If we’re gonna go broke paying for all that “free stuff,” at least we can laugh about it ~
 

[Hat-tip: chadams]

 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Related:
A brief lesson from the Mises Institute explains how there’s no such thing as free lunch; something too many Americans have completely forgotten ~

Governments can finance these programs in only three ways: (1) direct taxation of its citizens, (2) borrowing money, and/or (3) printing money. Few citizens understand the nefarious effects these methods can have on their own well-being. None of them provide “free” money.
 
The first and most obvious way to raise money is by direct taxation. When you pay your income tax or sales tax, you are brutally aware of how much money is being taken out of your own pocket. If the government only uses these taxes to fund itself, it would quickly run into serious taxpayer opposition; would we still be in Afghanistan today if the government took your flat-screen TV or cell phone to pay for soldiers half a world away?
 
The second way to raise money is by government borrowing. When the government borrows, it takes money from people who are trying to save, promising a seemingly riskless asset: a government bond. The government has displaced money that would normally have been used to invest in a new computer or machines or buildings, or even a consumption good as a new car […]
 
Now, government borrowing is normally also constrained. The more the government borrows, the greater the demand for loanable funds and the higher the rate of interest. Here again, taxpayers who are also trying to borrow to buy a car or a house would soon realize that it’s the government borrowing that is crowding them out of the loan market. Of course, there is a point of no return for government debt, when the markets doubt a country’s ability to repay this debt — as Greece discovered in 2010.
 
Now, the obvious question is, how can the US or any other country run record budget deficits and have rock-bottom interest rates at the same time? The answer is the third way by printing money, or often called “quantitative easing.” This way also impacts the government’s ability to borrow […]

[It also causes inflation, reducing the purchasing power of your money.]

The central bank has been keeping the CPI (consumer price index) in check but has created massive asset inflation, a massive redistribution of income from the poor to the rich and has been a major contributor to financing ever-growing government expenditures […]
 
Many in the lower rungs of the economic ladder blame their declining real incomes, and other inequities, on capitalism. They should, instead, be blaming the central bank.