Giveaway Nation

I am not sure that Americans, the generations born since the New Deal of the 1930s, are ready to give up all the goodies that the federal government provides. My father’s and my generation found comfort in Social Security checks and Medicare payments, but as the late Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, used to say, “There is no such thing as a free lunch” by which he meant you pay for what you get one way or the other, even it does not seem obvious at the time. When it comes to federal loans and guarantees, John Q. Public gets stuck with the bill.