Here are four facts that ought to scare the daylights out of every person who cares about preserving individual freedom, economic opportunity and American self-reliance. According to the Heritage Foundation’s latest Index of Dependency — which measures the degree to which individuals rely on benefits funded by the tax payments of other Americans — these four facts illustrate the reality that our country is losing the spirit of independence that is the heart of citizenship:
• Takers get more than makers: Individuals received on average $32,748 worth of benefits annually in 2010, the most recent year for which full data is available. By comparison, the average personal disposable income of tax-paying Americans was $32,446.
• More takers mean more costs for taxpayers: An estimated 67.3 million people in America depended on government for food stamps, retirement income, health care, job training and a host of other benefits. As a result, the dependency index rose 8.1 percent in 2010 over 2009, at a cost to taxpayers of $2.5 trillion.
• Fewer makers to support each taker: Just as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher predicted, sooner or later the entitlement state runs out of other peoples’ money to redistribute. In 2010, nearly half — 49.5 percent — of all adult Americans paid no federal income taxes. This is a prescription for an economic imbalance similar to the one that has paralyzed Greece.
• Ranks of the takers are exploding: The baby boomer generation has begun retiring and within the next 25 years their ranks will swell to more than 70 million. Virtually all of them will depend on government for many benefits. This means the Dependency Index is headed higher, even if major entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are reformed now.
As disturbing as these facts are, they only scratch the surface of a problem that Heritage has been tracking since 2002. The index is unique because is measures multiple factors associated with the cost of providing government benefits, as well as the scope of their distribution, using 1962 as a baseline. As Heritage’s Bill Beach and Patrick Tyrrell explain, “the index score has grown by more than 15 times its original amount. This means that, keeping inflation neutral in the calculations, more than 15 times the resources were committed to paying for people who depend on government in 2010 than in 1962.”
Alexis de Tocqueville reputedly said that the American republic will last only “until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.” Indeed, political philosophers have warned since Aristotle that the worst flaw of democracy is the tendency of the majority to oppress the minority. That is what happens when takers become the majority and use their political power to force makers to hand over the fruit of their labor in the form of taxes. The time remaining for America to reverse this debilitating ratio is rapidly disappearing.
