Food-Stamp Nation

Welfare: A record 42 million on food stamps is bad enough. But those now running Washington want dependence on government extended indefinitely.

Newly released July figures show 41.8 million Americans on food stamps (or SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to use the new de-stigmatized terminology). That's an 18% jump from one year earlier and 1.4% from June.

The light we are told to see at the end of this tunnel of recession, in fact, amounts to expanding the food stamp concept to lots of other aspects of our lives.

In proposing his massive expansion of government in 1964, Lyndon Johnson warned that "the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work."

Claremont McKenna College political scientist William Voegeli's new book, "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State" notes, "Liberals don't want the government to grow indefinitely. They just want it to be bigger than it is right now."

That, of course, means big problems — like trillion-dollar stimulus programs that don't produce jobs.

The Democrats' stimulus includes "$145 billion in state and local aid to forestall austerity measures in the public sector," notes Manhattan Institute senior fellow E.J. McMahon. As private sector workers suffer layoffs, salary cuts and pay freezes, the stimulus gives raises to government employees — who increasingly dominate Big Labor, which returns the favor with cash for Democrats.

"I have no better friend in labor than AFSCME," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once said of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the U.S.' largest political campaign donor, giving over $38 million since 1990, almost all to Democrats.

"Total state and local wages rose by $15 billion in 2009 alone, despite the recession," McMahon points out. A $15 billion return, in just one year, for a $38 million investment — not a bad deal.

Lower cost was the central campaign promise of ObamaCare, but as the Medicare actuary has attested, it will increase health costs. The president's government takeover has already begun to boost private health insurance premiums.

You're even supposed to place your car in mothballs and rely on government for transportation. "Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination," the president promised last year.

But as Heritage Foundation fellow Ronald Utt warns, the billions in transport "stimulus" is less likely to build whiz-bang, Japanese-style bullet trains than to go to "freight railroads to achieve modestly higher speeds for existing, half-full Amtrak trains running on their tracks."

Somehow, big government promises of "Hope" always end up being "Hope a Dope."