Poverty  and  Dependency  in  America


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.

Federal, state and local governments spent a total of $411.4 billion on welfare programs in 2006.*

Information about President Obama's rapidly expanding welfare state can be found here.


Freedom is Hard Work.  When wealth redistribution occurs in the false name of compassion, liberty is damaged for everybody.  Meanwhile, the seeds of class warfare, resentment and discontent, are sown from coast to coast.  The very fact that we have a literal "dependency class", a class that is convinced it will perish if not directly supported by government action, is a national outrage.

Workers Against Lazy Non-producers United Together.  We can no longer sit back and let our government spend our hard earned money on those who choose to be non-producers of society.  We must stand united and let our voices be our weapon.  We The People must remind our elected officials, that those who have put them in office, can & will take them away. ... Non-producers will no longer be given life and prosperity but forced to earn it as we have!

How Liberalism Exploits The Vulnerable.  Not knowing that she was on camera, this "community organizer" gave away the dirtiest of the dirty secrets of the left.  Herein lies the explanation of how and why major segments of America, particularly in urban areas, upon becoming increasingly liberal over the past several decades, have become more lawless, more hopeless, and more helpless.  While claiming to "help the little guy," liberalism has a vested interest in keeping the "little guy" oppressed and dependent.  Only in such a state can he fulfill his intended role as a "resource" of the liberal machine.

These Dis-United States.  The liberal/progressive movement has convinced modern man that to satisfy his material needs it is not necessary to labor exhaustingly in pursuit of said needs; but much more beneficial to modern man to simply reallocate resources from those who can afford to do so.  The foundations of the welfare state having been laid, the free market struggles to provide for its legitimate members as well as those of a lesser inclination.  The mixed economy may go on for years before the weight of redistributive legislation finally brings the golden goose to a prone position.  The tipping point, however, has finally been reached.  Better than 50% of the class of lesser inclination now feed at the trough of Federal largesse.

The Real Problem With ACORN.  [Scroll down]  Eventually I soured on welfare in a number of ways.  Even with the women it was doing no good.  They had no sense of self-sufficiency.  It was just a sophisticated form of begging.  They would develop a sense of entitlement so that "getting ahead" simply meant making more and more strident demands on more and more people.  And that's what Wade Rathke seems to have picked up on.  He said on the Fox show that when funding ran out for welfare rights he moved to Little Rock to start his own community organizing effort, based on that same sense of endless grievance.  ACORN became skilled at moral gangsterism, shaking down governments and corporations for larger and larger amounts, making ever more ridiculous demands.

The $450.00 purse.  Theirs weren't the only spending shocks, when the Obama stimulus checks arrived.  Students, who had attended every day of the first two weeks and had filled out their daily timesheets, and placed correct addresses on their W-2 forms, received a check for $640.00.  Cash in hand, one-hundred and twenty-five low income, low achieving, adult high school students went on a government furnished spending spree.

Spreading the Wealth.  When Barack Obama said he wanted to "spread the wealth around," he meant it.  A new study from Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation estimates that Obama's policies would spend $10.3 trillion on welfare programs over the next decade.

Obama Will Spend More on Welfare in the Next Year Than Bush Spent on Entire Iraq War.  As a candidate for president, Barack Obama decried the financial toll that the Iraq war was taking on the economy, but Obama's proposed spending on welfare through 2010 will eclipse Bush's war spending by more than $260 billion.

Welfare Reform after Ten Years:  A State-by-State Analysis.  In an age when "reform" seems a tired slogan that seldom delivers what it promises, why did welfare reform apparently work so well?  PRWORA replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a national entitlement program, with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a collection of block grants for the states.  As a result, states gained greater flexibility in implementing reform:  They could implement time limits, work requirements, and family cap restrictions to encourage self-sufficiency.

Rand study: It ain't the Big Macs that make the poor fat.  The whole song and dance is that eating healthy is expensive.  It is not.  My mother made do raising 5 kids on barely above minimum wage pay.  A study by the Rand Corporation found that far from preying on the poor, fast-food outlets avoid those neighborhoods because of crime and well, the customers don't have much money.

Buffalo named third-poorest city in U.S..  Detroit is the poorest city in America, with 33.3 percent of its residents below the poverty level.  Cleveland comes second at 30.5 percent, and Buffalo is the only other major city above 30 percent.  Anchorage has the lowest poverty rate among the nation's major cities, defined as those with populations of 250,000 or more.  Just 6.4 percent of Anchorage's residents were living in poverty a year ago.

Subsidized Health Care:  a view from the exam room.  When serving in the Rural Health Center in my community, my colleagues and I offered free or discounted care for a large number of patients.  Many were covered by Medi-Cal or one of dozens of state programs paid for by the taxpayers of California.  The following items were commonly seen on patients or carried by their dependent children, who were also covered by subsidized programs:
 •  Cell phones and "BlackBerry" PDAs, including just-released models with a price tag of $400, plus an ongoing monthly service fee of $65-$150
 •  iPods and portable DVD players
 •  GameBoys and handheld electronic games
 •  Artificial fingernails requiring maintenance every two weeks...
 •  Elaborate braided hair weaves, $300 per session plus frequent maintenance
 •  Custom-designed body art...

Peanut Farmer Allergies.  Many of America's largest cities have been controlled by the Democrats for decades and now lay in ruins.  Look at the condition of cities such as my beloved hometown Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis and so many others.  Our cities are sometimes as violent as what many of our soldiers face in war.  Industry and jobs have moved to the suburbs for any number of reasons.  And our fearless leader is using the most devastated cities in America as models for his hope and change.  Phenomenally stupid.

An Ownership Society No More.  If you are not in need of a government subsidy to find a place to live, listen and heed.  Do not, whatever you do, rent an apartment in a complex that permits government-subsidized housing.  You do not want to live there.  You do not want to be living around a bunch of people who cannot carry their own load.  The crime rates will be high and the place will quickly fall into disrepair.

The Myth that Liberals Care About the Poor:  Almost every program the Left supports to "help" the poor in this country is surreptitiously designed to de-motivate them and keep them dependent on the government.  The Left saps their will to work with welfare and food stamps, the Left reduces their income and puts them out of jobs by encouraging illegal aliens to enter the country, and the Left fights voucher programs that would allow poverty-stricken students to go to the same schools as the rich Americans.  Liberals incessantly ramble on about how much they care about the poor — and they do, the same way a Venus Flytrap cares about a random bug that happens to fly into its maw.

Welfare in a Bad Way.  What most Americans identify as government "welfare" are payments to single mothers, food stamps and (perhaps) Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor.  But that's not the half of it.  Since 1960, government has changed radically.  Then, 52 percent of federal spending went for defense, 26 percent for "payments for individuals" — the welfare state.  By 2008, 61 percent consisted of "payments for individuals," 21 percent for defense.  Social Security and Medicare — programs for the elderly — represented the biggest share:  $1 trillion in 2008.

ACORN Scandal Has Deep Roots.  ACORN is wedded to stale thinking that all too often makes people dependent, crushes responsibility, creativity and our very natures.  And the Obama administration only plans to continue to increase welfare spending, ensuring that the system that gave birth to ACORN and its inexcusable conduct will continue to thrive.

U.S. Poverty Rate Rises to 11-Year High as Recession Takes Toll.  The U.S. poverty rate rose to the highest level in 11 years in 2008 and household incomes declined as the first full year of the recession took its toll, government data showed.  The poverty rate climbed to 13.2 percent from 12.5 percent, and the number of people classified as poor jumped by 2.6 million to 39.8 million, according to a Census Bureau report released today [9/10/2009].

Socialism is really cannibalism.  When I work, I use up hours of my life... my limited, mortal, human, physical life.  The money I am paid represents the life I expended to earn it.  My pay — my wealth — is my labor.  It is the expenditure of some of my body's short, precious life on earth.  So when someone takes my money, they steal my hours of labor.  They consume not only the fruits of my labor, but my labor itself, that labor which is the very expenditure of my life.  When someone loots and consumes the money I have earned, they consume the part of my life devoted to producing what hey have taken.

Manufactured Healthcare Crisis.  Medicaid is funded roughly 50/50 by federal and state governments.  As an essentially free benefit to the poor, Medicaid has no tax associated with it, so it is covered by state and federal income tax revenues — that's you and me...   In 2006, Medicaid spending alone totaled $314 billion.  For perspective, this is roughly equivalent to the baseline defense budget (i.e. excluding war spending like for Iraq/Afghanistan).  State Medicaid programs are the largest single recipient of all federal grants, comprising 43 percent of the total.  In 2008, federal Medicaid and Medicare spending totaled $676 billion.  Comprising only 2 percent of the federal budget in 1967, these two programs today consume 23 percent of total federal spending.  This is the largest component of the federal budget, even exceeding total wartime outlays for national defense.

The More Given, the Less Earned.  The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn.  That is the basic concept of the welfare state — you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it.  About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax — but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned, them.  America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life.  As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization.  And eventually it will not be America.  It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.

Poverty?  It's just a lie the Left uses to destroy the middle class.  The propaganda gives it away.  Those ridiculous claims about abolishing child poverty are a huge warning sign.  Why 'child' poverty, by the way?  It's partly to make us all go gooey and say 'aah'.  It's also because the children in our most deprived households have no responsibility at all for the conditions they live in.  But the Government does, by encouraging the creation of single-parent families on welfare.

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.

Sex Offenders Live in Village Under Miami Bridge.  No, it's not an adventurous form of urban camping or a recession-fueled shantytown.  Instead, there is a distinctly permanent feeling to this scruffy encampment.  And it's clear many of its residents don't want anything to do with inquisitive reporters.

NYC sending homeless to Georgia, South Carolina.  New York City is buying one-way plane tickets for homeless families to leave the city, and dozens of the families have landed in Georgia and South Carolina.  The New York Times is reporting that it's part of a Bloomberg administration program to keep the homeless out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family.

Mayor Defends One-Way Tickets for Homeless.  Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended a city program to send homeless families out of New York on planes, trains and buses on Wednesday [7/29/2009], saying it "saves the taxpayers of New York City an enormous amount of money."  Speaking in the Blue Room in City Hall to announce a new finance commissioner, Mr. Bloomberg was asked if the program simply shifts the homelessness program to a different place, as some critics of the program have suggested.

Massachusetts is housing homeless in motels.  A record number of families are being put up in motels in Massachusetts.  High unemployment and the rising number of home foreclosures is the reason the state is taking this action.  Housing Massachusetts' homeless is costing tax payers around $2 million per month.  It costs an average of $85 per night to have families, including nearly 1000 children, stay in motels.

Obama, the remaking of America, the reverie for a police state.  Nationalized health care is only the latest page in the ongoing saga of U.S. president Barak (sic) Obama's attempt to remake/reinvent America into a socialist utopia.  Without fail, an ever-vigilant, all-powerful central government with police state powers will also arise to assist in tending to the "needs" of the dependent population.  Almost unbelievably, a recent poll taken in Germany confirms that once dependency is bred into a people, the longing for security becomes so strong that a police state is preferred to the uncertainties of a free society.  This is a stark warning to Americans.

What a concept!
 Gov. Schwarzenegger Proposes Eliminating Welfare.  Faced with a $21.3 billion budget deficit and proposed tax hikes, California voters rejected the tax increases, essentially telling their state government to get it's act together and quit driving the state over a financial abyss.  In response, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has come up with a proposal that has the "mainstream" media and other Leftists swallowing their snuff.

California contemplates ultimate reform — no welfare.  Could California become the first state in the nation to do away with welfare?  That doomsday scenario is on the table as lawmakers wrestle with a staggering $24.3 billion budget deficit.

5 Character Flaws That Are Destroying America's Future.  [#1]  Lack Of Personal Responsibility:  As a society, we encourage a "victimhood mentality" and an overweening government that never met an issue it didn't want to dive into with both feet; so we shouldn't be surprised that so many Americans expect to be rewarded for failure.

Uncle Sam's First Name Isn't 'Daddy'.  America did not become great by being a permanent daddy who keeps children ignorant and supports their every need cradle to grave.  Such a father would not simply be misguided; he would be evil.  We still have a republic.  If we intend to keep it, a great number of Americans need to give up the idea that Daddy will take care of them.

Poor in Colorado may get free phones.  Thousands of low-income Coloradans reliant on public assistance could get a free cellphone under a plan before the state Public Utilities Commission.  If approved, the plan by TracFone Wireless in Miami would make Colorado the 17th state it has settled into with free cell service for the indigent, a form of wireless welfare that proponents say taps into one of the last untapped markets for the telecom technology.

Stimulus funds to aid homeless.  The U.S. expects to send $1.5 billion in stimulus money today to hundreds of communities around the country to prevent homelessness, including $1 million for Fresno to dismantle tent cities and move residents into privately owned apartments.

Cap-and-Tax:  Government vs. America.  There is still time to stop the legislative monstrosity known as the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill before the Senate approves it.  But for that to happen, Americans must learn how bad it is. ... As noted, the bill contains a hidden provision establishing unemployment benefits for up to three full years for workers displaced as a result of this "job creations" bill, as well as health insurance premium subsidies and $1,500 each for job search and relocation expenses — all at taxpayers' expense.

Bureaucrat scuffs dream of homeless shoe shiner.  He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city.  When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie.  It's a reminder of how he has turned things around.  In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years.  But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month's rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.

Social service advocates predict disaster if budget cut.  Armageddon, disaster, nightmare, obscene, devastating.  Those are just a few of the words some people use to describe the fallout if deep cuts in Illinois' budget become a reality.  "This budget would be a disaster.  We are talking about decimating programs that help the most vulnerable," said Diana Rauner, spokeswoman for the Ounce of Prevention Fund, a poverty relief organization.

NYC Turns Luxury Units Into Shelters For Homeless.  There's controversy swirling around how much New York City is paying to rent luxury condos for homeless families. ... By all accounts it's the nicest homeless shelter in the city and some non-homeless neighbors are feeling pretty inhospitable.  "The apartments are beautiful.  They're living better than a lot of people around here and they don't have to pay for it," neighbor Maria Brown said.  When the building went up the idea was to sell the units, some of them for more than $300,000.  But now, even though apartments sit empty, you can't even rent them.

Mayor Bloomberg to homeless: Don't get too comfy in luxury condos.  Don't get too comfortable!  That was Mayor Bloomberg's message to dozens of lucky homeless families who scored a posh pad at a luxury condo that has been turned into a homeless shelter in Brooklyn.  "We're not going to let people just sit there.  This is a transition thing.  We want to move them out," Bloomberg said Friday [6/5/2009].  "And if they say, 'Oh, I love this here, I don't want to try something else,' I'm sorry, that's not the whole intent here."

'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.

This Boomer Isn't Going to Apologize.  I have two teenagers and an 8-year-old, and I can say firsthand that if boomer parents have anything for which to be sorry it's for rearing a generation of pampered kids who've been chauffeured around to soccer leagues since they were 6.  This is a generation that has come to regard rising affluence as a basic human right, because that is all it has ever known — until now.  Today's high-school and college students think of iPods, designer cellphones and $599 lap tops as entitlements.

A Simple, Inescapable Fact:  If we continually enlarge the size and scope of the Federal government, already the largest dispenser of money in the world, it is not rocket science to forecast that every scoundrel in the world will be looking for ways to game the system or to steal money outright.

Liberal Fantasyland.  From 1959 to 1964, the poverty rate dropped every single year, from 22.4% to 19.0%.  After that, President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared War on Poverty.  And indeed, the poverty rate continued to decline, reaching 12.8% by 1968.  But despite the War on Poverty continuing throughout, the poverty rate sort of stalled in the 12-15% range.  It would climb back above 12.8% by 1980, and stay there through 1997, when President Clinton ended Welfare.  In 2006 it was 12.3%, below where it was when Welfare ended and about where it was in 1968.

Healthcare Crusaders Out To Plunder System.  The number of uninsured people is grossly misleading.  Just because you are uninsured doesn't mean you have no access to medical care.  And just because you are insured under universal systems doesn't mean you will receive care.  If you don't think the administration is parlaying the crisis angle, then you must have missed the feigned urgency in Obama's declarations that "reform" must be completed this year.

In Washington, beggars can be choosers.
 Let Them Eat Arugula.  Last month, Michelle Obama visited Miriam's Kitchen, which serves the homeless in Washington, D.C. ... But the first lady's visit wasn't just about the needs of the homeless; it was also very much about the food itself.  In a Washington Post article covering the visit, one Miriam's Kitchen official explained, "If anyone brings us donuts, Steve [the chef] throws them away. ... It is not good food for our guests.  We care too much to give them anything but the best.  Steve wants our guests to have the same experience as if they were paying $30 for the meal."

The Editor says...
 If you want to consider freeloading homeless bums as your "guests," and feed them nothing but the very finest food, go ahead — but don't take money out of my paycheck to do it!

Welfare Reform after Ten Years:  A State-by-State Analysis.  On August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). ... In the simplest of terms, PRWORA sought to promote work and marriage and discourage births to teenagers and unmarried women.  Most policy experts, liberal and conservative, agree welfare reform produced extraordinary results.  Welfare rolls dropped from 12.2 million in August 1996 to 4.1 million in December 2006, a national decline of 67 percent.  Studies show most former recipients left for work, proving wrong the predictions asserting homelessness would increase dramatically.  Other key measures, such as employment of never-married mothers, grew by 50 percent.  Employment changes of this magnitude over such a short period for an entire demographic group are unprecedented in Census Bureau records.

Food stamp fraud may steal $400M from stimulus funds.  Fraud has declined to between one-third and one-quarter of what it was in the early 1990s, according to the Government Accountability Office.  That's largely a result of the USDA's phasing out stamps and replacing them with ATM-like cards.  Rather than handing over pieces of paper, recipients swipe the card at the grocery checkout and the amount is automatically deducted from their monthly allotments.

Food stamp rule frustrates police in North Dakota.  [John] Schweitzer's misfortune should have been an open-and-shut legal case.  The thief was caught on video surveillance, and he used his own food stamp swipe card to pay for groceries before leaving with Schweitzer's wallet.  But a federal law prohibiting the disclosure of information about food stamp recipients — even to law enforcement, unless a specific name is provided — meant it would take months and a lot of legwork before an arrest was made.

Obama's Stimulus:  LBJ's Great Society welfare was probably the worst of all liberal policies because it was directly responsible for destroying marriage by subsidizing illegitimacy and divorce, thereby creating a matriarchy dependent on government handouts.  It wasn't poverty that destroyed marriage in the lower-income classes, it was the liberal policy of giving taxpayers' money to women, thereby making the husband and father irrelevant and even an impediment to the flow of easy money.  By setting limits on government handouts, the 1996 welfare reform encouraged welfare recipients to get jobs or job training, to make themselves self-sufficient and to end their long-term dependency on government.  The Obama stimulus plan increases the taxpayers' money that the federal government gives to the states for welfare, and reverses incentives by giving bonuses to states that put more people on welfare.

NYC Starts Charging Rent at Homeless Shelters.  Even the homeless can't escape the high price of a night in New York City.  City officials this month began charging rent to some families staying in homeless shelters.  The policy applies only to shelter residents who have income from jobs.

Maryland becomes first state in nation to protect homeless people under hate-crimes law.  Maryland granted a new safeguard to its most downtrodden residents Thursday, becoming the first state in the nation to extend hate-crimes protection to homeless people. ... California, Texas and Ohio are considering similar bills, and legislation has been introduced in Congress.

Gospel of dependence from National Urban League.  Shouldn't it embarrass black Americans that one the nation's largest and most prestigious civil rights organizations offers a long list of proposals to improve black life in our country, and every single proposal is a government program? ... There's not a single proposal that I could find in a several hundred-page report about improving black life that does not start with government.  The civil rights movement once was about freedom and liberation.  Now it's about government dependency.  We should be ashamed.

Houston lines up stimulus package.  Houston is set to embark on a program to provide a boost to some of the city's biggest developments, many of which have been put on hold amid the ongoing financial crisis.  The plan aims to entice developers not to put their multimillion-dollar projects on hold in exchange for millions in incentives if the companies begin building soon and agree to make improvements to public roadways, sidewalks and streetscapes.

One in 10 Americans gets help to buy food.  A record 32.2 million people — one in every 10 Americans — received food stamps at the latest count, the government said on Thursday [4/2/2009], a reflection of the recession now in its 16th month.  Food stamps, the major U.S. anti-hunger program, help poor people buy groceries.  The average benefit was $112.82 per person in January.

Welfare Reform R.I.P.  Even many liberals thought the 1996 reform ended the welfare debate forever. ... At issue was the idea of insisting that millions of people make a transition from the dole to the work force.  States were given much more power in running their federally-funded welfare programs, deadlines were imposed on individuals getting back to work, and a lifetime time limit of five years was set for family benefits.  Defenders of the status quo warned that more than a million additional children would be condemned to poverty.  But what really happened was a 65% drop in welfare caseloads, millions liberated from the government teat and returned to supporting themselves, and a model gratefully followed by other countries.

What's In a Number?  That Depends on How You Define 'Homeless'.  A well publicized report this week that an estimated 1.5 million American children experienced homelessness in 2005-06 did not use the federal definition of homelessness.  Instead, it used a different definition that grossly inflated the actual number.

Atlanta 'giving meters' program off to slow start.  Six months after Atlanta business leaders set up parking meter-like machines to accept spare change donations and discourage panhandling, just $500 has been deposited — not much help for beggars who say they can sometimes raise $300 in a day on their own.

The Editor says...
 And that's $300 dollars a day tax free because it's all cash and they don't bother to file tax returns.  How many readers of this page bring home $2000 a week after taxes?

Photo of a "giving meter".

On D.C. Streets, the Cellphone as Lifeline.  To the usual trappings that help many homeless people endure life on the streets — woolen blankets, shopping carts or cardboard box shelters — add the humble cellphone.  Today, it's not unusual for the homeless to whip out Nokia 6085 GoPhones (with optional Bluetooth and USB connectivity), stop at a public computer to check e-mail or urge friends to read their blogs.

Why Team Obama Hates Poor People.  Democrats, and the progressive left in particular, exploit the poor, they use the poor, they write speeches about them, and manipulate their "unrepresented voices" in debates.  But one thing is increasingly clear from the Obama administration and the popular left in America, they don't have any interest in helping them.

Atlas shrugs, moves to Massachusetts.  Today's Wall Street Journal has an article on a drive to increase unemployment compensation benefits for New Yorkers.  The poor babies only get a maximum of $405 per week, whereas those in Massachusetts get $942.  Those fat cats get benfits which work out to be $48,048 on an annual basis.  The U S Census put median family income for all American families in 2006 at $49,207.

We Are NOT Entitled.  A county government official recently told me that just the "pension obligations owed to firefighters and police" were keeping him up at night.  One thing that so many large employers have in common — from car companies, to the U.S. Postal Service, to local governments — is massive pension obligation that are wreaking havoc on their bottom lines and threatening their viability.  But why should anyone be "entitled" to a pension?  The fact is, the vast majority of Americans have no access to a pension, do not expect one, and will never get one.

Eventually the gravy train runs out of gravy.
 Jobless Angry at Possibility of No Benefits.  As governors in nine states, mostly in the South, consider rejecting millions of dollars in federal stimulus money for increased unemployment insurance, there is growing anger among the ranks of the jobless in those states that they could be left out of a significant government benefit.

Mean Streets.  It is not unusual for me to get hit up for change a half dozen times between the time I leave my downtown [St. Louis] office to grab a bite to eat and return.  The record is ten.  By and large, these panhandlers are not the noble economic victims the mainstream media likes to romanticize on the six o'clock news ... Rather they are largely single men with chronic drug and alcohol habits, and a miscellany of mental illnesses.

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.

I Lost My Country.  There was a time not so long ago when people did not depend on government to bail them out of financial difficulty, a time when the nanny state bred apprehension, not affection.  Now, it seems, in the new America almost everyone wants a free ride.  The non-taxpayer wants a rebate from the taxpayer.  The poor man wants everything the rich man has and he wants the rich man to give it to him.

New Evidence on Taxes and Income.  When all sources of income are included — wages, salaries, realized capital gains, dividends, business income and government benefits — and taxes paid are deducted, households in the lowest income quintile saw a roughly 25% increase in their living standards from 1983 to 2005.  This fact alone refutes the notion that the poor are getting poorer.  They are not.

Welfare's Devastating Effects.  To most people, I imagine, welfare seems an obviously good thing.  But in fact the corrosive and iniquitous side of welfare has been evident for many decades.  It's only now that people are poking their heads out of the trench and daring to say so.  You can see the devastating effects of welfare in Britain, for example, in the exponential rise in single motherhood.  The figures are astonishing.  In the 1950s almost all children in Britain were brought up by their natural parents.  Today, only around half the children in Britain are brought up by their natural parents.  Half!

American Idle.  President Obama is auditioning American Idle contestants.  These non-producers of our society stole the show at his town meeting in Ft. Meyers, Florida on February 10, 2009.  It was like watching a Saturday Night Live skit when a parade of sad sacks asked for handouts.  Henrietta Hughes tearfully begged the President for a car, a kitchen and a bathroom.  Julio Osegueda, overcome in spontaneous euphoria, asked the president what his plans are for giving him better benefits at his job for McDonald's.  A man, who was recently laid off and receiving the forced generosity of the American people through his unemployment check, ungratefully asked why the government did not compensate him for his entire salary.

San Francisco blames out-of-towners for endless homeless problem.  City officials are finally admitting what others have been saying for years:  San Francisco is attracting huge numbers of homeless people from all over.  Thousands of transient people, arriving from other counties, states and even countries, are overwhelming the city's homeless system.  Facing a crippling budget shortfall, officials at San Francisco's homeless agencies are proposing a radical idea — take care of the city's own first, and require newcomers to show proof of residency for aid.

The Editor says...
 The people of San Francisco established a system to accommodate freeloaders, so they can't be surprised when vagrants and bums come from miles around to take advantage of the system.  I have some questions for San Francisco's officials:  (1) If someone is homeless, how can residency be proven or disproven?  (2) How long would I have to live in San Francisco before I became a "resident" and could apply for city services?

Top 10 Poverty Cities:  What do the top 10 cities with the highest poverty rates all have in common?
 1. Detroit, MI... hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1961;
 2. Buffalo, NY... hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1954;
 3. Cincinnati, OH... hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1984;
 4. Cleveland, OH... hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1989;
 5. Miami, FL... has never had a Republican mayor;
 6. St. Louis, MO... hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1949;
 7. El Paso, TX... has never had a Republican mayor;
 8. Milwaukee, WI... hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1908;
 9. Philadelphia, PA... hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1952;
 10. Newark, NJ... hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1907.

The Editor asks...
 Do poor people reflexively elect Democrats to avoid being cut off from public assistance, or do Democrats actively encourage people to be dependent on big government?  I think both.

The poverty of Democrats' ideas for cities:  Perhaps nothing illustrates that better than what's been happening in Detroit, Michigan, and Buffalo, New York.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly a third of the residents in those cities are living beneath the poverty line, the highest rates among large cities in the entire country. ... Detroit, whose mayor has been indicted on felony charges, hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1961.  Buffalo has been even more stubborn.  It started putting a Democrat in office back in 1954, and it hasn't stopped since.

The Magic of Barack Obama.  [Scroll down]  Ten out of 10 radicals surveyed agree that America must be remade via spreading the wealth around.  That means confiscating increasingly more money from society's hard-working wage earners and job producers and redistributing or "reinvesting" the booty in liberal programs and bureaucracies.  No matter that the welfare state has been an abject failure, having destroyed the traditional family and shipwrecked tens of millions of lives.  "The welfare system just needs more taxpayer money and then it will finally succeed," dreams the radical left.

The Schmoo is Alive and Well and Living in the White House.  It's difficult to see much difference between the denizens of Dogpatch, the cargo cultists and Obama's disciples, all of whom seem to believe they're entitled to health care, day care, food stamps, college tuition, abortions, a house, a car, a plasma TV and collagen-enhanced lips.  It isn't enough that Obama is a messiah for the non-religious and the number one fantasy sex symbol for America's women and Chris Matthews, he's also Santa Claus.  When I see what Obama and his elves, Pelosi and Reid, are doing to America, spending money like a teenager who's stumbled upon Paris Hilton's Platinum Card, it makes me fear that, thanks to the last election, America has done to itself what no foreign invader could have hoped to accomplish.

"Every measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives to it an administrative form creates thereby a class unproductive and idle, living at the expense of the class which is industrious and given to work."
— Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)    

Octuplets Mom Enrages California Taxpayers.  A big share of the financial burden of raising Nadya Suleman's 14 children could fall on the shoulders of California's taxpayers, compounding the public furor in a state already billions of dollars in the red.  Even before the 33-year-old single, unemployed mother gave birth to octuplets last month, she had been caring for her six other children with the help of $490 a month in food stamps, plus Social Security disability payments for three of the youngsters.

NYC Churches Ordered Not To Shelter Homeless.  City officials have ordered 22 New York churches to stop providing beds to homeless people.  With temperatures well below freezing early Saturday, the churches must obey a city rule requiring faith-based shelters to be open at least five days a week — or not at all.

Illinois' bad joke:  The state is three months behind in paying its suppliers and by spring it could be five months behind.  Keep this up and the state might bankrupt the businesses it needs for products and services.  If you were a doctor or a hospital, how long would you continue to give away your services under these conditions?  About 2.2 million people -- 17 percent of the state's population -- rely on Medicaid.  Most are children, low-income adults and low-income pregnant women.  But the elderly, disabled and blind consume the greatest proportion of aid.

Jindal:  Medicaid program on the skids.  [Louisiana Gov. Bobby] Jindal said change is needed because the state's Medicaid program, which serves more than 1 million poor, elderly and disabled Louisianians, is on an unsustainable financial path.  Whereas the program consumed about 8.5 percent of the general fund budget in 2006, it is projected to take up 21 percent by 2011, the governor said.

Good News on the Homeless:  The "homeless" are a population with severe to extreme mental health problems, substance-abuse problems, or other unusual challenges.  They need housing plus some other kind of support — and in recent years, under new Bush administration policies that emphasize treatment as well as housing, those needs have been more and more successfully met.

U.S. homelessness on decline.  Some 1.6 million people were forced to use an emergency shelter or transitional housing at some point between 2006 and 2007, but the number of people who are chronically homeless dropped nearly 30 percent from 2005 to 2007, according to a report made public Tuesday.  "We can all be encouraged that we're making progress in reducing chronic street homelessness in America," said Steve Preston, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, which released the findings.

The Editor says...
 People in an emergency shelter are not necessarily homeless.  Some are sent to shelters as a result of mandatory evacuations.

Homeless Get Cleaned Up With Free Haircuts For DNC.  The City of Denver has been working to make sure everything is in tip-top shape for all the visitors coming to town for the Democratic National Convention, and now a local salon is helping in that effort.  It seems to be a first — don't move the homeless, clean them up.

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.

Not Everyone Should Own a Home.  Maybe only a friendly foreigner could say this.  But America needs to realize that not everyone can own a home.  The American Dream of home ownership for all is a fraud.  Politicians who pimped this dream created an unsustainable mortgage industry whose collapse is only surprising because it didn't happen earlier.  America's mortgage industry will not recover, nor deserve to recover, unless it is prepared to challenge this politically unpalatable reality.

A Nation of Thieves.  Edgar K. Browning, professor of economics at Texas A&M University, has a new book aptly titled "Stealing from Each Other."  Its subtitle, "How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit," goes to the heart of what the book is about.  The rise of equalitarian ideology has driven Americans to steal from one another.

The Coming Entitlement Crash of 2010.  Culturally, Americans are facing a crisis in confidence.  Citizens feel powerless to impact the steady stream of foreclosures, layoffs and stock market retreats they watch daily.  Suffering from the depression of our age, "learned helplessness," many feel there's nothing they can do themselves to impact their world.  So instead of investing in constructive action, they look for saviors.  Their optimism isn't based on a renewed commitment to self-reliance and hard work but on an activist Democratic makeover of America.

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.

In defence of 'Greed'.  Do we all really "need" mobile phones and iPods?  Is it "excessive" for a family to have two cars and a 2,000-square-foot house?  Do we "need" to eat out as often as we do or buy the latest clothing fashions?  What is "needed" is a subjective judgment and makes the definition of "greed" vacuous.

Peggy the Moocher.  Who is Peggy the Moocher?  She's Peggy Joseph, a voter in Sarasota, Fla., who exulted earlier this week at a Barack Obama rally that this was "the most memorable time of my life."  Why?  As she told a Florida reporter on a YouTube video that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands:  "Because I never thought this day would ever happen.  I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car.  I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage.  You know.  If I help [Obama], he's gonna help me."

Video: Obama Is Going To Pay For My Gas And Mortgage!  (Already viewed over a million times.)

Itching for a change, and they don't care what it is.  Of course, given that hospitals generally allow you to pay off a bill at $10 per week forever, and that folks who claim they "can't afford" medical care often own color televisions wired for cable, cell phones, Gameboys, iPods, two cars and a motorboat, I suspect "can't afford it" usually means "had other priorities than saving for a rainy day" — which was certainly a lot easier back before the income tax.

Rules eased for food stamps.  As the economy weakens, states and the federal government are trying to help more people qualify for food stamps.  Since Oct. 1, new federal rules make it easier for households with income from combat pay, retirement accounts or education savings to be eligible.  The rules are part of the 2008 Farm Bill, which changed the name of the food stamp program to SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  "This is a nutrition program, not a welfare program," says Jean Daniel, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), noting that half the 29 million Americans who receive aid are children.

The Editor says...
 Of course it's a welfare program.  Just because it's part of the farm bill, and the money is being dispensed by the UDSA, that doesn't mean it's not a welfare program.

Houston Zoo will offer free admission to poor.  Despite record crowds, officials with the Houston Zoo are looking for ways to attract more low-income families.  Starting Aug. 1, families that use the Lone Star card to receive food stamps and other benefits will have unlimited free admission for themselves and up to eight others.

The Editor asks the obvious question...
 How will that help the poor improve their situation?

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.

Homeless say DNC diversions not for them.  Debbie — and this is merely a hunch — will probably be going to jail next month.  Unless they are giving away free booze and marijuana at the movies, the zoo or the Nature & Science museum — along with the free tickets to those venues they plan on giving the homeless during Democratic National Convention week — I can't see Debbie budging from the dirt beneath the Speer Boulevard bridge she has called home the past 26 years.

Denver's High-Class Homeless:  The area around the convention center where Democrats will gather is home to many of the city's 5,000 or so vagrants, so city officials have hatched a plan to, er, get them out of the way.  For their own good, of course.  But rest assured that Denver isn't going to confine them to shelters or anything.  No, indeed — while the Democrats are crowning Barack Obama, Denver's street people are going to be treated to a cultural renaissance.  Free movie tickets.  Free passes to the Denver Zoo.

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?

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.

America has Become a Dependent Culture.  When the power goes off for more than a day, the inhabitants of whole cities can become refugees from the elements and have to be saved by big-brother government.  If the help doesn't come fast enough the "refugees" cry foul and complain.  As in the travesty that was New Orleans (Hurricane Katrina), the people stood around helpless, waiting for government to deliver them from a nature-made calamity.  They were incapable of helping themselves.  Several thousand died as a result and billions of tax dollars were squandered to save the rest.  They didn't have the intelligence, training or the where-with-all to escape the big city.  The big city and their helplessness killed them, or made them wards of the government.

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!

NBC 15 confronts Speaker Nancy Pelosi on FEMA spending.  When NBC 15 News first met Gwenester Malone a month ago, she was receiving three catered meals a day, while housekeepers made sure her hotel room stayed clean.  None of it was costing her a dime.  "Since the storm, I haven't had any energy or pep to go get a job," Malone said, "but when push comes to shove, I will."  That shove may not come until March 2009.

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.

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?

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.

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.



Overgrown toddlers depend on 9-1-1 for everything

The Editor says...
 The nanny state has established 9-1-1 as a universal means of asking for help from the almighty government.  Naturally there are people who turn to this service as a matter of reflex whenever the slightest dispute arises.  Something tells me that these same people are already in the habit of depending on the government for financial support.

I'm sure there are many cases like this, but here are just two examples:

Man calls 911 after Subway left sauce off sandwich.  Jacksonville police say Reginald Peterson needs to learn that 911 is not the appropriate place to complain that Subway left the sauce off a spicy Italian sandwich.

Fort Pierce woman calls 911 when McNuggets run out.  Told McDonald's was out of Chicken McNuggets after paying for a 10-piece, a local woman called 911.  Three times.  "This is an emergency, If I would have known they didn't have McNuggets, I wouldn't have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don't want one," Latreasa L. Goodman later told police.  "This is an emergency."

At least something good resulted from all this...
 'I'm embarrassed' by McNugget meltdown.  After becoming an Internet sensation for calling 911 three times to report an emergency after McDonald's had run out of McNuggets, a Fort Pierce woman said Wednesday she is embarrassed by all the media attention.  "I'm embarrassed to show my face in public," Latreasa Goodman told WPBF News 25's Alexis Rivera one day after her McNugget meltdown was first reported.

Woman calls 911 over lack of shrimp in fried rice.  A woman called 911 to report she didn't get as much shrimp as she wanted in her fried rice at a Texas restaurant.  Haltom City police on Tuesday [4/7/2009] released the taped emergency call, in which the customer is heard telling the dispatcher, "to get a police officer up here, what has to happen?"

Woman calls Haltom City cops over her 'extra shrimp'.  Here's a fishy food fight.  A woman who ordered shrimp fried rice at A&D Buffalo's on Monday afternoon called police when she believed that she didn't get the extra shrimp she had requested.

The state and federal governments bring this extra burden upon themselves by encouraging this over-reliance on the 9-1-1 system.

See a Smoker in a Non-Smoking Area?  Call 911.  If you catch someone smoking in a non-smoking area in Omaha, Neb., call the police.  The Omaha Police Department is encouraging city residents to call 911 in the wake of the citywide ban on smoking that went into effect on Oct. 2.

Is that what the designers of the 9-1-1 system had in mind?

Here's one good reason not to have a cell phone:

Wireless Technology:  They'll Know Where You Are:  Under the so-called Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA) police are given the authority to track the locations of any cell phone users even if they're not dialing 911.

Many more articles about cell phone tracking can be found here.


The War on Poverty

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.

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.

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.

$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?

The "War on Poverty" Turns 40.  In his State of the Union address forty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an "unconditional war on poverty in America."  Since then, the federal government has created vast new bureaucracies and raised taxes to a staggering level not seen since World War Two.  LBJ helped create welfare (AFDC), Medicare, Head Start, the Job Corps, and Medicaid.  Worst of all, most of LBJ's War on Poverty was a failure.


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.


"For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat."

— II Thessalonians 3:10    



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