I understand your anxiety (or anger) Dan, but I tend to look at it like a vessel. A ship if you will, on a never ending cruise. You've got poor on board and rich on board. Each gets their level of comfort commensurate with their respective "worth".
..but the passage still costs the same even if there are only a few first class passengers. Now you most certainly can feel that you don't "owe" that and that the poorer passengers are the reason of your high ticket price ...but try "not funding" the ship and what happens?
Dan, these are "natural" side effects of having more losers than winners. You can blame the reasons that these people are "losers". You can cling to myths of millions of crack smoking, baby producing, ghetto residents ...just living off the public dole and having it all come out of your pocket ...but it just isn't the case. I'll offer you an alternative view.
Take me. I was fairly gainfully employed. I made about $50k a year (knock off about a grand each year going back 15 years). No chimps did this job. We ran fairly sophisticated evaporators and other environmental systems from a computer control room. I was the chief guru. The engineers knew less than I did about the operations. It kinda felt like you were launching the space shuttle if you brought the system up from a shut down (gosh I miss it
)
Now that job is gone ...and, as with most heavy industry, there is very little to replace it. There are jobs like mine that are just as gainful (power production, etc.) ..but they are highly competitive and few in number.
So am I a crack smoking "loser"? No, I'm "un-needed" in that capacity. My 50k of tax revenue is now gone and replaced with anwhere from $26-35k a year tax revenue. Now multiply that by a tens of millions of people and you may just figuure out why you've got such a big tax bill. This "tax creep" has more to do with our dwindling wealth as a nation than it has to do with excessive taxation. There's no way around it.
You can blame it on whatever you like ..but it isn't going to change. Be prepared for more of it. You can take all the wellfare off the books ..take all the money that the rich could dump in and double it ...and it will still be the same. The food stamp program was so dwarft by the "increase" in medicare spending that it almost wasn't worth mentioning.
These are "The good old days", pal. You should be enjoying this brief luxury of economic freedom ..for it is surely coming to an end.