Taxpayers vs. Tax-Eaters

by Jim Panyard

Playing off the sloganeers of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Presidential re-election campaign, it’s safe to say, “It’s Mourning in America.”

Even The Gipper would admit it.

As of June 2009, 155 million people were laboring in the shrinking private sector of the American Empire with a per capita income of $39,751 and a per household income of $50,740.

In addition to supporting themselves and their dependents on those earnings, they were also supporting:

22.5 million government employees at the federal, state and local levels. The average pay of those on the federal government payroll is $75,419 this year, according to Econwatch. The story is much the same at the state and local levels. In Pennsylvania, for example, the average state employee has a pay package of about $68,000 per year, while the state’s household income is $48,576. (As an aside, there are only about 20 million jobs in the nation’s manufacturing and construction sectors, combined.)

• 3.9 million welfare recipients
• 46.5 million Social Security recipients, a number projected to rise to about 72 million in the next 20 years.
• 14.7 million Americans drawing unemployment benefits, with that number expected to rise consistently in the foreseeable future.

The productive sector workers are also paying for everything the Leviathan State does, such as wars, roads,Imperial adventures, private stadiums, bailouts, counterfeiting, ad infinitum. They also pick up the soaring tabs for 47 million Medicaid and 42 million Medicare recipients.

If this isn’t rampant socialism, it will do until the real thing arrives.

How can 155 million productive workers support themselves, nearly 100 million nonproductive others and a seemingly endless list of government endeavors (most of which could be done more economically and more effectively by the private sector)?

Answer: They can’t. Or, as they say in the computer business, “Game Over.”

America’s ongoing and growing financial bankruptcy is matched by its moral bankruptcy with 50 million “legal” abortions and counting; illegitimacy becoming the societal norm and celebrations of sodomy across the nation.

Theologian and author R.J. Rushdoony noted, correctly, that a nation’s religion is reflected in its culture.

What about hope? As my Dad used to say, “S(p)it in one hand and hope in the other. See which one fills up fastest.”

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