It may be Winston Churchill who holds the record as the most quoted man in history, when in fact he never uttered the actual words: "Liberal under 25, conservative over 35," etc. Mark Twain runs a close second.
It's a habit that goes back to antiquity; if you want your opinion to be taken seriously by a great number of people, say it (or write it) and attach somebody else's name to it.
Modern society has brought this habit to 2021, and doesn't appear willing to abandon it yet. Just look at your Facebook page. It seems every other post features a prominent citizen, or actor, with a pithy quote underneath.
There's a smart observation that we find in columns now and then. It is usually attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish judge from a couple hundred years back. Sometimes it's credited to Alexis de Tocqueville. And it goes like this, give or take a word:
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."
No matter who said it, the comment is insightful--and unnerving. Because, well, the news.
We'd be stunned if, during the Joe Biden administration, the national debt doesn't rise above $30 trillion. And that doesn't include the unfunded mandates and promises of Social Security and other government programs. The national debt has been on the rise for years. As the Trump administration has proved, the debt problem is a bipartisan mess.
And you might have heard that the state of Georgia held a run-off election this past week. It was an important race, in which the power in the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance. Both sides poured millions into the election. Both sides sent in the big guns. (If we get one more email from James Carville ... .) One of the races has been called. As of Wednesday, the other was thisclose.
President-elect Joe Biden visited Georgia earlier in the week. And during one pre-election rally, he promised Georgians that they'd get a little more of the largesse if only they voted Democrat.
Larger stimulus payments of $2,000 per person would "go out the door immediately" if the two Democrats won in their contests, the president-elect said. And, as is Joe Biden's habit, he wasn't shy about going on and on once he found an idea the crowd liked:
"Think about what it'll mean to your lives," he said of the 2K payments. He talked about folks "putting food on the table, paying rent, paying your mortgage, paying down the credit card, paying the phone bill, the gas bill, the electric bill. Just look around, millions of people in this country out of work through no fault of their own."
But no matter your thoughts on the stimulus bill(s), his comments were faulty.
The $2,000 government checks--the third round of stimulus--wouldn't just go to millions of people who are out of work. But also to millions of people well into the upper middle class, or at least well into the middle middle class. That is, those with well-paying jobs.
And they don't need the money to put food on the table. Or to pay the electric bill. Or to pay for gas. There is a difference between stimulus checks going to everybody, and an extension of unemployment benefits (which, for the record, does keep food on the table and the lights on).
The first two stimulus checks were means tested. That's no guarantee the next one will be.
And if sending out guaranteed stimulus checks (much of the money going to folks who have jobs) is a good idea at the back end of a pandemic, then why not every single year? Or every month? Or every two weeks? How far away are we from the guaranteed Universal Basic Income pushed by last year's flash-in-the-pan Andrew Yang? And how many trillions are We the People willing to spend now for our kids and grandkids to pay?
Note well: Every dollar put on the nation's credit card will have to be paid back in the future. Or interest paid on the balance.
How far in the future? Hard to say. But there is no free lunch.
We think Milton Friedman said that first.
Or was it Rudyard Kipling?