The Perpetual “War On Poverty”
We must keep striving until everyone has an above average income might be a proper rallying cry for the poverty pimps in the country. “Fixing” poverty and making all of anything above average are both mathematical impossibilities.
LBJ started the so-called War on Poverty (or more precisely the “Scheme to Create a Monolithic Voting Bloc”) in 1964 when the poverty rate by the existing metric stood at ~15%. Since Ogabe took office federal spending on welfare programs have increased by 41% to over a HALF-TRILLION dollars ($668 billion for FY ’11) a year yet our progress on defeating poverty (again, a mathematical impossibility) has changed very little. According to the CATO Institute (a source for some of the values in this article) we are currently spending $61,830 a year for a “poor” family of three or $20,610 for every poor person in the country. Hell, at that rate the wife and I could live pretty comfortably and I suspect most of our readers could too, so what gives? Why aren’t we making progress in this alleged war? Simply put we keep moving the goal posts for what constitutes poverty and it’s advantageous for the Left to constantly increase the numbers of people eligible to step up and slurp at the government trough.
In order to assess poverty in the U.S. we first need to see what our definition of poverty is. The government for the last 20 years or so has reported the number of persons living in poverty is relatively unchanged at around 30 million Americans. The media and activists likes to use about 1 in 7 Americans. We are given images of those people living in desperation, deprived of basic needs and largely homeless. As most of us know this is utter bullshit. I can’t say that some people actually do live in those conditions, and the number is not insignificant but way, way, WAY less than that 30 million figure. Chronic homelessness has a number of other factors in play, not addressed by your typical welfare program. There are quite a few folks that live homeless by choice, those with significant, untreated mental illnesses especially including chemical dependencies. Also there are millions of Americans that in fact, do experience temporary crises in food, clothing or housing. Compassion dictates that we must have a safety net for these situations, and I wouldn’t advocate the total elimination of our social programs essential to weave that net.
Placing the former group to the side of our discussion leaves the ‘average’ person or family living in poverty. Using an isolated figure like income for the determination of who is and isn’t ‘poor’ wrecks the target populace for government programs. ‘Poor’ Americans in general, live in conditions that the upper middle-class in other countries would envy. Last year the Heritage Foundation produced a report entitled “Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?“. This well-researched report provides excellent insight into the state of poverty and the ‘war’ in the US today. Most astonishing to me are the two graphs depicting by percentage, the living amenities owned by ‘All US Households’ and ‘Poor US Households’. The graphs are virtually identical.
This near equality begs the question “So why the hell are we still bombarded with images of starving children and women dying on the streets homeless?” You really do know the answer, right? The Left. We will always have a group of citizens that can be called ‘poor’, it’s a mathematical certainty not a social failure. The progressives will always use the ‘everyone must be above average’ and ‘no one must be poor’ paradox to tax and spend their way into a lifetime of elected employment. They can count on two group’s votes here, the recipients of other people’s coerced money disguised as largesse by the government politicians and also the vote of the guilty liberal that must fweeel better about him or herself that they ‘did’ something, of course the companion to that ‘something’ is did it work is of no consequence to them, merely the fact that they ‘tried’. Notice the parallel here to the ridiculous concept we have in kid’s sports where everyone gets a medal for participating and there are no winners or losers. The liberal gets it’s medal for participating (through taxes onlyl) in the war on poverty, regardless of the outcome. We can spend a TRILLION dollars a year on Welfare perpetually in the ‘War on Poverty’ but there can never be a win. But hey that’s OK for Mr. or Ms. Bumper-Sticker Ideologue.
What is or should be our intentions regarding the ‘poor’ is the very first question if we intend to reform the system, and we must. As the baby-boomers continue to reach retirement age our tax burden will rise astronomically just on social programs, as we all know. Of course, the first battle will be with the socialists wanting to maintain their sinecures and that requires maintaining the system status quo. So far we’ve been spending all these billions just to allow the poor to attain the trappings of the higher classes without the responsibility and effort that everyone else needs to earn them. We’re on our 3rd generation of cradle-to-grave welfare dependency in large population groups of the inner cities. Getting these folks off of government dependency will be worse than getting a crack-addict clean. Also, look for the the socialist-progressives to morph the welfare system from a safety-net into an income redistribution scheme to equalize incomes. It isn’t enough for the Left that the ‘Poor Folks’ have all the niceties the rest of us do, they need the same AGI we have otherwise it’s ‘unfair’ and what little prosperity we have was at the expense of others, besides ‘we didn’t build it’ anyway.
What to do? I for one favor a serious Workfare program, but there are many details that would need to be addressed to keep it from becoming a clusterfuck. Do we have the recipients only perform services for the government or do we have a program whereby they can be ‘hired’ by the private sector. This might have some attractive features since the charge for their service could offset their welfare checks. Do we attempt to provide job skills training or just unskilled labor? I would suggest both, but only for those that display a willingness to learn. One thing for certain is that we will never break the dependency cycle without first instilling the work ethic into this group. We have to keep in mind that in general, the recipients right now have NO shame whatsoever in living off the taxpayers (well, Obama’s Stash). They’re actually proud of themselves for taking ‘the man’s dime’ while they can get all the bling and build a bad-ass Donk with it, along with paying the rent and groceries. They honestly see themselves as being ‘clever’ without realizing their perceived cleverness is actually targeted slavery by the left. The Left will protect this status-quo viciously, truly free people will not vote for the slavery of the handout. Realization and acceptance that the true way to prosperity is through work and perseverance, will be accompanied by an epiphany that government social programs ensure they will never be prosperous and that they are at the mercy of selfish politicians.
The poor will always be with us, as Andrew Wilkow is right ‘some people just suck at life’, and it’s not helping them by making them increasingly comfortable in their poverty. Ben Franklin had it absolutely right. Welfare reform is imperative. We are rapidly approaching a point where the checks will be drastically reduced or stopped. Period. With the current state of the welfare program cities will burn if those EBT cards don’t get reloaded. The fact that Ogabe gutted the ‘work’ qualifications proves that the Left intends not only to maintain the current program, but expand it in a direction even more costly to the taxpayers. What are we prepared to do?
-Carry On
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Either way the cities are going to burn, my Liege. We can mitigate it somewhat by keeping the Great Unwashed Masses “corralled” but we’ll get leakers. Gonna be a mess no matter how humane we are, the only question is whether or not we get a backbone and institute programs that are, indeed, going to make a lot of poor people “uncomfortable” – as opposed to “dead” if/when The Balloon Goes Up.
Personally, I’m getting my Enfield outfitted with a night scope. Gubmint ain’t buying large quantities of .303 ammo, now are they?
Isn’t this one pretty much over? Poverty seems to have won.
One of the first rules of government is that you get more of what you subsidize, and less of what you tax. We have taxed the hell out of productive labor and subsidized poverty aggressively for decades, with the result that we have much less productivity and a huge surplus of poverty.
Benjamin Franklin had it exactly right when he said “I am for doing good to the poor, but…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed…that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
What we really need right now is some leadership smart enough to understand this and courageous enough to do something about it, or the accumulated misjudgements of our weak and selfish leadership will soon overtake us.
I remember my childhood in the 1960s. There were four of us in my family: My dad, my mom, me, and my younger sister. My dad had a good office job, and owned a house in the suburbs. We were a solid middle class family in every respect.
We had one car.
We had one black & white TV in the living room. It received about a half-dozen channels over the air.
We didn’t have air conditioning. We had portable fans.
We had two telephones that were hard-wired; one in the kitchen and one in my parents’ bedroom.
We only ate out occasionally. Mostly my mom cooked dinner at home. (And to be brutally honest, she wasn’t that good a cook. Yet I survived to adulthood, so she did her job.)
We didn’t have wide-screen high definition TV.
We didn’t have cable or satellite.
We didn’t have computers. We didn’t have high-speed internet access.
We didn’t have central air conditioning.
We didn’t have a car for every member of the family.
We didn’t have cell phones for every member of the family. (I still don’t have one.)
We didn’t have Xbox.
We didn’t eat out at fast food joints every night for dinner, and we didn’t have government-subsidized breakfasts and lunches at school.
All of these things the “poor” believe is their birthright today, and they tend to get angry when somebody suggests that maybe they shouldn’t have them at taxpayer expense.
Yet if anyone had suggested to my family that we were living in poverty, we would have laughed at them.
LC SecondMouse @ #:
In the late 18th Century, that might have been a good idea. But far too many modern governments would take it the wrong way and drive the poor out of poverty the same way the Interahamwe drove the Tutsis out of being Tutsi.
This is where the confusion creeps in. There is a (deliberate?) conflation of absolute poverty and relative poverty. IIRC, you are (relatively) poor in the UK if your income is below 60% of the median income. This is where the mathematical certainty comes in.
I was talking to a couple of Brazilian academics a few years ago when the discussion turned to poverty. I asked them what they meant by “poverty”. Their reply? “Oh, not what you Europeans call poverty. We’re talking about not having a roof over your head and not having enough food to eat.”