… the United States is, for better or worse, a European-style welfare state that just happens to be located across the ocean
deplores
Benny Huang.
Whether our massive welfare spending is a good thing or a bad thing
is a very debatable point. I know some people would say that money spent
on “human needs”—as if that’s all it ever goes to—is money well spent. I
would counter that “human needs” aren’t nearly as important to the
average liberal Democrat as sustaining a poverty-stricken political
fiefdom. They buy power with other people’s money and expect the rest of
us to stand in awe of their supposed generosity.
… The poor in my state of Massachusetts,
however, live pretty well on the dole. I was not at all surprised to
discover that only Hawaii and the District of Columbia offer more robust
benefits packages than the Bay State.
Come to Massachusetts’ post-industrial inner cities and you’ll see
satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms from the government-subsidized
housing. No one would be caught dead without their iPhone. They spend
almost three hundred dollars a month on their pack-a-day cigarette habit
and they prefer top shelf liquor. That’s how “poor” people live in
Massachusetts. It’s not exactly a “Feed the Children” commercial.
… It’s a form of national suicide, a
rather peculiar phenomenon that deserves some explanation. Ever since
the Watts riots happened fifty years ago this summer, American
politicians have sought to “invest” in poor inner city neighborhoods. As
“investments” go, it’s been about as lousy as buying confederate
currency in 1864. The War on Poverty was launched the same year that
Watts went up in flames but that didn’t prevent Detroit and Newark from
burning in 1967. Nor did it prevent the nationwide urban conflagration
of April 1968. Looting and rioting returned to Los Angeles in 1992.
Ferguson exploded in 2014, followed by Baltimore in 2015, followed by
more Ferguson rioting on the one year anniversary of Michael Brown’s
attempted murder of Darren Wilson.
Paying people not to riot clearly isn’t working.
… facts absolutely never penetrate the
liberals’ bubble. They revel in asking snappy questions that contain the
implicit assumption that we as a nation have almost no social safety
net to speak of. Here are a few:
“Why is that we always have plenty of money for the military but not for basic human needs?”
Answer: the military budget, though expensive, has been constantly
decreasing, adjusting for inflation, since the end of World War II. We
call on today’s military to do more with less. Welfare on the other hand
is always growing. The inflation-adjusted $22 trillion that we’ve spent
in the War on Poverty is more than three times the combined cost of all
wars since the Revolution. The War on Poverty is undeniably the most
expensive we’ve ever waged, and the longest.
“Why can’t we be more like Europe?” Answer: We are like Europe. Our welfare state is on par with theirs and it’s killing us.
“Why do people go hungry in a country as rich as ours?”
Answer: Very few actually do, but even those who don’t have enough to
eat can’t blame a lack of programs or appropriated funds. There are
state, federal, and local programs, not to mention private charities.
A rational discussion cannot begin with an irrational premise. The
idea that somehow our country adheres to a philosophy of rugged
individualism is absurd. We hand out other people’s money like it’s
going out of style. Our social safety net is deep and wide. The moment
we acknowledge this stubborn fact is the moment we can begin a useful
dialogue. I’ll be waiting with bated breath.
