'Twilight' Zone

This horror story by James Pethokoukis ought to scare the living daylights out of you and anyone else who cares about the future of the country soon to be formerly known as the United States of America:

The original purpose of Medicaid was to provide improved healthcare access for poor people, while not turning the safety net into a trap. Under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Medicaid will be greatly expanded beyond what Congress originally intended.

In fact, as these charts show, it has already expanded beyond what Congress surely originally envisioned and, in the process, has created a terrible fiscal problem for the United States. (These charts and graphics come from a briefing today here at AEI, conducted by Gary Alexander, secretary of public welfare for Pennsylvania.)

A few scary factoids:

• In the 1960s, there were 18 workers per Medicaid recipient. Today that number is 2.5.

• The number of Americans on disability has risen 19% faster than jobs created during this recovery.

• There are just 1.2 private sector workers per 1 person on welfare or working for government.

• There are now just 1.65 employed persons in private sector per 1 person on welfare assistance.

There follows a series of charts that are even more terrifying than the factoids, so please read the whole thing.  And then think about this: what happens to a nation when the Party of Take becomes bigger than the Party of Give?

Be careful what you wish for

And that’s just Medicaid. Medicare and Social Security are even worse; in fact, their trustees flatly say their trust funds will be exhausted in just a few years — Medicare by 2016, according to one estimate that factors in the double-counting under the deceitful ObamaTax. The national debt will soon be at 100 percent of GDP. And then what?

You can see where this is going: total collapse followed by “fundamental transformation,” just as the Cloward-Piven strategy predicts. Each time the Democrats come up with a new exercise in “compassion,” we know from bitter experience that (a) their cost projections are vastly underestimated, and (b) the program, once set on its course, must and will by its own internal, perverted “moral” logic grow until it consumes all available revenue. The program’s seeds of its own destruction — and that of everything it touches — are inherent from the start.

That’s because the public consistently fails to see — and Republicans consistently fail to explain — that massive programs like these don’t take place in a vacuum. Instead, they conform to Newton’s third law of motion. By ostensibly providing a “safety net,” programs like Social Security and Medicare change human behavior, undercutting the foundations of society and replacing the familial and social inter-generational compact with one guaranteed by the government at someone else’s expense. Free lunch for everybody!

And for what? Vote buying. Bribing the electorate has been a staple of the Democrats since Tammany Hall; it’s just that now the bribery is on an infinitely larger scale. The pursuit of political power has driven the Democrats from one crime against the nation to another, and sent them into alliances with racists, rebels, traitors, and, lately, the Frankfurt School Marxists who embedded themselves in President Obama’s alma mater of Columbia University. When faced with a choice between their country and their own self-interest, they inevitably choose the latter, even as they mask their aggrandizement as “compassion.”

Conservatives and their default party, the GOP, have acquiesced at every step. This is what comes from accepting the “moral” basis of anything the atheist Left argues — at this point, the very definition of insanity. Of course, there is no free lunch, as our current trillions of dollars of debt so vividly illustrates.

The House voted again yesterday to repeal the Patient Deflection and Unaffordable Care Act. Big deal. As the chief justice just taught everybody, the time to strangle a leftist program is in its cradle — not when it already has its teeth in your neck.