Posts Tagged ‘welfare’

By Alicia Colon, irishexaminerusa.com, July 13, 2010

–SNIP– I grew up in Spanish Harlem during the ’50s and watched how the tide of temporary home relief swelled into the permanent welfare system. The families that were on welfare then are still on the dole now, with generation after generation seduced by the supersized government handout. Inspectors used to come to the residences of home relief recipients to make sure that there were no able-bodied men in the household. (I used to see husbands hiding on fire escapes until the inspectors left.) Eventually, those able-bodied men would stop returning, abandoning their families to the taxpayers’ burden.

The route to dependency is becoming easier and easier, once one learns how to work the system. When I was laid off from a job more than 30 years ago, I had to file for unemployment benefits in person and collect a check at the state office every week. Now, all one has to do is file online and certify for checks in the same way, without even meeting with an employment counselor. Only after one applies for extended benefits is proof required that one is actually looking for work. It’s not difficult to understand why unemployment remains so high when the liberal establishment has made getting checks so effortless.

Currently, legislation to extend unemployment benefits has been stalled in Congress, Naturally, Democrats are blaming Senate Republicans for preventing it from passing, which is typical obfuscation. The Republicans are objecting to increasing the deficit unnecessarily when their own plan would extend benefits without adding to the deficit. This is just another Democrat way to maintain the status quo, demonize the GOP as mean spirited, and portray their own party of dependency as the savior of the poor.

Our current budget crisis is headed into the same abyss that engulfed Greece and one has to wonder if the Obama administration’s incompetent handling of our economy is one of simple ignorance or a deliberate design to undermine and destroy our capitalist structure. The stimulus programs were a joke and did nothing to stimulate growth. Meanwhile, the government grows fatter and richer.

Read more at http://www.irishexaminerusa.com/mt/2010/07/13/why_should_anybody_work.html

This is a great article, well worth reading in its entirety. A major point of this blog has been the “Greatest Management Principle” based on a book by Michael LeBoeuf. Ask yourself THE MAGIC QUESTION: What is being rewarded? This shows that what you encourage you get more of, and what you penalize you get less of.

This country penalizes work (taxes, etc.) therefore fewer people want to work. This country enables laziness (welfare, etc.) further encouraging people not to work.

Start looking at the (sometimes perverse) incentives around you, and you will start to see answers to a lot of problems that this country is facing.

by Demosthenes, American Thinker, May 15, 2010

For the past hundred years, America has been slowly moving away from the principles of its founding. The ideals of liberty, individual achievement, limited government, and the equality of opportunity have been slowly supplanted by calls for security, class warfare, excessive regulation, and the equality of outcome. The passage of stimulus acts, bailouts, government takeovers of two U.S. automakers, and the health care overhaul prove that our movement away from 1776 has accelerated.

Passage of the health care bill has sparked a revival of small-government thinking, causing many to predict significant Republican gains in Congress this fall. But despite some short-term success, this small-government revival is doomed to fail. The depressing truth is that the only way to regain the full measure of those freedoms proclaimed in our Founding Documents is for our current federal government to completely collapse under the weight of its own excesses.

Often, one carefully articulated analogy can succinctly convey a very complex idea. In our case, that analogy is addiction. Over the past hundred years, we have slowly allowed a monstrous system of dependence to develop until nearly every citizen relies upon government money, and thus is an addict. This has come about because the hard logic of the Founders has been replaced by the seductive ease of emotional arguments. All too often, the debate is over not if government should do something, but what it should do. This almost imperceptible shift in our national philosophy is a manifestation of our addiction.

While the citizen-addict is hooked on government largesse, the politician-addict is hooked on something far more sinister: power. Their drug is available in Washington, D.C. Just as a dealer will go to any length to continue selling his wares, politicians will stop at nothing to retain their power. These two groups of addicts are locked in mutual co-dependence, where the politician-addict seeking re-election buys off the citizen-addict with more spending. Then the citizen-addict, seeking yet another free lunch from Washington, reelects the politician-addict. The result is endless, ever-expanding government programs and our current fiscal nightmare.

Read more at  http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/let_it_burn.html

by Mark Steyn, OC Register, Feb. 27, 2010

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

Read more at http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/greece-236468-government-america.html