"...a paranoid fantasy planet of Communists and spoiled, brutish poor people who are out to loot their stuff."

107 million Americans right now live in a home where someone is on some form of means-tested benefit, not counting SS or Medicare. (corrected)

This is up from 97 million in 2009, and still rising.

If you include Medicare (which is not means-tested--yet) and subtract the overlap, the number goes up to 143 million.

These are not "brutish poor people" (if your straw men were clay, you could bury a Chinese emperor with them). They are people we know. My parents, for example. But they are not mythical, either, and there are only 300 million people in this country, of which 143 million are employed out of a labor force of 155 million.

How much of a country's population can live off the rest of it?

We have clocked in the first two months of fiscal year 2013. Total 2013 accumulated deficit so far for October and November: $292 billion. The government is borrowing almost half of every dollar it spends.

Obama is apparently going to fix this by raising taxes $80 billion a year. No liberal on this board cares.

He sincerely believes that a national health plan or social security program or a safety net will inevitably lead to the Gulag; that the poor are that way through choice (even though many of them hold two or three jobs and are still drowning), and that a brutal elite of intellectuals has allied themselves with the great unwashed just to plunder his hard-earned stuff.

I'm getting very tired of you lying about what I believe. My views are on record, in often-boring detail, over years and hundreds of posts.

There is a considerable amount of distance between national economic collapse and Gulags. But I don't define collapse without Gulags as a benign outcome. I also note that no nation in history that eventually ended up with Gulags did not start with some form of collapse.

No one here has ever said that the poor are that way by choice. That's one of your boogeymen.

"Stuff?" You are welcome to list the signature domestic positions and programs of Obama and the Democrats that do NOT involve handing out goodies or someone else's wealth to favored constituencies. Think before you respond.