A Nation of Moochers (3 page)

• We are extending dependency throughout society both vertically and horizontally. By legislative fiat the new health care bill extends the dependency of children to age 26, at least when it comes to health insurance, thus codifying a rolling redefinition of the age of independence. The legislation also expands the scope of middle-class dependency by providing government subsidies for health insurance to families making up to roughly $88,000 a year. By 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Obamacare will add another 16 million dependents to Medicaid, while another 19 million will receive taxpayer subsidies for their health insurance. By that year, the government will be responsible for 52 percent of the nation’s health care spending.
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This guarantees that dependency will begin at birth and extend throughout the adult life of many Americans.

• The 2011 federal budget envisioned a vast, permanent expansion of the welfare state, even after the recession ends. President Obama’s budget called for spending more than 10.3 trillion on poverty programs over the next ten years.
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• Central cities have become laboratories of mooching where the focus of political and economic activity is the expansion of or access to benefit programs, support programs, or, in the better cases, government jobs with high security and lavish benefits but little accountability. In particular, public education systems have become massive jobs programs (exemplified by the “rubber rooms” set aside for tenured teachers who can’t be fired) and perfect expressions of the moocher culture: You don’t expect much of me and I won’t expect much of you.

• To pay for all of this, taxes on future generations will have to be more than doubled to pay off an exploding national debt, which will reach 100 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) within a decade. By 2020, nearly half of all income tax revenues will go toward paying interest on the national debt.
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By 2050, the national debt will rise to more than 300 percent of the GDP; by 2080, it will be eight times the size of the entire economy.
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OPM (Other People’s Money)

This blizzard of transfer payments is advanced by advocates and politicians who rely on what William Voegeli wryly calls “non-Euclidean economics,” in which taxpayers are led to believe that all of these goodies are paid for by someone else. By “blackening the skies with criss-crossing dollars,” writes Voegeli, “the welfare state manages people’s perceptions of its costs and benefits to encourage them to believe an impossibility; that every household can be a net importer of the wealth redistributed by the government.”
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But despite the fondest hopes of those chasing the criss-crossing dollars, multiple mooches do not cancel each other out. The young may mooch off the old, the old off the young, but the result is not a wash. Rather, the mooching creates the habit and the expectation of relying on others; everyone feels not only entitled to the wealth of others, but convinced that they have to keep mooching or be left out. Only suckers pass up the free money.

The effect of all this on the national character goes beyond the impact on the economy. A culture of mooching undermines responsible behavior by rewarding and subsidizing failure, irresponsibility, and dependency.

In contemporary America, we now have two parallel cultures: an anachronistic culture of independence and responsibility, and the emerging moocher culture. We continually draw on the reserves of that older culture, with the unspoken assumption that it will always be there to mooch from and that responsibility and hard work are simply givens. But to sustain deadbeats, others have to pay their bills on time. Massive defaults are subsidized by the people who continue to meet their obligations to pay on time and in full. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the problem with moochers is that sooner or later they run out of Other People’s Money. This divide has become the flashpoint of American politics and will be for the next several decades.