Posted on 01/28/2012 8:40:19 PM PST by fight_truth_decay
You’ve played by the rules. Worked hard to put yourself through school. You’ve gotten a decent job and you pay your taxes. You’re faithfully paying down your mortgage and saving money in a 401(k) – all to secure your finances and your future. But now there are a lot more “takers” than “makers” in this country – and the impact is systemic and long-lasting.
A prevalent new “moocher culture” is changing the character of this nation – that’s the core message of A Nation of Moochers: America’s Addiction to Getting Something for Nothing, a new book by Charles J. Sykes, senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and the author of six previous books.
“This has been the flash point in American politics for the last several years,” Sykes told The Fiscal Times in an interview this week. “In the wake of the Great Recession, we’ve shifted from a culture of celebrating and encouraging those who are productive and hardworking, to a culture where handouts, bailouts, freebies and entitlements dominate. You start to wonder, Why am I paying the freight for those who have been reckless and irresponsible, whether it’s on Wall Street or in Washington or anywhere else in the community? I think we’re becoming a very different nation.”
Excerpts from our conversation with the author follow:
(Excerpt) Read more at thefiscaltimes.com ...
This more than anything is what is going to kill us. Gimme gimme gimme and make someone else pay for it. And when you don’t get what you want, riot. Ever since the 30s, more and more people think that someone else owes them a living. It started out with groups everyone agreed needed help — Social Security for the very old. Now anyone can get Welfare and Food Stamps. And programs for the elderly (Medicare especially) are bankrupting us. But if you try to reform them, there are riots. Government workers get premium benefits because they think they deserve it. And a big chunk of the population agrees. They think “the rich” have enough money to pay for everyone else to get a free ride. Hence the fact that the top 10% pay over half the taxes. We are in for a long, ugly period of American history. All because we moved from self-sufficiency to “make someone else pay” over the past 80 years.
It is the era of the parasite.
How Did Obama’s Stimulus End Up Paying a Rich Hollywood Director to Produce a Web Video Show?
[Excerpt:]"According to grant reports, One Economy so far has invoiced the government $18.9 million of the $28.5 million awarded under the grant, with 142.47 jobs created. The jobs include field supervisors, sales representatives and program managers, as well as numerous production-related positions, such as producers, cast members, casting director and an executive assistant to Mr. Townsend....If you poke around the Pic.tv and One Economy network of “free web sites” that you paid for, you’ll find helpful links promoting…wait for it…ObamaCare."
The joker that makes the rational, irrational is called a central bank. When you can grow money on trees why make sound decisions?
The attitude permeates our government and society. And it will continue to be fed by a printing press.
Until the music stops.
...and then History happens. We have no guarantees. I notice in these trains of thought a petulant "I did what's right and now I DESERVE!!!" That is not biblically or even basically correct. Thankfulness for each day is the only way to avoid the kind of bitterness this line of reasoning encourages.
Also, it's just better to live life as a productive person. Many curses are laid on lazy people and moochers and thieves. They get away with nothing. Don't be dragged into self pity!
I’m a federal employee who worked in private sector for 25 years. Premium benefits? Like what? The health insurance is so expensive we use my husbands, I pay a lot for the dental, vision and life insurance I do get...what else is there? I’m on the FERS retirement plan, and that’s nothing to write home about either.
We don’t get a Christmas ham, logo’ed mug, or even a pen with our agency name on it. You guys that buy into the lie of how great the fed employees have it are no different then the occutards crying about the 1 percenters.
I know. Sometimes I feel like the world’s biggest sucker.
I worked my way through college and paid the loans off myself. My husband and I just SOCKED away cash for years, saved for a down payment, bought a home, sadly, at the height of that ridiculous housing bubble, and now BOOM, we’re $50K underwater. That’s what we get for saving, playing it safe ... living within our means.
We continue to try to hang on to the house, and I’m very sure we’re not going to retire as well off as we once could have for sure. However, I’ll go to my grave knowing I did the right thing ...did not take out a loan I couldn’t pay back ...did not walk away and let someone else foot the bill.
I’ve learned from this whole thing ...and hopefully my kids will learn from it also. I do feel the good people of this world will eventually win out, but for now, it’s a stinking rotten mess. I also get very disgusted by the people I meet in my daily life who are immigrating here only to get on the dole. The entire world thinks America is their cash cow.
It is the truth and it has to be stopped.I have no sympathy for you if you were too stupid to keep yourself from having 6 kids by the time you were 22 it is not my problem to feed,clothe,and house you and your family.People have to realize that what was promised in the lat century was a myth we just can’t keep.There is a bottom to the barrel and we are pretty much there.
We are told the average compensation in Washington is now greater than the average American. The Public employee doesn't have private sector billionaires and millionaires to skew the average up. This makes the disparity even greater. So this is not true? Why the Boston Mayor's secretary makes $117,000 in salary alone. Throw in the benefits and she makes more that twice a private sector secretary, Nepotism is rampant in the Massachusetts public sector. Mom4melody, you got a long way to go to calling us liars.
“The entire world thinks America is their cash cow.”
Of course they do. They watch America TV. They see Buffett playing the system and they want some of that.
As if Buffett bank bailouts weren’t enough, Buffet arranges for a decoration from his clown Obama before ordering Obama to kill Keystone and thereby give Buffet’s Burlington Northern railroad a virtual monopoly on transporting oil out of North Dakota with a “Buffet monopoly tax” of at least $3 per barrel tacked on.
“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. - Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged 1957
“In the wake of the Great Recession, we’ve shifted from a culture of celebrating and encouraging those who are productive and hardworking, to a culture where handouts, bailouts, freebies and entitlements dominate.Kinda sums up the lot of us, huh?
You start to wonder, Why am I paying the freight for those who have been reckless and irresponsible, whether it’s on Wall Street or in Washington or anywhere else in the community?
I think we’re becoming a very different nation."
"Thankfulness for each day is the only way to avoid the kind of bitterness…"I understand your premise. It is, however, like giving an addict his next fix to continue with the madness we call "Social Services".
I’m probably the same generation as you, and we’re doing better than ever in this economy. You just have to position yourself right.
and it doens't stop with the average takers/moochers....its also the corporate welfare...
we're totally screwed......but still....I'm thankful that we are workers and givers, not lazy and takers...like many that we know..
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