Meanwhile, over in the BIG house...

reprinted from 8/17/03

Continuing from yesterday's "Welfare - adding psychological insult to injury"... our nouveaux riche middle class saw no limits. Expectations grew as fast as ones imagination could work. Add in easy credit and a certain amount of justified guilt from the vets, and you develop a giant new ME generation that quickly assumed that the world was created for them. A sheltered suburban lifestyle, lots of gifts, attending college, buying a house after marriage... then 2 cars, 2 good jobs, etc.

Within one generation, people who used to live, work, and play side-by-side became the Haves righteously doling out favors to the Have-Nots, with a hug, while patting themselves on the back... and they're still doing it... with renewed righteousness... while trying to blame the problems on someone else.

The poor were staying poor, despite welfare, so benefits were raised, and raised... to the point where welfare became a "living wage", equivalent to, or greater than, the wages of many working people. It no longer made any sense for the poor to even attempt to become productive. Get a job and earn LESS?

For the hard-core welfare recipient, the value of the full range of welfare benefits substantially exceeded the amount the recipient could earn in an entry-level job. As a result, recipients were likely to choose welfare over work, thus increasing long-term dependence.

Offer a society only one practical way to survive, and they're likely to get good at it. That naturally evolved a culture of welfare expertise... how to get all you can (it's a "right" after all)... and that expertise transferred to the next generation... and the next. We produced the spectacle of multi-generational families where nobody could remember not relying on welfare. Because government is so pathetic at administration (even though 70% of welfare funds are spent on it) we also had a caste of people on welfare who were not even poor, while most poor people did not receive benefits.

The financial impact of WWII and the catastrophic aftermath of government growth and destruction can be seen in 3 numbers... the National Debt in 3 years:

1935 - 28.7 billion dollars
1945 - 258.7 billion dollars (9 times as high in 10 years)
2003 - 6.75 trillion dollars (26 times as high since the end of WWII)

… and that was while taxes were skyrocketing.

Was welfare necessary at all?

The Economic Report of the President in 1989 concluded that economic growth alone naturally raises more and more people out of poverty. Without welfare, economic growth would have produced a poverty rate about the same as, or a little lower than, the one we have today. If the value of volunteer labor is included, private sector contributions to charitable causes are approximately the same as the poverty budgets of federal, state and local governments combined.

The future?

Since the 70's, a variety of attempts have been made to move welfare recipients to employment, but welfare has become a way of life, and recipients severely handicapped in relation to the working world, so the problem is monumental. Again... it's similar to the problems slaves faced upon release, but at least the freed slaves were used to work and a poor lifestyle.

Some church organizations, working on a volunteer and local level, have had success in bringing such people into the workforce, but it requires a fierce desire from the former welfare recipient, and a lot of patient help from the volunteers. Experience should tell us that it's the only sort of solution that can actually work.

Is it so difficult to see the destructiveness of government programs... the economic manipulation of people through legislation... through FORCE? How long will do-gooders continue to believe that government programs are the solution, when in fact they are the source of the problems? More government programs won't help... more tax money won't help. Will our nation be brought to its knees before we all come to that simple realization?

If you resent hearing this from a libertarian, take it from a liberal's hero who, despite his early and correct definition of the problem, continued on to immensely compound the problems.

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole our relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union 1935

This is the conclusion to a 4-part series:
1. Being poor ain't what it used to be

2. Government and the godawful greatest generation

3. Welfare - adding psychological damage to injury

4. Meanwhile, over in the BIG house...