There are far too many reliant on government.

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If you turned on cable news today, you’d think America was in free-fall. “Millions of Americans to lose benefits!” “Federal workers can’t eat!” “Horror, chaos, despair!” The usual panoply of pity-party press releases. But here in Real-ville, we see a very different scandal—one the elites don’t want you to talk about: the culture and policies that did this to us in the first place.

Yes, we’re in the grip of a government shutdown because Congress couldn’t get its act together, roughly 800,000 federal employees have been furloughed, and another 700,000 are working without pay. Infrastructure grants, transit funding, and countless other programs are being frozen—especially in blue states.

The talking heads on your TV screens have become experts in moral anguish: “How will people live?” “This is a humanitarian crisis!” Their tone is somewhere between Oprah and a disaster movie narrator. But what they’re not doing is diagnosing the disease—they’re only describing the symptoms.

Let’s begin with a refresher course on what got us here.

Go back to 2012. Barack Obama unveiled his mystical fable, The Life of Julia—a virtual cartoon woman whose life was essentially run by the state from cradle to grave. Preschool? Check. Student loans? Check. Childcare subsidies? Check. Maternity benefits? Check. Health care? Check. Retirement? Check. All owed to the government. It painted the federal bureaucracy as the caring, guiding hand you never asked for but couldn’t live without.

It wasn’t just campaign fluff. It was the blueprint for a new American identity: dependent, not independent.

Fast-forward to today, and the Julia template is baked into modern governing. Whether through expanded ACA subsidies, stimulus checks, child tax credits, or stealthy welfare expansions, the message is: You don’t need to stand. We’ll prop you up.

Democrats and their cultural vassals taught a generation to regard “self-sufficiency” as cruel, cold, and mean-spirited. That in itself became a virtue-signaling barrier: make people dependent, then shame them if they try to break free.

So, when a shutdown happens, and benefits are suspended, what do we see? People clutching their entitlement arms, wailing, “How dare they take from the weak?” The powerful response is emotional, not introspective.

But what we need is confrontation—not empathy—as in: Why are so many Americans engineered into dependency?

Day three of the current shutdown: Senate votes to reopen the government fail yet again. The GOP passed a continuing resolution in the House, but in the Senate, they couldn’t gather the 60 votes. Meanwhile, the White House is freezing billions in funding for Democratic-held states—projects in transit and green energy already hit.

Now, the media is in meltdown mode: “Households won’t pay rent! Kids will go hungry!” But consider: how many of those households were already depending on the government when times were good? How many of those children grew up memorizing the acronym of their taxpayer-funded benefit instead of reading a book?

Let’s get real: in many cities dominated by big-spending, progressive administrations, the welfare state is the default economy. Jobs are scarce, regulation is an anchor, taxes are outrageous—and dependency is the path of least resistance.

So, when the shutdown forces suspension of non-essential programs, we see that these “benefits” were not just subsidies—they were crutches.

Do you notice something odd about the Left’s reaction? They don’t blame themselves for the dependency they engineered. Instead, they wail about how unfair it is that people might suffer. They conjure images of “constituents” as helpless victims without ever calling their own policies into question.

They act morally righteous in dramatic public appearances: “We must protect the vulnerable!” Yet behind the scenes, they demanded that any reopening bill include massive subsidies, protections, and giveaways—even for illegal immigrants. They’re not negotiating for Americans; they’re negotiating their voter base—forcing Republicans to reopen the checks without cutting their version of the patronage stream.

If Democrats truly cared about suffering, they’d demand less dependency, not more. But that’s not how “compassion politics” is practiced today.

If you listen to the Senate Democratic Leader, he’ll demand restoring premium tax credits as a condition to reopen the government. You can’t open the doors unless you first lock in the payouts. That’s not negotiation—that’s hostage-taking. Meanwhile, Republicans pushing for a “clean CR” are pressured to carry the fiscal burden alone. But the word clean doesn’t mean clean—it means don’t ask us to cut your favorite freebies. The Left wants everything sewn into the reopening, including giving new benefits to illegal immigrants.

Let me put it in plain English: they’d rather shut down the government than let go of their patronage machines.

We conservatives have grown weary of being shamed for wanting people to earn rather than receive. So, here’s a new tactic: turn the shame back onto the shouters.

• “Why are your policies still in place if they work?”
• “If poverty is so awful, why do we have more people relying on government now than ever?”
• “Which city has your model, and does it prosper or collapse?”

Ask the Left how “compassionate” it is for them to train generations to consume freedom instead of producing it. Ask them if they realize that they’ve replaced the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of a monthly benefit check.

If they care about people truly suffering, they’d encourage opportunity, not permanence. They’d fight for job creation, not just for regulating how we qualify for the dole. They’d aim for people to graduate from dependency, not remain in it forever.

Their silence on this is not an oversight—it’s their design.

Here’s the real test: if you cared about the vulnerable more than the dependent, you’d cut the welfare death-grip, not fill it deeper. You’d pass a CR that reopens funding for critical services—but you’d refuse to lock in new expansions or provisions for those who are here illegally to join the line at the taxpayer buffet.

That is the moral baseline.

Then—and only then—you negotiate programs that support the truly needy, not the chronically comfortable. You force reform: stricter eligibility, time limits, pathways to employment, work requirements. You build bridges to independence, not padded binds to entitlement.

And you stop letting the Left get away with moral blackmail. Because when they scream “people will die,” what they’re really doing is protecting their policy work—and their electoral base.

This shutdown didn’t break government—it exposed government. It pulled back the curtain and revealed the truth: millions of Americans are not struggling because we lack compassion—they’re struggling because we replaced ambition with entitlement.

Let politicians keep pushing their dramatic narratives. In Real-ville, we’ll keep pressing a harder question: when does someone say, “I don’t want to get paid by Washington—I want to go to work for myself again”?

Because that, not more programs, is the real safety net this country needs.

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