Two Amusing – but Disturbing – Cartoons about Dependency

I’ve always been partial to these dependency cartoons produced by a former Cato intern, but these two are well worth sharing.

If you want to see more of Chuck Asay’s great cartoons, click here, here, here, and here.

On a related theme, here’s a cartoon from Lisa Benson.

The good news, as shown in this polling data, is that a majority of Americans still believe in individual responsibility. Let’s hope that spirit of self reliance lasts long enough for us to roll back the welfare state.

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Has Obama Made the Economy Better or Worse?

I’ve been a big critic of Obama’s policies on taxes, spending, regulation, and intervention, so you won’t be surprised that I argued on CNBC that his policies have made the economy worse.

Here are two graphs, which I posted earlier this month, that make my point. The red lines show the economy is finally – and slowly – moving in the right direction, but the blue lines show how the economy boomed under Reaganomics.

The gap between the two lines in the charts is a measure of how Obama’s policies have undermined the economy, as I mentioned on the program. However, I also said that this may not matter much this November if Republicans are incapable of making coherent economic arguments.

One last thing to emphasize is that Jared resorted to dishonest Washington math when discussing Obama’s make-believe budget cuts. When you use honest numbers, as i did when analyzing the President’s new budget, you find that the burden of government spending is going to climb by $2 trillion between 2012 and 2022.

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