Apocalypse now (or at least soon)

Interesting facts regarding the last presidential election: Obama won 28 states plus DC while McCain won 20. The total number of square miles of Obama states was 1,483,702 while McCain's were 2,310,315 (1,719,311 if we take out Alaska). The average murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by Obama was 6.56 while in McCain's counties it was 3.6.

While the divide was less severe than in 2004, the continued reality is that the poorer, less law-abiding sectors of our nation continually vote for the Democrat while the more affluent and more law-abiding populations vote Republican. Should it be a surprise that the result of this trend is a progressive increase in the size of government largess. This is not to say that Republicans never engage in government-run charity, but clearly the Democrats are the primary progenitors of such programs. They certainly campaign the most stridently on their willingness to provide even more direct assistance to the "needy" among us.

Today, nearly half the population pays no income taxes at all, and many of these same people (perhaps as much as 40% of the population) depend on some form of government hand-out. We have an ever-growing divide between the providers of revenue and the recipients of benefits. The question is, how do we ever stop our nation from continuing to move in this direction?

We have recently seen in Greece what happens when citizens are threatened with the loss of government entitlements: rioting in the streets. Once a benefit is bestowed, it is virtually impossible to take it back, regardless of the consequences it's having on the economy. This is why the Founders foresaw the inherent dangers in granting gifts from the public treasury to the voting citizens. Human nature inclines most people to vote themselves the best benefits, regardless of how it effects anything else.

Today we have a society that is putting its government gifts on a charge card and saddling the next generation with the payments. This is serious enough, but if Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal immigrants, and they begin to vote, we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years. I think that this clearly plausible scenario can rightly be call an Apocalypse.