George Rebane

Debt is an injustice imposed on borrowers by greedy lenders who do not deserve to be repaid – from the liberal mind.

Forbes has identified eleven states that are in an economic “death spiral”.  These are the pictured states whose taker/maker ratios equal or exceed 1.00, states where takers are the government employees and welfare recipients, and makers are those who are taxed to pay for the takers.

This list of shame reads New Mexico 1.53, Mississippi 1.49, California 1.39, Alabama 1.10, Maine 1.07, New York 1.07, South Carolina 1.06, Kentucky 1.05, Illinois 1.03, Hawaii 1.02, and Ohio 1.00.  From this we see that California has 1.39 takers for every diminishing maker in the state.  [H/T to regular reader for the heads up on this.]

Victor Davis Hanson is keeping a stiff upper lip as he reports the goings on in the once golden state.

Not just in its finances but almost wherever you look, the state’s vital signs are dipping. The average unemployment rate hovers above 10 percent. In the reading and math tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, California students rank near the bottom of the country, though their teachers earn far more than the average American teacher does. California’s penal system is the largest in the United States, with more than 165,000 inmates. Some studies estimate that the state prisons and county jails house more than 30,000 illegal aliens at a cost of $1 billion or more each year. Speaking of which: California has the nation’s largest population of illegal aliens, on whom it spends an estimated $10 billion annually in entitlements. The illegals also deprive the Golden State’s economy of billions of dollars every year by sending remittances to Latin America.

For those wanting more than a little depth on this entire issue, Nicholas Eberstadt has written an analysis that pulls together the magnitude of the disease our country is afflicted with in his A Nation of Takers – America’s Entitlements Epidemic (2012).

The government statistics he quotes that document our behavior over the last 50 years or so are devastating.  Many of them have also been presented on RR, and, of course, duly rejected by our leftwing neighbors.  Eberstadt cites that 98% of Americans over 65 receive SS and Medicare payments. But what is more shocking is that in 1960 only 0.65% of 18-64 year olds were receiving SS disability payments, and that number today has swollen to almost 6%.  And well over a third of these are getting checks for “musculoskeletal and connective tissue” maladies and “mood disorders” – clearly the nation has discovered and is exploiting a new commons and getting while the getting is good.

The problem, it appears, is that once the government spigot is put in place and turned on, there is little chance of stopping people from demanding more spigots flowing at ever greater rates.  Contributor to the book, Yuval Levin notes that “Liberal democracy has always depended upon a kind of person it does not produce.”  These stark factors that now describe the landscape of American propensities have formed the basis of my own established assessment that we are beyond the tipping point that forebodes failure in the great experiment of our ability to govern ourselves.  And by no means is this a solitary vision of our future.

Meanwhile the looney Left denies all of this, and with supermajorities in both houses in Sacramento, you ain’t seen nothing yet when it comes to taxing and regulating the state’s Makers.