The Scariest Picture You’ll Ever See

I think the author also missed one point, that the wealthiest people tend to live near major metropolitan areas and, because they do not have to worry about their daily subsistence, like moderate income people do, many tend to be more liberal. This leaves those in the middle to fend for themselves.

Excerpt: What you’re looking at is a map of the 2008 Presidential election, broken down by the results in each county. If Barack Obama received most of the votes in a particular county, it appears in blue. If John McCain was the winner, that county is in red.

If you added up the land mass of every blue and red county you’d see something really striking—the Republicans won 80 percent of this country, when measured by acreage. John McCain got a majority of votes in 2,417,000 square miles of the United States. Barack Obama, by comparison, won in just 580,000 square miles.

Ah, but now let’s look at the population numbers for each county. McCain still came out ahead, but not by much. The total population of counties won by Republicans was 143 million, while the population of counties won by Democrats was 127 million.

Basically, the Democrats swept the populations centers—the cities and more populated suburban areas—while the Republicans won everything else.

Now, guess what you would find if you could then overlay this map with one showing the distribution of food stamps, unemployment checks, subsidized housing and other welfare payments? Sure, there will be some in all of those red areas. There are plenty of Republicans receiving Social Security and Medicare. I’m sure there are even some Republican farmers who get paid not to grow crops. And there are certainly some Republican businessmen getting subsidies from Uncle Sam.
But the overwhelming majority of voters in the red areas pay more into government than they receive; while just the opposite is true in the blue areas. The majority of people there receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. In fact, 45 percent of adults in America pay no income taxes at all. Not one red penny. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

Can you guess where most of those people live? And which party they vote for? While you ponder the significance of these statistics let me repeat a quotation I used in last week’s column when I was discussing the differences between a republic and a democracy:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, and is always followed by a dictatorship.”

The statement does not come from one of our Founding Fathers (although I’m sure that, to a man, they would agree with its warning). No, it was written long after our revolution, by a Scottish historian named Alexander Fraser Tytler. By the way, he wasn’t predicting the collapse of our republic; he was talking about what happened to the Athenian democracy 2,000 years ago.

The Scariest Picture You’ll Ever See