It seems these days that liberals want big government services as long as someone else pays for them.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center asked a cross section of voters: If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?

White Republican men chose a smaller government by a 92-7 margin and white Republican women made the same choice by an 82-12 margin.

On the other side, white Democratic men chose bigger government by a 53-35 margin and white Democratic women by 56-33. This might explain the tendency for liberal Democrats to play with the fire of socialism.

This same question was presented to the so-called millennial generation” (defined as being born from the early 1980s to late 1990s). Initially this generation preferred a “larger government which provides more services” by 54 percent and only 43 percent preferred smaller government with fewer services.

However, once the resulting higher tax rates associated with big government are mentioned, the percentages flip flop to 57 percent in favor of smaller government and only 41 percent wanting larger government with more services.

The millennial generation is a confusing lot, yet they are a force to be taken seriously. This year, the millennials are projected to surpass baby boomers as the nation’s largest living generation, according to the population projections released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Consequently this major voting block has made themselves prime targets for big promises from declared socialists like Bernie Sanders and, yet-to-be declared, Hillary Clinton.

Both are trying to procure the millennial vote with promises of free college tuition and the forgiving of past student loans. This is basically the same old trick used on the poor and uninformed, to buy votes only then it was with free gifts such as free cell phones, tax returns on taxes not paid in, and allowing welfare assistance to be used for wants instead of needs. Liberals have always been willing to give a poor man somebody else’s fish yet they never give him a fishing pole.

For the average millennial, social media, particularly Facebook, along with comedy shows such as “The Colbert Report” and John Stewart’s former “Daily Show” have replaced mainstream television as a source of political news. Prior to his retirement, 27 percent of millennials were said to have gotten the majority of their political news from Stewart, a comedian.

With this questionable source of political information in mind, surveys show that half of millennials 50 percent now describe themselves as political independents neither favoring the Democrat nor Republican Party and about three out of ten 29 percent say they are not affiliated with any religion. These are some of the highest levels of political and religious non-affiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century.

When it comes to the millennial generation and gun control, socialists have used one of their best weapons, patience. Not able to sell gun control to the older generations socialists years ago turned their efforts toward our children. By constantly telling of the evils of guns, (not the people using them), getting little children to “tell” on their classmates if they should witness another student drawing a picture of a gun, or publicly humiliating students that dare wear shirts with military symbols or a soldier pictured on it, and we have the classic case of chewing a pop tart into the shape of a gun. All of this over many years has resulted in “Scholastic Brain Washing” yet you have to admit the socialist’s anti-gun agenda may have finally taken root in the millennial generation.

Socially liberal, the millennial generation typically votes for Democrat and liberal views on most social issues such as: supporting same-sex marriage and legalization of marijuana, yet millennials may be the generation that finally puts an end to unnecessary abortions. Liberal’s heavy promotion of “diversity” with it’s respect for all lives has had a positive effect on how the unborn are viewed by the millennials, I’m sure the liberals did not foresee this happening.

So we find millennials in general: burdened with the debt of student loans, which were far to easy to get and almost impossible to get rid of. Most millennials are in no rush to marry, they currently see little need for home ownership, and have little or no formal savings or retirement plan. We also find an alarming number have moved back in with their parents which has created a level of multi-generational households not seen since the Great Depression. Clouding their future is an accelerating $18 trillion federal deficit that currently seems to have no limit.

Yet amazingly enough, even with a world torn by religious wars, a cancerous spread of “nuclear weapons”, rapid decay of the nation’s moral structure and divisiveness running at an all time high, yet millennials still remain optimistic about the future.

God bless them all, for they are the future.

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Mark Schenck

Contributing columnist

Mark Schenck is chairman of the Scotland County Republican Party.