America’s Real Fiscal Problem: Federal Goverment Has Become a Gigantic Wealth-Transfer Machine

◼ “Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine,” wrote Nicholas Eberstaadt in the Wall Street Journal. “As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined.” - Canfield Press

“Our long-term fiscal problems won’t be fixed until we address what might be our nation’s most serious fiscal-related problem: we’re increasingly becoming a European-style ‘entitlement nation,’ with ‘payments to individuals’ increasing both in absolute dollar amounts and as a share of total federal spending, while at the same time the share of Americans who face a zero or negative federal income tax liability is above 40 percent and rising,” wrote Dr. Mark J. Perry, professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the University of Michigan. “In other words, a declining share of American taxpayers is being forced to finance the rising cost of the federal government, which is increasingly being spent on payments to individuals.”