I love to read stats. This probably started when I was a young man, trading my baseball cards. There was a time when I could tell you the batting average, number of RBIs, and number of runs scored for virtually every player in the National Baseball League.

These days, I’m more apt to go on-line and read demographic information. There is so much that can be deduced and inferred from raw data.

One of the data points that I picked up recently was the almost startling fact that approximately 45% of all Americans receive some form of government largesse. Handouts.

Things like food stamps. WIC cards. Free cell phones. Subsidized housing. And on and on and on.

How we got here, I’m not sure. It’s kind of like that frog that became dinner simply because he didn’t notice the water heating up gradually. It just happened over time. And benefits, once dispensed, are mighty, mighty hard to put back in the bottle.

At some point, it is quite conceivable that the “takers” will outnumber the “givers.” This will be very interesting. Because at some point, the givers will have nothing left to give.

I look at the street riots happening in London right now and I ask myself, “Why?”

The fact is that that particular part of London is occupied primarily by individuals who simply cannot make a contribution to society. They’re untrained, most likely illiterate, and in many cases seething with discontent. It’s an ugly combination.

We did this to ourselves. We did this by letting government take the place of family. When my grandfather was a boy (in 1910), there were no safety nets. If you failed, it brought shame upon the household. So, you didn’t fail. You worked your butt off until you got it right. Or, you felt the sting of father’s paddle.

We all know this. We all know that things like the birth control pill, women in the workplace, and the general breakdown of family contributed to a society where government takes over a bigger and more important role.

But something that we didn’t notice was the fact that we also (and somehow --- I’m still trying to figure this one out) very gradually gave up on making things.

When I was a teenager, the only summer jobs were in manufacturing plants. I worked in a candy factory, a cheese factory, and a steel mill. Along the way, I learned how to melt and bend steel, create bacteria that would hollow out a piece of Swiss, and coat a bon-bon evenly and smoothly.

More importantly, I learned about things like distribution channels, inventory costs, shelf life, and even preservatives.

I made stuff.

Now that is all gone. Sent away, I think, because we somehow came to the conclusion that “making things” is dirty business. We concluded that “making things” is for “lesser” societies. Somehow, we came to believe that we had evolved beyond those societies and thus we would only perform the more sophisticated “brain” work.

Unfortunately, another manufacturing system, that being our educational system, failed to keep up with this strategy. Again, I think you can blame government for this as well. Government could not handle the truth (apologies to Jack Nicholson) --- the fact that career teachers began to retire instead of bending to “new ways” of teaching. (This is just one of many reasons why education started to slip.)

Here’s another one, the Vietnam War.

This conflict came along and, I believe, a whole generation of sub-standard teachers came online to replace those retirees. (I love to tell the story of one of my fraternity brothers - this guy could hardly spell the word “cat” - he became a secondary education major when he realized that the only way to avoid carrying an M-16 in Vietnam was to either leave the country or teach. Believe it or not, I later on dated a woman who was one of his students in high school. She called him, “the dumbest teacher I have ever met in my life;” which is when I knew it had to be the same guy.)

Unfortunately, there were a lot of these guys at my college and, from what I hear, the predilection to teach somehow became part of the psyche of every Vietnam-eligible sophomore on every American college campus circa 1965-1970.

Today, plant owners will be the first to tell you that they simply cannot find plant workers. This is partially due to the fact that the equipment is more sophisticated and partially due to the fact that many people are taking that aforementioned government largesse and either sniffing it up their nose or shooting it into their arm. (Another observation --- next time you’re in a men’s room and someone is taking an extra long time in a stall, check their nose when they come walking out.)

Forty-five percent.

Now, if you’re a recipient of this money and you are legitimately disabled or the victim of some legitimate tragedy, you have both my apology and my sympathy.

But what’s funny to me is how that number of “legitimate” causes has more than quadrupled in just the past two generations.

And as any college-educated math major will tell you, “Statistically, that just don’t make no sense.”