Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said the following on Al Sharpton’s program:

“We’re headed in the right direction. Unemployment continues to drop and those people who are unemployed, they’re not going to be voting for the party who wants to cut their benefits, cut access to food stamps, cut job training.”

Actually, unemployment has not dropped if the underemployed and those who have given up trying to find employment are counted in the unemployment numbers. Bureaucratic regulations, high taxes, and government subsidies are contributing to the creation of a permanent underclass of voters who will resist any attempt to cut their benefits.

Programs that we’re implemented decades ago with the claim that they would help the most needy people have become gargantuan in size and scope. Some will argue that this was by design in order to create a permanent underclass that would always vote for a larger role for government and the political party that supports the programs.

The principle is illustrated in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point is “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” My favorite illustration is one on paper folding. How thick would a sheet of paper become if you could fold it in half just 50 times? Each fold doubles the thickness. The first fold nets almost no appreciable change in thickness as you end up with two sheets. Even ten folds (if you could physically fold a sheet of paper in half ten times) doesn’t reveal what’s coming as the folding continues. What seems insignificant at the beginning results in a dramatic end. The math is simple – 2⁵⁰. Here’s how it works out:1

1. 1,125,889, 990,700,000 (1 quadrillion, 125 trillion, 889 billion, 990 million, 700 thousand sheets of paper).

2. Divided by 200, the number of sheets of paper per inch (5 trillion, 629 billion, 449 million, 534 thousand inches of paper).

3. Divided by 12, the number of inches in a foot (469 billion, 124 million, 961 thousand, 200 feet of paper).

4. Divided by 5280, the number of feet in a mile (88 million, 849 thousand, 424 miles) — nearly the distance from the Earth to the Sun (93 million miles).

It’s hard to create new programs, but it’s harder to “un-create” them. Once a program is on the books, it’s nearly impossible to overturn it. Unfolding the programs takes time and energy. There are too many people who benefit by the subsidies.

Did you notice how the TSA grew by leaps and bounds so fast? There was purpose in this. Liberals will talk about how many jobs (votes) will be lost if the agency is abolished.

Presently, we are a almost a 50–50 nation. Nearly fifty percent of voters have no economic skin in the game. Talk about tax cuts scares them. With revenue down, they will be affected first. Nearly 50 percent of Americans don’t pay a dime in federal taxes. Once we reach a tipping point, that is, once that number goes over 50 percent, the game is nearly over. It becomes an election of sheep and wolves, and we’re the sheep.

“Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote. . . . Voters and politicians alike would do well to take a look at the rights we each hold, which must never be chipped away by the whim of the majority.”

We’re lunch. Liberals understand this very simple principle. They’re counting on the wolves to vote en masse. What the wolves don’t realize is that once the sheep are eaten, there won’t be anything else to eat, and they’ll begin to eat one another. We’re already seeing it by the high murder rates among certain underclass groups that were created by the welfare state.

1. The calculation is based on using 100# Gloss Coated Cover Paper with an average caliper of .0095 inches per sheet: 211 pages per inch rounded to 200 ppi. [↩]