Amerika

How do you know when your society passes into collapse? One day you wake up and your society is acting more like a third world society. It just keeps getting worse after that until you descend to Russia and Brazil levels.

If you want to know what it is like to pass into socialism — one of the guideposts for moving into third world status — it helps to know that they rarely announce it with those hammer and sickle flags. Instead they just approve welfare programs until the entire economy is driven by government.

Consider the vast number of people dependent on government food subsidies:

Unless Congress strikes a deal to both reopen and fund the federal government, certain benefits will cease to be doled out starting this Saturday, November 1.

Among them: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, or SNAP, the food stamps used by some 42 million Americans annually, with an average benefit of $187 per recipient per month.

“For nearly six million households that rely on a program that helps low-income Americans pay for energy costs, it means facing expensive heating bills and the possibility of utility shut-offs in the winter,” reports The New York Times. Ditto for the roughly 65,000 children enrolled in Head Start programs nationally.

That is twelve percent of Americans who are on food assistance. Considering that many of these are heads of families, the actual number will be much higher. Can we say we are only twelve percent socialist? That sounds better than claiming ourselves as a dying crypto-Communist regime!

But the story gets juicier. Between social security and disability, another vast tranche of Americans are dependent on government benefits:

Social Security benefits and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments for more than 72.5 million Americans will increase 2.5% in 2025, the Social Security Administration announced today.

Nearly 68 million Social Security beneficiaries will see a 2.5% COLA beginning in January 2025.  Increased payments to nearly 7.5 million people receiving SSI will begin on December 31, 2024. (Note: Some people receive both Social Security benefits and SSI).

The population clock estimates the United States population on October 27, 2025 was 342,727,107. This means roughly thirty-three percent of Americans are supported by the government.

Add to that all of the people employed by affirmative action, all of the jobs like civil rights lawyers and paperwork-fillers for government programs, the millions of bureaucrats, the many people hired to manage government programs for private industry, and well over half of the country is entirely government-funded.

The industry is diversity and government is pumping money through it as a means to keep itself, a jobs program, expanding and powerful. There is no evil 1984-style overlord ruling us; we did it to ourselves with our greed and softhearted feelings, and in doing so we replicated the Soviet Union on our own soil.

Tags: benefits, communism, entitlements, SNAP, social security, socialism, SSI, welfare