This page is here to illustrate two things: First, people who live in (what we call) poverty in
America are fairly well off, compared to the poor in other countries. Second, decades of
government intervention has only made the problem worse. Trillions of tax dollars have been
spent fighting poverty, but instead of encouraging people to get jobs and get themselves out of
a financial rut, the welfare system creates conditions favorable to pregnancy, childbirth and
illegitimacy. The "safety net" has become a hammock for the laziest people in our society.
Please notice, if you will, that the cities which have the greatest difficulty with homeless bums and
panhandlers are the cities where liberal politicians are in control.
New: As mentioned above, trillions of dollars have been spent on Lyndon Johnson's "War on
Poverty," but estimates vary. At the bottom of this page, I have put together a table
of estimates by various authors, excluding anonymous bloggers
and one-time-only "letters to the editor" and the like. The most widely accepted estimates
seem to be somewhere between 5.0 and 5.4 trillion dollars, although other apparently
credible estimates are much higher.
How Poor Are America's
Poor? According to the US Census Bureau, 36 million Americans are
"living in poverty." Can this alarming claim really be true? The
simple answer is: No.
'Poverty'
in America: Some material hardship does exist in America, but it is quite limited in severity and
scope. According to the government's own data, the typical person defined as "poor" by the Census has
cable or satellite TV, air conditioning, a microwave, a DVD player or VCR, and two color TVs. Three
quarters of these "poor" own a car and nearly a third have two or more cars.
Populists
equalize poverty. To be sure, there are some very rich people in America who earn and possess
hundreds or thousands of times what poorer people earn or possess. But the poor in this country are only
relatively poor. We have no abject poverty. On the contrary, America's "poor" have cars,
TVs, appliances, computers, $200 basketball shoes and own their own homes. Their lifestyle would be the
envy of most of the world's population. As long as there's relative wealth, there will always be relative
poverty.
Are Our 37 Million Poor Really Poor?
Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation is a national authority on poverty and the U.S. welfare system.
Specializing in welfare reform and family breakdown, Rector has done extensive research on the economic and
social costs of welfare. With presidential candidates of a certain hue decrying the suffering of the
37 million Americans who have been officially classified as poor by the U.S. Census Bureau, we thought
we'd ask Rector if these poor people are really as poverty-stricken as we have been led to believe.
Priceless politics: Among the
many rationales used to defend the welfare state, the most powerful is that it is necessary, in order to take
care of the poor and the downtrodden. But the amount of money required to bring every poor person in the
country above the official poverty line is a fraction of what is spent by government on the welfare state.
The imps of the
impoverished. Ah, the good old days! When the word "poverty" really meant
something! In the Middle Ages, thousands of city dwellers might starve to death during a
drought. "The poor" were people who walked around without clothing. To be destitute
meant eating tree bark to survive. Today, obesity is a bigger problem for the poor than
is hunger.
ACORN's Nutty Regime for Cities:
[ACORN] promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts
to the poor. As a result, not only does it harm the poor it claims to serve; it is also a serious threat
to the urban future. It is no surprise that ACORN preaches a New LeftŠinspired gospel, since it grew out
of one of the New Left's silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.
In the mid-sixties, founder George Wiley [ ... intended] to flood the welfare system with so many clients
that it would burst, creating a crisis that, he believed, would force a radical restructuring of America's
unjust capitalist economy.
Acorn Squash. While
Acorn now operates in more than 100 cities with a national budget of $37 million, it never truly left
behind the welfare-rights mentality. One is hard-pressed to find in the organization's many antipoverty
initiatives any programs that address social dysfunctions like illegitimacy and single parenthood. ... While
[the Community Reinvestment Act] spurred Acorn's growth, the "living wage" is the group's most successful
local issue.
Activist
Blames Poverty on Liberalism. Blaming poverty on liberalism and the federal
government, a conservative activist on Friday [9/14/2007] said: "It is very sad what
the liberals have done with their war on the poor in this country." "After 40 years
of failure, they still insist that they want to expand this war, that they think they should
pour more money into this war," said Star Parker, president of the Coalition on Urban
Renewal and Education.
East Berlin, D. C.
Increasingly, visiting our nation's capital can only be likened to visiting a distant dystopia, with problems that
don't seem quite at home in America. Criminals are the most obvious malefactors, but surely part of the
problem is government. The seat of our own government is run as if it were the reductio ad absurdum
of government everywhere … Whole segments of the population are now snared in the trap of government
assistance. Call it "welfare," if you must … but how much of this money increases the actual
welfare of those caught in the cycle of poverty?
The Dumb Leading the Dumber: George
Mason's "Hunger Banquet" is simply a small part of widespread indoctrination, propaganda and miseducation at America's
universities that misleads and confuses our young people and promotes class envy. It happens for at least two reasons:
the 1960s flower children are in administrative positions, and members of boards of trustees, whose duties are to direct and
oversee, are derelict in these duties.
Preserving a
vision: Part II. For decades, the liberal media and the intelligentsia have had to struggle
mightily against good economic news. Their whole vision of the world — and of themselves — is
at stake. It's not easy. Even Americans in the bottom 20 percent in income have higher
real incomes than in the past and such staples of middle class life as microwave ovens and motor
vehicles are now common among "the poor."
Slaves
to the Welfare State: Obviously not everyone in New Orleans is a slave to the welfare state.
But on balance its residents have drifted since 1927 into the entitlements mentality: abandonment of
personal responsibility and individual initiative. The socialist welfare state is a form of slavery, or
more accurately, a sort of neo-feudalism in which the individual has no rights independent of the figurative
"piece of ground" to which the political state has assigned him.
Promoting Dependence:
Congress has moved closer to passing legislation to bail out homeowners who are in trouble with their mortgages.
Yet again, the taxpayers will be forced to pay for other people's mistakes. … President Bush has said he'll
veto a bailout bill if Congress sends him one. He should. Many Americans need to unlearn their belief
that government is a nanny to catch them when they fall, and learn to define the phrase "moral hazard."
S.F. parking meters
retooled to aid homeless. Rather than tossing loose change into a panhandler's empty cup, San
Francisco officials want you instead to slide your spare quarters and nickels into a homeless meter. … A
handful of cities around the country, including Denver and Baltimore, have installed homeless meters in
recent years. And while the programs haven't necessarily been lucrative, some cities have seen
less panhandling as a result.
The Poverty Hype:
Low-income people have sources of income that don't show up as taxable income such as sales of property like homes,
cars, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts. They might be headed by retirees
or those temporarily between jobs, and thus their low income total doesn't accurately reflect their long-term status.
Will
Hillary's 'Secretary Of Poverty' Solve Problems Of The Poor? "I believe we should appoint a
cabinet level position that will be solely and fully devoted to ending poverty as we know it in America," she
solemnly intoned. … The media largely ignored her proposal but her former rival John Edwards applauded it.
The Editor says...
You remember John Edwards — the
champion of the poor, who pays $400 for a haircut. And didn't Lyndon Johnson say he was going to end
"poverty as we know it" about 44 years ago? Even the liberals don't believe poverty can be
eliminated, which may be why the news media brushed off the idea. Let history be your guide: Did
the creation of the Department of Education solve all the public education problems -- or make them
worse? What about the Department of Energy?
Clinton Vows To End
Poverty. [Ending poverty as we know it in America] seems to me to be a rather ambitious
undertaking, especially when you consider America has spent upwards of four trillion dollars of taxpayer
money in the "war on poverty" since it was declared by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The current poverty rate,
by government standards is only slightly lower than it was in 1963, and that is only because the rate is an
arbitrary figure set by government.
Hooverville? Nah, Just Reuterville!
What seems to have happened here is that [Dana] Ford heard about the tent city and went there with the idea of
writing a story about how the housing problem is making people homeless. When she arrived, she found zero
factual evidence to support her thesis, but she was attached to it so she wrote her story anyway, and made the
lack of evidence a throwaway line in paragraph 5. She then rested her story on the prediction of an
"activist" that it is "just a matter of time" before Ford's journalism comes true.
A poor way to measure poverty.
The official poverty measure counts only monetary income. It considers anti-poverty programs such as food
stamps, housing assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid and school lunches, among others,
"in-kind benefits" — and hence not income. So, despite everything these programs do to relieve poverty,
they aren't counted as income when Washington measures the poverty rate.
End
to homelessness. [Baltimore] Mayor Sheila Dixon unveiled yesterday [1/17/2008] a 10-year plan
to end chronic homelessness, a goal she said the city is moving toward with the recent establishment of a
large well-run winter shelter and by setting aside 100 housing vouchers for homeless adults and children.
Dixon described the plan, which was created by a committee of city business and social service leaders, as a
"blueprint for a society where homelessness no longer exists."
The Editor says...
I predict that every bum on the east coast is about to head for Baltimore.
Our taxes now pay for most Arizona births. More
than half of Arizona's babies are born under the state health plan for the poor — a positive trend, in the view
of public-health experts, while others see it as a drain on taxpayers. The trend follows recent policy
changes that allow more individuals and families to qualify for free or low-cost care, as well as the
ever-increasing costs of private health insurance.
The Editor says...
How could an increase in poverty be "a positive trend"?
Progressive? No sooner had the Census Bureau
released its annual survey showing the poverty rate for 2005 was unchanged at 12.6% while real median
household income rose by 1.1 %, than than the Democrats started complaining about income inequality.
The Problem with Obama's
Father's Day Speech: The problem of fatherless families is the problem of mothers as well as
absent fathers. Children born out of wedlock, after all, are born because a woman decides that a good
father is not that important. The prior irresponsibility is not these young men, but the young woman who
decides to have sex with them, intending or assuming that society, rather than a husband, bear the costs of
her pregnancy.
Anti-poverty vapors:
Everybody knows President Bush and the Republican Congress have chopped poverty spending to finance massive
tax cuts for their wealthy friends. … Once again, what "everybody knows" turns out to be false.
Heritage Foundation budget analyst Brian Riedl actually looked at social spending under Republican control.
What he finds is as astonishing as it is counterintuitive: Under the mean, nasty, coldhearted
Republicans, expenditures on the poor have zoomed to record levels. In 2004, 16.3 percent of the
federal budget went to anti-poverty efforts. This figure never has been higher.
One in 15 plays the banjo and chews tobacco.
One in 6 West Virginians is on food stamps.
About one in every six West Virginians gets food stamps, the highest level of participation in at least 30 years.
Amid rising food and fuel costs, the assistance is becoming worth less and less. … Last month, 274,487 state residents
received food stamps.
Low-Tax States Cut Poverty Rates: Study.
Fiscally prudent states appear to be winning the war on poverty, according to a recent study by the Goldwater
Institute, which found low-tax and low-spending states are more successful at reducing poverty than their
high-tax, high-spending counterparts. The 10 states with the lowest tax burdens saw a 13.7 percent
decline in poverty during the 1990s (more than double the national average), according to the study.
Meanwhile, the 10 states with the highest tax burdens suffered an average poverty rate increase of
3 percent. The poverty rate dropped nationwide during the decade, the report notes.
Michigan may be first
state to issue food stamps twice a month. Michigan could become the first state in the nation to issue food
stamps twice a month, making fresh produce and meat more available and giving grocery workers steadier hours. The
state's 1.2 million food stamp recipients — the highest number ever — now have their benefits added
to a debit card within the first 10 days of the month. They then spend those dollars early in the
month, typically in poorer, urban areas where residents may have limited transportation. Each recipient
gets an average $88 a month.
Ohio
food stamp recipients have doubled since 2001. Nearly one in 10 Ohioans now receives food stamps,
the highest number in the state's history. Caseloads have almost doubled just since 2001, with
1.1 million residents now collecting benefits, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family
Services.
Homeless
activists will always be with us? On the face of it, hats off to Eric Montanez, age 21, who aims
to feed the homeless. But instincts are not enough. Montanez was arrested — not for feeding
the poor as such, but for feeding the poor in a public park. Public parks are for the "public," but not
for certain members of the public to turn into homes. Houses are for homes. Parks are ... Well, parks
could be said to be for the "homeless," these days. That's where many homeless people like to sleep.
She gave him burger; he
gave her beating. The homeless man, David Craig, 41, was outside of the fast-food chain after being told to
leave a nearby liquor store. MacLaren gave Craig the cheeseburger as he was lying down in a parking spot outside the
restaurant. Craig shouted he didn't want the burger, just money….
Orlando's homeless
laws spark debate. At Lake Eola park, there is much beauty to behold: robust palms, beds of
cheery begonias, a cascading lake fountain, clusters of friendly egrets and swans, an amphitheater named in
honor of Walt Disney. Then there are the signs. DO NOT LIE OR OTHERWISE BE IN A HORIZONTAL
POSITION ON A PARK BENCH...
Ottawa's homeless fight
for right to sleep in underpass. A panhandlers' rights group in Ottawa is preparing a human
rights complaint against the City of Ottawa after it put up a fence to stop them from sleeping in a downtown
pedestrian underpass.
The Editor says...
What's this? There's a "panhandlers' rights group in Ottawa"? Who bankrolls an
organization that promotes and defends Canada's parasites?
New York Times
lowballs homeless numbers. Estimates of the number of homeless have a long history of politics
trumping accuracy. When President Reagan was in office, the American media often quoted made-up figures
from "advocates" along with the mantra that many of us were "one paycheck away" from living on the streets
ourselves. But yesterday [1/2/2007], the New York Times published a surprisingly low estimate of the
number of homeless. But this time, the estimate was for the number of homeless in France.
Study shows 744,000 homeless people in U.S..
There were 744,000 homeless people in the United States in 2005, according to the first national estimate in a
decade. A little more than half were living in shelters, and nearly a quarter were chronically homeless,
according to the report Wednesday [1/10/2007] by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an advocacy group.
30th Anniversary
for the Homeless. Thirty years ago, in the case of Lessard v. Schmidt, ... the
Supreme Court ruled that mentally handicapped individuals who were not dangerous could not be held
against their will in mental hospitals. So those hospitals emptied, then closed, sending untold
numbers of mentally handicapped folks onto the street.
Liberal or not, Austin
ponders a ban on panhandling. John Henry Smith insists he makes an honest living begging
for money at intersections in the state's capital. In a few hours, with his swollen left leg exposed,
he can make $70 or $80. "It helps to be sick," said the 49-year-old Lubbock native, who was shot
in the leg 30 years ago.
Enough is enough,' San
Francisco says of the homeless. San Francisco — the liberal, left-coast city
conservatives love to mock — could be undergoing a transformation when it comes to homeless
people. Although the city would still be a poor choice for a pep rally for the war in Iraq, indications
are that residents have had it with aggressive panhandlers, street squatters and drug users.
Anti-Poverty Spending Grows.
Republicans claimed Congress is again serious about controlling spending, while Democrats asserted tax cuts
and "cuts" in spending would hurt the poor and benefit the rich. … "Anti-poverty spending has
grown 42 percent in the last four years and will continue to grow in future years," [Brian] Riedl
said. "We'll go from growth of 39 percent over the next five years to growth of 38 percent
in these programs. … If that's slashing spending, we've gotten addicted to massive spending increases."
Los Angeles introduces
$100 million effort to combat homelessness. It was a special day for the "friends and
neighbors" of the Los Angeles Mission, a center for transients near Skid Row, because lunch was being
provided by the In-N-Out Burger chain. The shelter's "friends and neighbors" are about 1,200 of
the estimated 90,000 homeless people in Los Angeles County, the largest concentration of homeless
in the nation.
A Whiff of Truth. These
poor people aren't on the street because of mean old conservatives, the economy or stingy taxpayers. You
could hand them a rent-free apartment and a simple job requiring no more than a few hours of their time per
week and it wouldn't do any good. The apartment would be trashed or abandoned within days, if not
hours. The job would be more than their shattered brains could handle. Sick people are
wandering our streets, whether the reasons are mental illness or addiction.
Grand jury sees $500 million in fraud. Calling
Los Angeles County child-care programs an "ATM for thieves," the county grand jury on Thursday [6/29/2006] said
welfare recipients and their friends and relatives are defrauding taxpayers of $500 million a year, much
more than previously estimated. Failure of the county Department of Public Social Services to verify that
welfare-to-work recipients qualify for child care has resulted in about half of the $1.1 billion CalWORKS
child-care program being lost to fraud, jurors wrote in their report.
A
dangerous obsession: Part II. Who are these minority of the world's population who own a
majority of the world's wealth? They are the population of the United States, Western Europe, Japan and
a few other affluent countries. How did these particular people come to possess so much more wealth than
other people? They did it the old-fashioned way. They produced the wealth that they own. You
might as well ask why bees have so much more honey than other creatures.
A
dangerous obsession: Part III. Any number of schemes for redistributing wealth have
ended up redistributing poverty in a number of countries. "Progressives" in the media and among
academics and intellectuals claim to be interested in ending poverty but the production of more output
is the only way to end poverty for millions of people.
A
dangerous obsession: Part IV. Transferring wealth from 300 million Americans and spreading it out
over more than two billion people in India and China is not going to do much. But enabling more people
in India or China to become more productive can help them and us — and has. Multinational
corporations are among the biggest spreaders of greater productivity to Third World countries and they usually
pay higher wages than local employers. But moral exhibitionists who are hot for the redistribution of
other people's money are among the biggest critics of multinational corporations.
Housing
costs push California's poverty rate to third highest. California has one of the highest poverty
rates in the nation after the cost of living is taken into account, according to a survey released
today [5/11/2006] by the Public Policy Institute of California. The official measure, which looks
at income and the number of people in a family, says the state has the 15th highest poverty rate
in the country, with 13.3 percent of its residents below the federal threshold.
The
End of America As We Know It: Despite the fact that we have a national debt that exceeds
9 trillion dollars, an amount that comes out to almost $30,000 for every man, woman, and child in
the United States — there are screams of outrage if the rate of growth in any of this
country's entitlement programs is cut and there are massive pushes to hand out even more goodies,
not to the poor, but to the middle-class.
The storm over
poverty: NAACP President Bruce Gordon praised Bush's speech to the nation this
week, but pushed for government to go further, to usher in utopia: "Now what we need to see
is whether he will use the George Bush-style conviction to eliminate poverty." Eliminate
poverty ... with a stroke of the pen? Is it really that easy?
Myths of rich
and poor: There is a fundamental difference between seeking the truth and scoring
points. In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts
of the media.
Divorce:
The Cause of the Shrinking Middle Class. The average middle class family cannot support two
households (and two divorce attorneys) without falling out of the middle class.
Why Poverty
Doesn't Rate. A wealth of evidence shows that those who are counted as poor today have
dramatically higher living standards than their counterparts in the 1960s, when the poverty rate was
originally devised.
Immigration
vs. gate-crashing. For most of our history, there was a guarantee that immigrants would
come here to work. The alternative was starvation. With today's welfare state, there's no
such guarantee. People can come here, not work and not starve because the welfare state guarantees
that they can live off the rest of us.
The
Welfare Debate We're Not Having: It turns out — apparently
to the surprise of many on the left — that working for a living
is better than subsisting as a parasite on government handouts.
Is
this any way to help the homeless? Mary Baker and Ruth Neikirk love to cook. What's more,
they love to cook for poor people. They do it frequently, preparing meals at home and bringing them to
their church in Virginia. … The people they cook for love it too. But there's a problem. It
was "criminal activity." The Fairfax County health department points out that —
horrors — Mary and Ruth are actually preparing food and serving it to people! Without
a license!
The
Welfare-Reform Miracle. Welfare caseloads have dropped 60 percent since the passage of
welfare reform. Was that just the result of a strong economy? No. Caseloads didn't decline
significantly in any of the eight periods of economic expansion from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. From
1953 to 1994, the number of families on welfare dropped in only five of those years, and dropped two years
in a row only once. By 2005, welfare caseloads had been declining for a stunning 11 straight
years. Work requirements, and the message sent by reform that dependence is unacceptable, got former
recipients into the work force.
Self-reliance
matters. [One] example of admirable legislation that promotes self-reliance is the 1996
Welfare Reform Act. The bill was initiated by conservative Republicans to replace the failed
social program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The new program — Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) — aimed to get poor parents off welfare and into paying jobs, thereby
reducing child poverty and combating illegitimacy. The results speak for themselves.
Clinton
got it right on welfare reform. Not everything has been reformed. There is clearly more
work to do. The 1996 law affected only the basic welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC). But dozens of other welfare entitlements, such as food stamps and Medicaid, still
operate under the old rules. And while the out-of-wedlock birth rate is no longer skyrocketing, it is
still far too high — as are the poverty and social chaos it begets.
Why Welfare
Reform Worked: The 1996 law replaced Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) —
traditional welfare — with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Congress created
AFDC in 1935 as part of the landmark Social Security Act, which also included unemployment insurance
and old-age assistance. In an era when few women worked, AFDC was intended to provide modest
income support for widows and their children. By the 1980s, it had evolved into something
else: guaranteed payments for single, often never-married mothers. Critics argued
that the program bred dependence, weakened self-reliance and rewarded out-of-wedlock births.
How Welfare Reform
Worked: Welfare reform celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, and celebrates seems the
right word. As most readers know, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) ended the much-despised
Depression-era federal entitlement to cash benefits for needy single mothers, replacing it with short-term,
work-oriented programs designed and run by individual states. Its success has surprised just about
everyone, supporters and naysayers alike.
The Entitlement
Mess. Congress is spending us into a hole. We hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq
war. But what about "entitlements"? That's the government's ironic term for programs that transfer
money from people who earned it to people who didn't. Entitlement? How can you be entitled to
someone else's money? To finance "entitlement" programs, the government threatens force against the
taxpayers who provide the money.
Apocalypse Not: Welfare
reforms's success is a lesson in modesty. Welfare reform turned 10 this week, and more
remarkable than its near-total success is the near-total amnesia that seems to have gripped its one-time
opponents. … When Bill Clinton signed the bill ending a federal entitlement to welfare, a leading
liberal newspaper called it "nasty," "atrocious" and "odious" — adding with typical nuance
that "the children will suffer the most."
Welfare reform at
ten. Welfare reform was associated with a sustained pause in the growth of illegitimacy, which
does hurt children. But it has not reversed the long-term trend toward more children born outside of marriage.
Curing poverty or
using poverty? People on the political left make a lot of noise about poverty and advocate
all sorts of programs and policies to reduce it but they show incredibly little interest in how poverty
has actually been reduced, whether in China or anywhere else.
Poverty
IQ: Po' vs. broke. I'm delighted to hear people jawboning about poverty again, even
if it took a couple of hurricanes to get us to do it. But sometimes I wonder how many people
know what poverty is.
Book Explains Why the Good Old Days Are Now.
Most Americans who are considered poor today have access to a quality of housing, food, heath care, consumer
products, entertainment, communications, and transportation that even the superrich Vanderbilts, Carnegies,
and Rockefellers did not enjoy in their day.
The Nanny State of the
Union: The fact that such burgeoning government interventionism in state, community
and private affairs is beyond the constitutional pale goes without saying. For the Founders, dependence
on government in private and public life was to be avoided at all costs — such dependence, as
they rightly saw it, being the root of bondage.
How Washington will spend your
taxes in 2006. Nearly half of the spending on low-income programs subsidizes state
Medicaid programs that provide health services to poor families. Other low-income spending
includes: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, housing subsidies,
child-care subsidies, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and low-income tax credits. Despite
recent rhetoric about "cuts for poor," anti-poverty spending now tops 3 percent
of GDP for the first time ever.
Editor's Note:
People with low income pay little or nothing in taxes and do not need or deserve tax credits,
especially if they receive other goods and services from the government.
Man pleads guilty to food
stamp fraud. A man charged in Florida with having ties to a terrorist organization pleaded
guilty Friday [6/16/2006] to processing more than $1.4 million in phony food stamp transactions at a
grocery store he once owned. Hatem Fariz, 33, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money
laundering. In exchange for his plea, federal prosecutors dropped eight other counts.
The
Katrina experiment: The common denominator of low-income-housing programs over
these last 40 years is that they have been consistent failures. Yet, despite this
indisputable fact, today's social-policy gurus persist in search of the magic government
low-income-housing program, rather than appreciating that the problem has been, and is
today, government interference in private lives.
A Very Late Checkout.
After being flown [to New York City] for free back in September, [Theon] Johnson's been at the Holiday Inn
since Super Bowl Sunday. On April 21, the hotel served Johnson with three notices of occupancy
termination, saying that it would begin court proceedings if he wasn't out by May 9. He wasn't,
so it did. If the court boots him, Johnson could end up in one of the city's homeless shelters. He's
been broke for over a month now. FEMA sent him $9,000 in housing aid, but he spent it all on booze,
cigarettes, some clothes, and food — partying, mostly. "I spent my money just the way
I wanted, and I think [FEMA] should send me some more," he says.
The Editor cries out in frustration ...
Here's an example of a person who will be a freeloader and a sponge for the rest of his life. If
there's a government "No Fly" list at the airport, why isn't there a "No Handouts" list at the homeless
shelters? It would be cheaper to buy this man a one-way ticket to another country. Or at least
to Guam or Puerto Rico or somewhere other than a New York City hotel!
More
about Hurricane Katrina
and the rise of the welfare state.
Libertarianism and Poverty: This
essay outlines a libertarian approach to poverty. No, it's not "Leave them in the gutter." It's
an approach that tries to be pragmatic and compassionate.
The 2005 Index of
Dependency: Benjamin Franklin wrote that "the best way of doing good to the poor, is not
making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it," and observed that the
growing welfare system in England removed "the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and
sobriety, by giving [the poor] a dependence on somewhat else than a careful accumulation [of
wealth] during youth and health.
Forging
a healthy BOND: "Each year government spends over $200 billion on means-tested
aid to families with children; three-quarters of this aid flows to single-parent families," [Robert] Rector
testified before Congress last February. "Children raised without a father in the home are more
likely to experience: emotional and behavioral problems, school failure, drug and alcohol abuse,
crime and incarceration."
Bunks for drunks. An experimental social-service
project rewards chronic alcoholics with room and board, no strings — or help — attached.
Apartments
Welcome Homeless Alcoholics. When Brian Steik lived on the streets, the government spent tens of
thousands of dollars on emergency room visits and other services to keep the alcoholic alive. Now
social-service agencies are conducting an experiment: Offering Steik and dozens of other homeless
drinkers subsidized apartments where they can keep boozing at a fraction of the cost.
Why Not Abolish the Welfare State? Since
1965 we have spent $5 trillion on the War on Poverty, measured in 1992 constant dollars. Yet the
poverty rate is higher today than it was the year the War on Poverty began. How can we spend so much
and achieve so little? One reason is that most of the money we spend doesn't go to poor people. It
goes to nonpoor people who work in the welfare-poverty industry. Medicaid dollars go to doctors and
hospitals; food stamp dollars go to the agricultural industry; housing subsidies go to landlords; and legal
service dollars go to lawyers.
Since we're talking
about race and class… Since the days of the Great Society, the U.S. Government has
thrown literally trillions of dollars at the poor. It undoubtedly helped some and it indisputably
hurt others. The people it hurt most are poor blacks, helping to erode social and family
bonds. We are told, for example, that out-of-wedlock births are a uniform cultural
phenomenon these days. This is simply a lie. Seventy percent of blacks are born
out of wedlock, most of them poor. … Upper-income women overwhelmingly wait to get married
before they have their kids.
Free Lunch: Title I's formula for determining
aid — and its recipe for fraud: The process to qualify for a free lunch comes down
to parents self-reporting their income on a form that is turned in to their local school. Federal
free-lunch program administrators argue that the program has little potential for abuse because "the worst
that happens is a kid gets a free lunch." Federal free-lunch data, however, are used as one of the
main poverty indicators for school districts and are linked to many other local, state, and federal funding
streams. So any fraud in the free-lunch program is quickly multiplied.
Cronyism 101: The Perks
of Being "Disadvantaged". The "Disadvantaged Business Enterprise" program, run by the U.S.
Department of Transportation and adopted by states and cities across the country, is one of the most
atrociously corrupt government endeavors in existence. Opportunists of all colors have used the racial
set-aside law to win billions of dollars worth of federal contracts for themselves and their friends under the
guise of being "victims."
Work pays! Those
for whom indignation is a way of life often inform us of the fact that families or households in the top 10 or
20 percent in income make far more money than people in the bottom 10 or 20 percent in income.
What they almost never inform us of are how much money they are talking about and how many people in these
different brackets actually work.
Liberals
and class: If this is a class-ridden society denying "access" to upward
mobility to those at the bottom, why is it that immigrants can come here at the bottom
and then rise to the top? One obvious reason is that many poor immigrants come here
with very different ambitions and values from that of poor Americans born into our welfare
state and imbued with notions growing out of attitudes of dependency and resentments
of other people's success.
Only
in America. What are we to make of people who preach pessimism and doom
to people — telling them that they're poor because others are rich or telling
blacks that they'll never make it because of societal racism? What are we to make of
politicians, media pundits and college professors who preach the politics of
envy — telling people lies that the rich became rich off the backs
of the poor?
Liberal
emotion vs. Conservative logic: It takes a lot more integrity, character, and courage to be a
conservative than it does to be a liberal. That's because at its most basic level, liberalism is nothing
more than childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues. … Look at Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty," which
did nothing to reduce the poverty rate despite the trillions that were spent; however, it did help drive the
illegitimacy rate among black Americans from 22 percent in 1960 to 70% in 2005.
Ammunition
for poverty pimps: Since President Johnson's War on Poverty, controlling for inflation,
the nation has spent $9 trillion on about 80 anti-poverty programs. To put that figure in
perspective, last year's U.S. GDP was $11 trillion; $9 trillion exceeds the GDP of any
nation except the U.S. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita uncovered the result of the War on
Poverty — dependency and self-destructive behavior.
Welfare State Continues to Grow: When
President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty more than 30 years ago, he announced it was an
investment that would repay its cost to society many times over. Since that time, the United States
has "invested" $7.95 trillion (in constant 1999 dollars) in programs that provide cash,
food, housing, and medical and social services to poor and low-income Americans. By contrast, the cost
to the United States of fighting World War II was $3.2 trillion (also in
1999 dollars). The cost of the War on Poverty has been more than twice the price tag for
defeating Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation.
Pushing a
formula for getting poor. No one can devise a formula for getting rich. But I
can devise a formula for getting poor. Don't work. Convince yourself that your life
reflects the decisions of others and not yours. Be the perennial victim. This is the
toll that the welfare state has taken on blacks. It introduced a culture of poverty.
More class
warfare. A key element of the John Kerry-John Edwards campaign is an
us-versus-them theme, where "us" are the poor and middle class and "them" are the greedy
rich. Edwards famously characterized this dichotomy as "Two Americas" during his run
for the Democratic nomination. The clear implication of the Democrats' message is that
the rest of us would somehow be better off if the rich were worse off.
We
really are better off. The media's reporting about poverty is misleading
too. It's true that the official poverty rate has risen lately. Some people
do line up at food banks. But what Americans call poverty is totally different from
what it's meant through most of history. A "poor" man at a food bank told me he
had "the normal things": cable TV, a microwave — the "normal
things" that not even rich people used to have.
Silence on Welfare Reform: What
may be most striking about the current welfare debate may be the remarkable absence of journalistic interest in
the topic. In fact, the news media's silence speaks volumes, testifying to the emergence of a broad new
consensus surrounding a law that was vilified by opponents when it was originally passed.
Illegitimacy
is the Major Cause of Child Poverty.
Welfare reform
fantasyland: Finally, the federal government has stopped subsidizing families to keep fathers
out of the household. It only took a half-century and millions of broken families but the government
finally got it. But there are 70 other federal welfare programs.
Is It Wrong to Require Work in Exchange for
a Welfare Check?: "It's too bad that Congressman Rangel sees getting something for nothing as
being more noble than having to put in an honest day's work for it," said Project 21 member
Michael King. "As opposed to sitting on their hands and doing nothing, residents are asked to
give a portion of one day in exchange for receiving housing. What's the problem? Oh, I
forget — this gives Congressman Rangel and his compatriots something else to point to
at election time."
Make Welfare Mothers Work: In the spring
of 1994, the last full year of welfare as we knew it, 112,000 Massachusetts families were on the dole. In
the spring of 2001, the caseload stands at 41,500 — a reduction of 63 percent. So
spectacular has the success of welfare reform been that it is easy to forget how bitterly — and
with what moral posturing — it was opposed.
Daring
to Question The Welfare State: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, in
an interview with Financial Times, said, "Able-bodied adults should save enough
on a regular basis so that they can provide for their own retirement and, for
that matter, health and medical needs." Shocking!
Poor Before
Welfare. Before the rise of the welfare state, Americans of all
classes shared a deep aversion to dependence on either private organized charity or
governmental relief. Indeed, there was a great stigma in the folk culture attached
to any form of what might be called hierarchical relief (relief in which those who control
the purse strings are higher on the socio-economic scale than the recipients).
What is
poor? Many poor people today own appliances that were considered luxuries when I grew up, and
some would still be considered luxuries today. For example, 91% of those in the lowest 10% of
households — all of whom are officially poor — own color TVs; 74% own microwave
ovens; 55% own VCRs; 47% own clothes dryers; 42% own stereos; 23% own dishwashers; 21% own
computers; and 19% own garbage disposals.
Editor's Note:
The "poor" seem to always have money for cigarettes, beer and lottery tickets. Even the poorest of the poor sometimes
buy wine.
Excellent:
Understanding
Poverty in America: For most Americans, the word "poverty" suggests
destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and
reasonable shelter. But only a small number of the 35 million persons classified
as "poor" by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship
certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity. Most of America's "poor"
live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few
generations ago.
The
productive vs. the unproductive: Today, more than 98 percent of American
homes have a telephone, electricity and a flush toilet. More than 70 percent of
Americans own a car, a VCR, a microwave, air conditioning, cable TV, and a washer and
dryer. In 1900, no homes had the modern conveniences of today. Today's poor
Americans have choices that yesterday's millionaires could have only dreamt of, such as
cell phones, computers and color television sets.
$9 Trillion Didn't End Poverty — What to
Do? Nine Trillion dollars has been spent fighting the "war on poverty". Yet, as the
Census Bureau just reported, poverty in America is up. So what do the candidates propose
we do? Isn't it time that one of the candidates admit we cannot spend our way out
of poverty?
Liberal
Activists Demand "Meaningful" Welfare Reform: A "who's who" of liberal activists descended on
Washington, D.C., March 25, [2002] to publicize their anti-poverty plan. They want poverty reduction
to be the main focus of welfare reauthorization, and they plan to say it loudly — with protests.
Jacko
and Snoop Dogg's America. Michael Jackson's father is blaming — what
else? — American "racism" for his ghoulish son's persistent legal and
personal problems.
Editor's Note:
The article above is replete with charts and footnotes, as well as a number of
surprising statistics. For example, ninety-seven percent of poor households
have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions. Seventy-eight
percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV
reception. Seventy-three percent own microwave ovens, more than half
have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.
Government, Poverty and
Self-Reliance: One of the saddest chapters in American history is one
from our own times, and it's the well-documented tragedy of what decades of federal
programs have done to black families in our inner cities. Charles Murray's pivotal
book, "Losing Ground," told that story in a compelling way and sparked huge changes
in federal welfare policy. So much destruction of lives might have been avoided
if the presidents and congresses of the 1960s and 1970s had been of the same mind as
President Andrew Johnson was when he vetoed a bill to extend the Freedman's Bureau
in 1866. In his veto message, he noted, "A system for the support of indigent
persons in the United States was never contemplated by the authors of the Constitution; nor
can any good reason be advanced why, as a permanent establishment, it should be founded
for one class or color of our people more than another."
The Black Family: 40 Years of
Lies. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are
far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child
poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children.
Self-inflicted
poverty: Did you learn that the United States is rich because we have bountiful
natural resources? That has to be nonsense. Africa and South America are probably
the richest continents in natural resources but are home to the world's most miserably poor
people. On the other hand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and England are poor in natural
resources, but their people are among the world's richest.
Poverty That Defies
Aid. Between 1960 and 2005, foreign aid worth more than $450 billion, inflation adjusted,
poured into Africa. Result? Between 1975 and 2000, African gross domestic product per capita
declined at an average annual 0.59 percent rate. … Foreign aid to Africa has also enabled
government officials to embezzle large amounts of money and misspend much on loss-making projects.
This is real poverty...
Poor Haitians Resort to Eating
Dirt. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls
the economy.
The
Cos again. Yesterday's gross material poverty among blacks is all but
gone. In all too many cases, it has been replaced by the worse kind
of poverty — poverty of the spirit.
Vanderbilt
professor who was born into poverty calls for end to affirmative action: Carol Swain grew up in
a poor black family of 12 children, a family that had to carry water up a steep hill to their rural
Virginia shack to run the washing machine or take baths. Years later, she is an award-winning political
scientist — and an author whose name and opinions probably will become more familiar in the
next few months.
Sweden to rein in generous
welfare. Sweden was poised to enact controversial cutbacks to its generous unemployment benefits
system as early as last night [12/21/2006], bringing thousands of people on to the streets in defence of the
country's long tradition of a welfare safety net.
Poverty Does
Not Cause Crime. In all my years covering court, I don't ever recall a defence lawyer claiming
that his or her client committed a particular crime because of poverty. All sorts of explanations crop
up during sentencing submissions, including addiction, mental illness, childhood abuse and abysmal coping
skills. Defence lawyers, however, do not pin their hopes for a light sentence on the poverty-causes-crime
argument. It's untrue and judges won't buy it.
How many trillions of dollars have been spent on Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty?"
Estimates below are from what appear to be reliable sources, as opposed to anonymous bloggers, letters to the
editor, and other wild guesses by unknown authors.
5 trillion: Robert Sirico, 1995.
5 trillion: John C. Goodman, Gerald W. Reed, Peter S. Ferrara, 1994.
5.1 trillion: Robert Rector, 1993.
5.3 trillion: Institute for Public Accuracy, 1999.
5.4 trillion: William F. Lauber, 1995.
5.4 trillion: John C. Goodman, 1996.
5.4 trillion: Michael Tanner, 1996.
5.4 trillion: Alice Klimkoski, 2007.
5.429739 trillion: Jan Brauner, 2005.
6.6 trillion: George F. Will, 2005.
6.6 trillion: Rush Limbaugh.
6.98 trillion: Leon Felkins, 2001.
7 trillion: Anthony Salas.
7 trillion: Adam Young, 2002.
8.9 trillion: Jenifer Zeigler, 2004.
9 trillion: Michael Hampton, 2006.
9 trillion: Walter Williams, 2005.
9.1 trillion: Harry Browne.
8 to 10 trillion: Jerome R. Corsi and Kenneth Blackwell, 2006.
10 trillion: Steven Malanga, 2004.
10 trillion: Jerry De Angelis, 2006.
11 trillion: Robert Rector, 2007.
Over 11 trillion: Bill Steigerwald, 2007.
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