When the President declaimed in his recent budget speech about how all of us are "connected," I guess what he meant was that we (or at least a rapidly increasing number of us) are "connected" through our mutual dependence on the federal government.
Perhaps in his mind, that's a good thing. But I prefer the outlook of Ronald Reagan, who observed that a nation's compassion isn't measured by the number of people who are on welfare -- but rather, on the number of people who no longer need it.
An ever-increasing number of people on welfare doesn't signal an increase in compassion; it signals an ailing economy, flawed economics, and growing dependency on redistribution of income.