John Stossel in TownHall.com: Congress is spending us into a hole. We hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq war. But what about "entitlements"?
That's the government's ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn't.
Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money? To finance "entitlement" programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money. Read more…
It is worth noting that from our country’s founding until the late 1930s, it was considered unconstitutional for the government to make transfer payments to private individuals. When Roosevelt started paying “entitlements” to farmers and other individuals in the 1930s, the Supreme Court ruled each time that this practice was unconstitutional.
The administration’s response was that the money was already distributed and that it would be impossible to get it back. Then the next year, similar legislation would be enacted and the scene was played again. This fight went on for six years and eventually ended with the replacement of the court’s majority in 1939.
The result – it now takes 53% of the federal budget just to cover federal entitlement programs.
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