Chart: We Are The Forgotten 33%

Look up the word unsustainable in the dictionary and you might see a chart that looks like this.

Much has been made of the 1% vs. the 99%; the “super-rich” vs. the rest of us, who are presumably the hard working, loyal Americans who’ve been left behind. But who are the rest of us, and how does who we are affect how much we pay in taxes, and how we may vote?

The chart ... depicts the American electorate divided not into two groups – the 1% vs. the 99%, but four groups – the 1% super-rich, then 20% representing government workers, 46% representing citizens who either pay zero taxes or negative taxes (ala the “earned income credit”), and the remaining 33% who are neither super-rich, government employees, or not paying taxes. One might term this group the forgotten 33%, because no special interest will speak for them. They have neither the numbers nor the financial wherewithal to decisively influence elections...

...This identity of interests between the political class and the entitled class has created a supermajority of voters in America who have a self-interest in supporting big-government.

Perhaps the most appalling – and unchallenged – fallacy promoted by the big-government supermajority, primarily through their spokespersons in the public sector unions, is that the super-rich are “trying to destroy the middle-class by pitting the private sector workers against the public sector workers.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

With the dramatic extensions to unemployment insurance implemented by the Obama Democrats, the private sector is now paying people not to work:

President Obama is crowing that the unemployment rate is falling—to 8.3% in January—but he and his party are still insisting as part of the payroll tax deal that payments to the jobless must increase again. So add on another $30 billion or so to the $200 billion that this extra "unemployment insurance" has already cost since the recession...

...But for the last three and a half years those payments—about 35% to 40% of the worker's last pay check—have been extended eight times to an all-time high 99 weeks in many states. So now taxpayers pick up the check for as much as two years of not working, even as jobs become easier to find...

...[But t]wo of President Obama's most senior economists—former White House aide Larry Summers and current Council of Economic Advisers chairman Alan Krueger—have published studies documenting this antiwork incentive. According to a study co-authored by Mr. Krueger in 2002: "Higher and longer duration UI benefits will cause unemployed workers who receive UI to take longer to find a new job."

The sooner the Democrat Party is wiped out at the ballot box, the sooner this insanity can end. Before it's too late.