{"id":8996,"date":"2010-03-04T08:57:11","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T13:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8996"},"modified":"2010-03-04T08:57:11","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T13:57:11","slug":"a-milestone-and-a-millstone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=8996","title":{"rendered":"A Milestone And A Millstone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s unclear who actually first used the aphorism &#8220;Democracy can only survive until the people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury&#8221;.\u00a0 I&#8217;d always thought it was De Tocqueville, but a cursory search shows it could also be anyone from King George III to Jessica Simpson.\u00a0 I just don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>And, given\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtontimes.com\/news\/2010\/mar\/01\/americans-reliance-on-government-at-all-time-high\/\">yesterday&#8217;s news<\/a> that Americans depend more on government than ever before&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Without record levels of welfare, unemployment and other government benefits as well as tax cuts last year, the income of U.S. households would have plunged by an astonishing $723 billion \u2014 more than four times the record $167 billion drop reported last month by the Commerce Department.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8230;and get more in bennies than they pay in taxes&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Moreover, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans took more aid from the government than they paid in taxes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8230;it&#8217;s really a lot less important to know who said it, and more important to see if the unnamed sage was correct.<\/p>\n<p>Because we may just find out, here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s unclear who actually first used the aphorism &#8220;Democracy can only survive until the people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury&#8221;.\u00a0 I&#8217;d always thought it was De Tocqueville, but a cursory search shows it could also be anyone from King George III to Jessica Simpson.\u00a0 I just don&#8217;t know. And, given\u00a0yesterday&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8996"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9040,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8996\/revisions\/9040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}