Editorial: Romney a little low on number getting checks

Forty-nine percent of the American public is on the federal teat, and they are sucking the old sow dry.

It is a fact straight from government sources, and it was published long before Mitt Romney was caught on an open microphone. The former Massachusetts Governor found himself in hot water with the leftists last month when he was “exposed” for saying behind closed doors that 47 percent of the American people would never vote for him because they are dependent on government checks.

But months before he said it, an article in October 2011by Brian Faler with Bloomberg News detailed that actually 49 percent of Americans get some kind of government check, and his number came straight from the United States Census… an organization run since 2009 by the Obama Administration. Furthermore, Faler wrote that 63 percent of all federal spending that year “will consist of checks written to individuals for which the government receives no services,” and that fact came from the White House budget office.

By comparison, only 18 percent of Americans were on the government dole in 1940. The number of people getting assistance means it’s hard for either party to enact meaningful reforms to rein in spending, and, as Romney said, it makes it harder for a conservative to get elected. The message of personal responsibility and self reliance rings hollow with nearly half of the populace, most of who are in favor of cutting any program… except the one that benefits them.

Able-bodied, lazy people on welfare is a problem, but there is so much more to it than that. There are Social Security and Medicare recipients who feel they paid into a system that now owes them benefits (even if many will receive far more than they pay in over a lifetime), there are college students receiving federal education grants (the number of which went up 70 percent in five years), and single or low-income parents who qualify for daycare assistance. All of these programs – and dozens and dozens of others – bleed the treasury, none of them are authorized by Constitution, and they all violate the concept put forth by our Founding Fathers that the federal government is supposed to be limited in its size and scope.

However well intentioned the programs were in their origins, we have reached a point where federal assistance – in all its many forms – threatens to bankrupt the government of the United States and the only way to stop it is at the ballot box. But there again, Mr. Romney is correct in his assessment because even the suggestion of reforms brings out the fire-breathing accusations from Democrats that Republicans just want to starve children, kill old people, and stop anyone from going to college.

Americans have to wake up to what’s going on, and all the sacred cows have to be put on the budget altar. Otherwise, the $16 trillion debt this nation has acquired will soon look like peanuts as the costs of retiring Baby Boomers and the mandates of Obamacare gut the treasury in the coming years.

Romney’s problem wasn’t that he wrote off half the electorate; it was that he told the truth. And the truth hurts.