Plans to Spread the Wealth Around

When Barack Obama told Joe the Plumber he planned to "spread the wealth around," many people didn't realize that Obama was not talking about spreading the wealth only of the super-rich. Now that Obama is elected, he is moving rapidly to expand welfare handouts for non-taxpayers, running up a tremendous national debt that will inevitably lead to higher taxes on the Middle Class.

The enormity of this transfer of money away from working, taxpaying Americans to non-taxpayers has just been explained in a sensational report by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. There are not enough superlatives in the English language to adequately describe the colossal amounts of money involved in these shocking cash transfers.

Most people don't realize that the federal budget has become a vast machine for transferring wealth from the upper third of Americans (who pay 90% of federal income taxes) to the lowest third of people who pay no income tax. The size of this massive annual transfer rose by 40% over the last ten years, and is projected to rise to $1 trillion per year by the end of Obama's first term.

Obama didn't invent these means-tested transfers; they mostly started with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society welfare programs. Like most government programs, the cost of these welfare and aid-to-lower-income persons has increased, and Obama demanded vast additional increases, which Congress passed in the Stimulus and Omnibus bills. Welfare spending is 13 times greater today than it was when LBJ started the Great Society in 1964. Means-tested welfare spending then was only 1.2% of our Gross Domestic Product, and now has reached 5%. These programs are now the third most expensive government activity. National Defense ranks only fourth.

Listen to the Audio version of this commentary.