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| Great Depression Food Line |
Americans in
general are confused about poverty – people and economists define it
differently. People who think themselves “poor” desire socialism and are perennially
voting for their favorite Marxist Democrat while complaining endlessly how
unjust and rigged the system is, how the Man keeps them down and how there is
no equality and social justice. Nobody admits that personal responsibility and a
failed work ethic might be the culprit of their own poverty.
To say that
poverty induced by socialist dictatorships is hard to shake would be an
understatement. Ask Cubans and Venezuelans about their lives in the workers’
paradise that Fidel and Chavez forced upon them while the two dictators stashed
away stolen billions.
Lately, as the social justice,
income disparity, income inequality, economic justice rhetoric intensifies,
more global and Hollywood elites crawl out of the woodwork to confuse, agitate,
and inflame the low information voters.
When almost 50 percent of
the American public does not work and relies on some form of government welfare
paid for by the other 50 percent of the working population, it is perplexing
when former White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers states that “The U.S.
may well be on the way to becoming a ‘Downton Abbey’ economy.”
Downton Abbey is a British
television show that highlights a wealthy British family and their servants at
the turn of the 20th century. It seems to me that the 50 percent of
Americans that are already working have become unwilling servants to the other
50 percent on welfare whose main job is to vote for the same politicians who
promise to deliver additional unearned income tax and “entitlements” by taxing
the “rich” even more.
It is galling to hear
people, who pay no taxes, work and get paid cash under the radar of the IRS,
receive welfare, earned income tax credit, are paid by unions to show up and
protest people who work for a living, screech that the “rich are not paying
their fair share.”
Who is
victimizing these people who consider themselves poor and downtrodden? If you
ask them and their political representatives who became rich in office, voting
and implementing policies that keep their constituents poor, it is the rich who
are at fault. Personal responsibility in their bad choices are never mentioned.
The former Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan said, “I consider income inequality the most dangerous
part of what’s going on in the United States.”
It is interesting to
evaluate such statements now when America is plagued by huge unemployment,
trillions of dollars of new national debt, anemic GDP growth, weak job
creation, disastrous economic policies, out of control spending, devaluation of
the dollar through constant quantitative easings, heavy corporate taxation
which causes Congress-enabled overseas exodus of capital, government rules and
regulations that destroy jobs and prevent the creation of new ones, and
Obamacare, encompassing a huge portion of the economy and wasting trillions of
dollars in the process of destroying the world’s best health care system.
To promote class envy and
discontent, Saul Alinsky recommended class warfare, the division of people into
wealthy and poor in order to make it easier to tax the wealthy with the support
of the poor. Increasing the debt to unsustainable levels allows the government
to increase taxes on the middle class, thus producing more poor people who are
easier to control.
As strident rhetoric of
income inequality comes from the left, even Keynesian economists recognize that
reasons other than the progressive taking points in the main stream media are
the culprits:
-
Differences in
ability such as I.Q., poor health, and “entrepreneurial ability”
-
Differences in
intensity of work
-
Risk taking
-
Compensating wage
differentials (some jobs are more dangerous, unpleasant, demanding)
-
Schooling and
other types of training
-
Work experience
-
Inherited wealth
-
Luck
Progressives view income
inequality as a harbinger for poverty. This is not necessarily true because poverty
is a relative term. A person who considers himself poor in one country can be
rich in another. Consider some of the reasons for poverty:
-
Tyranny
-
Perennial welfare
-
Bad choices in
life
-
Lack of education
-
Poor choices in
degrees
-
Absence of middle
class
-
No opportunity
for success
-
No resources,
living in a barren area
-
Suppression by
rulers and government
-
Not willing or
afraid to put forth the effort and time to invest in oneself
-
Comfortable in
generational poverty status quo
-
Mental and
emotional handicap or addiction
-
Mental illness
(much homelessness is caused by mental illness)
-
Cultural factors,
i.e., generational poverty
-
Social mobility
or lack of mobility
-
Religious
oppression
Pope Francis called on
governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in order to curb the “economy of
exclusion,” hinting at the “injustices of capitalism.” (AP, “Pope Demands
‘Legitimate Redistribution’ of Wealth,” May 9, 2014)
Americans are already the
most generous nation with their time, money, expertise, food, medicine, and
education for those less fortunate. We don’t need the government to step in and
confiscate in a Stalinist fashion our hard work in the name of the ill-conceived
and unjust Marxist brand of “social justice.”
People should not want
someone else’s wealth or welfare on a constant basis, they should look for the
opportunity to work for a better life, not expect crumbs from a tyrannical
communist government or from a government beholden to crony capitalist
corporatist interests.
The generous “government”
welfare to those 50 percent low information voters who are elated with the
current global status quo does not come just from the rich who pay plenty of
taxes, but also from people who often work long hours every week, two or three
jobs to make ends meet, and sometimes cannot afford to buy the very things
welfare recipients purchase with someone else’s hard work. Additionally, what
the government gives so liberally with other people’s money, it can certainly
take away.
Progressives have worked
hard to cause permanent physical poverty and mental penury in America, while
discrediting and blaming capitalism for “income inequality:”
-
killing job
opportunities for the poor (enacting higher pay for minimum wage jobs, creating
Obamacare, pushing solar and wind energy against fossil fuels)
-
keeping poor
Americans out of good schools (forcing them out of successful charter schools
like the one in D.C. into public schools to appease the teachers’ union)
-
giving generous
welfare that dis-incentivizes work and creating a Democrat plantation mentality
(a destroyer of the human spirit and of the work ethic)
-
supporting and
funding abortion and single mother households with government as the daddy in
order to destroy the family nucleus
-
championing
illegal immigrants instead of American workers
-
fighting for
criminals, not the victims
-
indoctrinating
our children into the enslaving tenets of Marxism and the religion of
environmentalism
-
erasing any
symbol of Christianity in our public life and promoting Islam to our young and
impressionable children
-
destroying any
symbols of patriotism that unite us
-
deconstructing
historical truth to suit the progressive agenda
This administration is
creating two Americas, one that works and one that does not work but votes for
entitlements they have not earned. The plan is to reduce income inequality by
debasing and punishing the successful through the forced redistribution of
their wealth and income.
That
is not to say that there are no Americans who do not genuinely need temporary
or permanent help but have fallen through the cracks of welfare. It is people
who know how to milk the system who benefit the most from the welfare largesse.
Being
on welfare is not just the result of lack of a good education, bad choices in
life, unwillingness to work, of a culture of entitlement (it is free and the
government owes it to us), it is also a function of bad luck, personal injury,
illness, and hard times during cyclical economic downturns.
The
federal government uses personal income tax receipts to provide two-thirds of
welfare funds, while state and local governments provide one-third from state
tax receipts. Economically speaking, welfare is categorized as transfer
payments.
The
largest transfer of payments (welfare) goes to Medicaid, food stamps (SNAP),
Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), housing vouchers, State Children’s Health
Insurance Program (SCHIP).
Keynesian
economists thought that tackling poverty by giving the poor EITC income would
not destroy their incentives to work. The federal government gave them a
supplemental “grant,” proportional to earned wages. EITC began in 1975 but
became more generous after 1993. (Baumol and Blinder, Economics, 2007, p. 458)
We
do know how well EITC works since illegal aliens, using an IRS issued number to
encourage them to file income taxes, have taken advantage of this IRS loophole,
raking in $6.3 billion a year in tax refunds, claiming children who are not
even residents or citizens of this country.
Cato’s
Michael Tanner suggests that making people more comfortable in poverty (more
food, housing, health care, free day care) and government dependence is a bad
idea. The quickest solutions to get out
and stay out of poverty are simple – finish school, do not get pregnant outside
marriage, get a job, any job, and stick with it.
Having
spent more than $25 trillion on welfare since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty
program, “many Americans are less capable of self-sufficiency today than when
the War on Poverty began.” The Heritage Foundation describes the pathway to
self-sufficiency as work and marriage.
According
to Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, “the welfare state should be reformed to
promote self-sufficiency and require recipients of welfare to work or prepare
for work as a condition of getting aid.”
In
their article, “15 Facts about U.S. Poverty the Government Hides,” they explain
that U.S. Census statistics about poverty “exclude nearly all welfare benefits,”
taking into account only the poverty threshold for a family of four which in
2015 was $24,036.
The
writers debunk leftist activist groups who talk about hunger when in reality
“most of the poor do not experience hunger or food shortages.” Acknowledging
that “poverty and homelessness” are often confused, Rector explains that “only
9.5% of the poor live in mobile homes or trailers; the rest live in apartments
or houses. Forty percent of the poor own their own homes.”
In
2014 the U.S. government spent over $1 trillion on welfare for the poor and low
income families. This figure did not include Social Security and Medicare,
Rector said. Welfare in the form of cash, food, and housing was $342 billion.
Eradicating
poverty should be more than just streamlining welfare – it should be about
fighting the real causes of welfare dependency: the breakdown of families,
rejection of faith, truancy, dropping out of school, having babies outside of
marriage, drug use, crime, and lack of personal pride, responsibility, and
accountability for one’s actions. Spreading the wealth, the socialist goal, is
a dystopia that will further enslave people into perennial poverty.
