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…

Read article here