American idiots calling for less government have no idea how much government they depend upon (via NYTimes):
The most comprehensive data appear in the Census Bureau’s Consolidated Federal Funds Report for Fiscal Year 2009, but the data is very aggregated and doesn’t tell much about how many people benefit from various programs or to what extent. The most recent study I could find that tried to do that was published by the Tax Foundation in 2007. It found that in 2004, a typical middle class family in the middle income quintile received $16,781 in benefits from the federal government.
Reminds me of this piece on the Tea Party by Matt Taibi:
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don’t love my country? I’m a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.