The Fiscal Times reports that the United States is experiencing a level of dependency on government unknown since the depth of the Great Depression.

For the first time since the Great Depression, households are receiving more income from the government than they are paying the government in taxes. The combination of more cash from various programs, called transfer payments, and lower taxes has been a double-barreled boost to consumers’ buying power, while also blowing a hole in the deficit. The 1930s offer a cautionary tale: The only other time government income support exceeded taxes paid was from 1931 to 1936. That trend reversed in 1936, after a recovery was underway, and the economy fell back into a second leg of recession during 1937 and 1938.

Last summer I was at my parents’ cabin in rural Virginia and I noticed a dead mouse in a rusty old trap. I tossed it in the trash. Later that day I told my dad about the mouse, and he asked, “Where’s the trap?” I told him it looked as though it were falling apart, and I’d thrown it out with the mouse still attached. He looked at me as if I’d punched him in the face. My mom chimed in: “We’ve had that trap since we got married!” I wasn’t sure she was joking, and they got married almost 50 years ago. I sheepishly dug it out of the garbage and loaded it up with cheese again. Now it’s become one of those perennial things they bring up every time I go home: “Remember when Steve threw out the mousetrap, mouse and all!?” This is followed by shuddering and head shaking, as they silently wonder where it all went wrong.

What Tuttle doesn’t seem to realize is that his parents are simply typical representatives of an older, working-class life style in which cash was in severely limited supply and in which one’s own time in the form of labor would routinely serve as a substitute.

My generation always blamed our parents’ resistance to our own preferred high consumption economic style as the product of the psychic trauma of living through the Great Depression.

A lot of people on the left these days seem to be rejoicing in the arrival of economic bad times the same way many Britons and other Europeans welcomed the outbreak of the First World War, as a purifying fire that would sweep away corruption and decadence and which would ennoble those who passed through the flames. Well, we all know how well things worked out for those Europeans of the WWI era.