Most Americans’ understanding of their nation’s past is notoriously sketchy. Now, at the end of an election season ostensibly about the nation’s future, most Americans surely are uncomprehending about the present.

They fancy this a nation of independent, self-reliant strivers, wary of government and disdainful of Europeans contentedly dependent on governments’ providing for their well-being by redistributing wealth. Most Americans probably would recoil from living in a hypothetical country where:

Payments from government entitlement programs — transfer payments — are the fastest-growing major component of citizens’ personal income. Such transfers are the third-largest source of personal income: In 2022, the average citizen received almost as much from government transfers ($11,500) as from investments ($12,900), and more than one-quarter as much money as was obtained from work. This average citizen received six times more (adjusted for inflation) in government transfer payments than in 1970, during which span income from other sources increased less than half as much. Transfers’ share of total (inflation-adjusted) personal income has more than doubled since 1970, from 8.2 percent to 17.6 percent in 2022.

Actually, this is not a hypothetical country. It is the United States.

The Washington-based Economic Innovation Group, which promotes economic dynamism, has released a report, “The Great ‘Transfer’-mation,” explaining how swiftly U.S. communities became dependent on government transfer payments. In 2022, Americans received $3.8 trillion in government transfers, 18 percent of all personal income. In 1970, not even 1 percent of counties received one-quarter or more of personal income from transfers. By 2000, 10 percent did; in 2022, it was 53 percent. This is certain to increase as the population ages.

The primary explanation: the aging U.S. population. The portion of the population age 65 and older has increased from 9.8 percent in 1970 to 17.3 percent in 2022. The 65-and-over portion of the population rose as much in between 2010 and 2020 as it did between 1960 and 2010. The elderly are living longer, hence are susceptible to increasing ailments treated by increasingly competent, increasingly life-extending and increasingly expensive medical care.

Between 1970 and 2022, total Medicare and Medicaid spending (which 30 years ago overtook Social Security as the largest source of transfer spending) grew more than three times faster than total Social Security spending. Medicare spending, adjusted for inflation, rose from $7,000 for every person 65 and older in 1970 to $16,000 in 2022.

Poverty-alleviation programs constitute only 11.4 percent of the 1970-to-2022 increase in transfers. In fact, their share of transfers has declined from 14.1 percent to 11.7 percent.

Today, most counties depend on a level of transfers that previously was reserved for especially distressed places. The Economic Innovation Group’s stark warning is:

By 2040, the working-age population is projected to grow by 6 million, the over-65 population by 20 million. The increased taxes necessary to finance entitlement transfers could make impossible the faster economic growth that will be indispensable for funding the transfers. The “fading importance of work and productive activity” in generating Americans’ incomes surely matters. Spending on transfers can “crowd out” growth-enhancing investments. And economic stagnation is the result when policy favors present economic security over future prosperity, running gargantuan deficits throughout the business cycle.

Where does the great “transfer”-mation lead? In “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville, after traveling the country in 1830s, wondered: What would become of people in a democracy whose solicitous government’s power is gentle, like a parent’s — except it “tries to keep them in perpetual childhood”:

“It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry. … It covers the whole of life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action.”

This year, a woman at a Michigan fair approached a carnival-style stand where she could win some gimcrack prize by skillfully throwing darts to pop balloons. She was, however, vexed when handed darts that did not have what define darts: sharp points. The man operating the stand, sharing her exasperation, explained: “The (expletive)” — here he named members of a particular political party — “are afraid people will hurt themselves.”

Government acting in loco parentis, protecting people from cradle to grave. This mentality comes with the great “transfer”-mation.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.