law.”

F.A. Hayek once wrote in “The Decline of Socialism and the Rise of the Welfare State,” “If government wants not merely to facilitate the attainment of certain standards by the individuals but to make certain that everybody attains them it can do so only by depriving individuals of any choice in the matter.  Thus the welfare state becomes a household state in which a paternalistic power controls most of the income of the community and allocates it to individuals in the forms and quantities which it thinks they need or deserve.”

Here is a Media Matters sound grab from the Limbaugh program: