Fiscal Predators: The Seduction of Governmental Dependency

U.S. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter, Chair
The Republican House Policy Committee


The Left claims the Bush Administration manufactured a bogus war on terrorism to scare Americans into ceding their civil liberties to a police state. In reality, however, the Left is seducing Americans into surrendering their sovereignty, liberty, and prosperity to the welfare state.

Breaking their promise to provide fiscal responsibility to federal spending, every week the House floor echoes with the Democrats’ siren paeans to whatever slice of “social justice” du jour will ostensibly excuse hiking taxes and spending. By now taxpayers should be versed in the Left’s tricks of their trade: refusing to reduce government spending; refusing to prioritize government spending; and sweetly alleging only to be taxing a targeted group they’ve unfairly demonized to purportedly “help” a targeted group of vulnerable individuals - the poor, the sick, the kids (excepting the unborn). But in truth, the Left has only helped themselves in the near and long term to more of your prosperity, liberty and sovereignty.

Bent to feast upon the taxpayers’ money needed to sate their craving for social and electoral engineering, in the 110th Congress these Fiscal Predators have already:

• Passed five-year authorizations of $887,473,870,000, of which $25,476,250,000 is mandatory spending.

• Passed over $80,000,000,000 in NEW TAXES.

• Budgeted for the largest tax increase in American history – between $217,000,000,000 and $392,500,000,000.

• Raised the federal statutory debt limit by over $850,000,000,000 from $8.965 trillion to $9.81 trillion.

• Refused to devote a dime of deficit or debt reduction in their legislation.

• Refused to enact real earmark reforms.

• Refused to propose any entitlement reforms to defuse the ticking fiscal time-bombs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

• Ignored the fact economic growth – not tax hikes and Keynesian spending sprees – increased federal revenues by approximately $6,000,000,000 and will decrease the federal deficit by 36.2% at the end of FYO7.

Yet despite these alarming acts of fiscal irresponsibility, it appears the Left’s seductive spending is enticing the American electorate.

Earlier this year, in the Christian Science Monitor analyst Gary Shillings reported 52.6% of Americans receive “significant income from government programs… That's up from 49.4% in 2000 and far above the 28.3% of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55%, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President Reagan's move to scale back the size of government.” Future attempts will prove even more difficult. En masse, the aging baby boomers are hitting “entitlement age,” and beginning to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Compounding the problem, under the “progressive” federal income tax, a full 50% of the lowest earning Americans provide only 3.5% of federal tax revenues. In consequence, soon over half of all Americans will view future tax hikes and massive spending increases as bargain, if not a boon. And, by the way, since the Republican Party strayed from its root principle of fiscal discipline, the electorate empowered a new Democratic majority to handle America’s treasury. Combined, these events conspire to supplant free enterprise with wealth redistribution as Americans’ unifying economic philosophy and system.

The fiscal tipping point is passing. Like it or not, in our capitalist system money is not only a measure of your prosperity; money is a measure of power and, thus, your liberty and sovereignty in relation to the subservient national government. Thus, whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators raise taxes, it reduces your prosperity and your liberty; and whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators increase spending, it expands their power and diminishes your sovereignty over it. If nothing is done – and done quickly – to tether the Fiscal Predators and reaffirm the historic fact our free people engaged in free enterprise are the foundation of our national prosperity, Americans, who were once the masters of their fate, will be fated to be mastered by their once subservient government.

For the sovereign citizens of a free republic conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition government only exists to protect our God-given rights, this portends a less than divine descent into Hell.