Who pays anyone $30,000 for one hour of their time every two years? 

If you're part of the 25% paying 90% of the Nation's income taxes, you do.

The $30,000 is what you're paying those who vote for a living to spend one hour of their time every two years doing it.

Because means-tested welfare is a political concept in which those who work for a living get to pay those who vote for a living.

Actually, outside of Mississippi, the value of means-tested welfare's often much more than $30,000 every two years.  It's more like $40,000 in Iowa, $60,000 in California, and even $80,000 in Hawaii.  In my own home state, Maryland, it's $71,344 every two years. 

Campaign spending for the mid-term election in which you may have just voted totaled at least $4 billion.  That sounds like a lot of political lard just to grease 435 House seats and 36 Senate seats (an average of $8.5 million per seat).  Actually, it's peanuts.

Forget political action committees, direct campaign contributions, party funding, and all the rest of the penny-ante stuff about which the Federal Election Commission exercises itself.  All that's voluntarily contributed for one political consideration or another, and it doesn't amount to a hill of beans anyhow.  Don't let all the hoopla about Federal election laws distract you from where the real political action is.

The real political gorilla in the campaign room is the $1 trillion which government collectively spends every year on its means-tested welfare programs.  That's your money which you involuntarily spend each year to elect every two years the politicians who force you to spend it.  So for just this mid-term election alone, you've involuntarily spent $2 trillion during the last two years to re-elect the politicians who will force you to spend another $2 trillion during the two years before the next full-term election.  And so on for every future election cycle until you're bled dry, the dollar tanks, and no one anywhere in the world will lend your government any more money with which its politicians can buy the welfare votes, which are the margin by which they get themselves re-elected.

The $2 trillion which this mid-term election thus involuntarily cost you for buying votes with means-tested welfare spending is, by the way, 500 times greater than the $4 billion various political interests voluntarily contributed for special reasons of their own (think inflation-induced consumption, asset bubbles, and crony capitalism).

What? 

You didn't think, did you, that your federal government was spending $775 billion -- and your state governments another $225 billion -- every year on means-tested welfare just because all elected officials are legislative Mahatma Gandhis or political Mother Teresas who believe all of you who work for your living are simply dying to transfer trillions of your dollars to the slews of social parasites whom Rabbi Steven Pruzansky in 2012 characterized as voting for a living rather than working for a living? 

You didn't think, did you, that there's no conceivable way, in the world's most muscular economy, the millions who vote for their living could, like you, instead work for their living?

You didn't think, did you, that the most productive way to manage a free-market economy was to take $1 trillion a year away from people who earned it producing things of value and transfer it to people who didn’t earn it and produced nothing of value for it?

You didn't think, did you, that your government's now preparing to print 34 million green cards and work permits for non-citizen workers because there are simply too few unoccupied citizens already here to do the nation's unskilled work?

You didn't think, did you, that any of this was going to change just because Mitch McConnell will replace Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader?

Well, of course you didn't.  You're probably too busy putting roast taxes on government banquet tables to think much about this at all.  Maybe -- like me for most of the last half century -- you've just pretty much been a chump. 

Well, two years from now when you line up in your polling place again you might start thinking about the voters ahead of you, behind you, and in between them and you.  Because they're likely to be the 50% paying none of the Nation's income taxes; and half of them, the 25% whom your income taxes pay $30,000-$80,000 for the one hour it takes them to cast the votes which cancel your own.

Think, and ask yourself how that's working out for you.

Ever heard of Judy Chu?  Know who Keith Ellison is?  How about Donna Edwards, Sam Farr, Mike Honda, Jared Hoffman, Jan Schakowsky, Steve Cohen, Alan Lowenthal, James McGovern, Mark Pocan, Linda Sanchez, Peter Welch, Alcee Hastings, and Jose Serrano?  According to The National Journal, they're the Nation's 15 most liberal [make "15 most liberal" hot key for: http://www.nationaljournal.com/pictures-video/the-15-most-liberal-representatives-20140206] legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives.  "Liberal," in this context, means big government with its nose in your business and its hand in your pocket.  Every one of these statist partisans was re-elected Tuesday.  And the margin by which they were re-elected is the $30,000-$80,000 which you paid their welfare constituents to spend one of their last 17,520 hours re-electing them.

Yesteryear's actual plantation owners bought human beings with their own money and -- no matter how reprehensibly -- at least used them to produce real economic value.  Today's political plantation owners, however, corruptly use your money to buy human beings and pay them not to produce any economic value at all as long as they go to the polls once every two years and cast their votes for the good old boys and girls in the big white house on the hill.  How much, then, has truly changed?  The human beings involuntarily laboring on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation in the 19^th century may well have had a greater ratio of intact, happy, and productive families than the ones now laboring not at all on the 21^st-century political plantations.

There's a perfectly good political reason for all this.

It gets politicians re-elected.