“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

Almost everyone remembers Barack Obama’s pitch to Joe the Plumber in 2008: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Most, too, have heard of “Julia,” the composite American created by the Obama campaign to illustrate the benefits of cradle-to-grave government dependence.

Less publicized is his 1998 speech at Loyola University, when he said, “The trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution.”

Stripping away the deceit, Obama espouses government that confiscates and transfers money from one group to another. He sees government as Robin Hood, hardly an apt comparison since the sheriff of Nottingham was a government agent. No, when it comes to income and wealth redistribution, government is a robbin’ hood.

It is now beyond debate that redistribution has been an unmitigated fiscal, economic, social and cultural failure, and the divisive government dependence it fosters is nothing less than a metastasizing cancer on our nation. Nearly half of Americans pay no income taxes; the only skin they have in the government game is the government largess they get and defend with their votes for candidates who promise to preserve or increase it.

The Heritage Foundation’s Government Dependence Index has risen by 25 percent since 2005 and 8 percent in the last year alone. Dependence programs today consume a record 70 cents of every dollar the government spends; 80 percent of the $1 trillion farm bill languishing in Congress would help fund a decade’s worth of food stamps. For the first time in history, the money each aid recipient gets for health care, welfare, college education, housing and retirement exceeds the per capita disposable income of the people paying the bills.

These damning truths are the result of nearly a century of “spreading the wealth around,” underwritten more recently with more than $1 trillion in annual borrowing. Yet the poverty rate has never been higher, and the tens of trillions redistributed over time have accelerated the nation’s social, cultural and economic rot.

Today, 91 million Americans work for or are dependent on the federal government. Maybe they and their families, friends and neighbors don’t comprise the Obamabeholden 47 percent of the population, as Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney indelicately claimed in secretly taped, off-the-cuff remarks at a spring fundraiser. Certainly, millions are unwilling dependents, “the victims” of the Great Recession.

But is there any doubt that through redistribution, government has created a permanent underclass of people who are undyingly loyal to Democrats and who indeed see themselves as “victims” of any number of injustices and thus entitled to other people’s money?

Romney’s remarks set off a firestorm of righteous indignation from Democrats and journalists. But when these same Obama supporters are asked about the president’s socialistic proclivities and about the parasitic predispositions of millions of Americans — essentially, whether Romney’s remarks were true — they shrug. As Joe Healy of The Los Angeles Times put it, it’s “a dog-bites-man story.”

Ah, universal deceit; it’s what Americans have come to expect from the robbin’ hoods and their band of merry journalists.

— The Republican American of Waterbury (Conn.)