February 20, 2009 8:13 AM
Stimulus Bill ends welfare reform - resurrecting the poverty cycle?
Tim Arensmeier sent this:
"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
~~~ The late Dr. Adrian Rogers , 1931 to 2005 ~~~
A thought worth considering:
- as any parent trying to raise responsible human beings will surely hear the truth in these words.
-and as a study of any failed socialist country reveals. In fact, yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Russian Prime Minister Putin warned the US against socialism.
Anyone remember pictures of Russian grocery stores with empty shelves? Maybe that's what it will take for Americans - accustomed to having 20 choices of specialty mustards and food from all over the world - to wake up to the fact that the Democrats are selling us down the river. That their prime motivation is to build dependent blocks of voters and to keep people enslaved to government handouts.
Since no one was able to read the Stimulus Bill before it passed, the tragic mistakes contained in the law Obama proudly signed on Tuesday are leaking out only as fast as responsible people can read and analyze the 1077-page tome. Of course, you won't find a discussion of anything substantial in the Government Groupie Media. As Rush has pointed out: they've painted Obama so large that he cannot fail. They will prop him up and rally 'round his flag ad nauseum. In fact, many are quitting their so-called journalist posts to go work directly for him. Doncha find that interesting?
One that sent a chill up my spine was the news that the Welfare Reform passed under Clinton was not being abolished. While that shouldn't surprise us - Obama seeks citizen dependency - the rapidity and stealth with which it was accomplished is like a slap in the face.
As someone who spent early years as a minority member in Washington DC - one of three white kids in my class at Barnard Elementary School - prior to Lyndon Johnson's Orwellian-titled War on Poverty (I say Orwellian because like so many Democrat "programs" short-term "help" ended up enslaving and doing long-range harm), I will tell you that for this poor white cracker fatherless girl, the homes my friends welcomed me into were the early model for my longing for a strong family. Were they poor? If they were, they weren't poorer than me, and I didn't see it. All I saw was the proud and faith-filled families who made a place for me at their dinner tables when my own mother didn't come home.
I agree with Bill Cosby - who of course has been crucified for stating the truth: that welfare worked to destroy the black family. It's so diabolically simple: when you reward mothers financially for giving birth to illegitimate children and take away the welfare on which they've grown dependent when they marry - and when you consider that fatherlessness is the leading indicator of poverty, not because of pay inequality but because it takes a man and woman to effectively parent and provide for children - then you can see that Johnson's Welfare state was not a triumph for anyone other than the Democrats who keep the poor riled up with class envy and shuffled to the voting booths (courtesy government-funded ACORN "community organizers") whenever needed.
Then you add the entertainment/sports/media emphasis on ghetto talk and gangster culture - and black heroes whose only goals seem to be to buy bling and exploit women.
Then you add to that the actual cowardice going on in this country - not the race-baiting Eric Holder engaged in yesterday, but the cowardice which keeps us from discussing these huge cultural/psychological/emotional/spiritual/material problems honestly - lest we be savaged as Bill Cosby was. And Mr. Cosby had the advantage of being a black man - I'm just a white woman and therefore supposedly unentitled to have an opinion.
But here's my opinion: we are now into the fourth generation of welfare mother who beget welfare mothers who beget welfare mothers - maybe even more generations since they often start as young as 13. In the meantime children are growing up in more severely disadvantaged homes in Washington DC and other places. And I know what I'm talking about as my daughter Samantha attended and I taught in a Head Start Montessori School in the inner city in 1971-1973, where 90% of our students came from families below the poverty line (at the time I was not below the poverty line myself, but purposely placed Samantha there even before I began teaching because I was politically correct before there was a name for it). Three year olds came into my class with barely any speech, not knowing colors or numbers, never having seen a domestic animal - severely deprived and sometimes malnourished.
Until Clinton's Welfare Reform - which encouraged the development of skills and work - there was no incentive for it to be otherwise. And let's just say it loud and clear: today's definition of poverty is much different than the poverty I myself grew up with - with no car or TV and often an empty refrigerator. It is disingenuous to excuse obesity in poor people because of a starchy diet. Today's starchy diet is often fast food - which there seems to be enough money for.
The (I believe purposeful and certainly diabolical) dumbing down of the DC family is the real reason why in spite of spending nearly 25,000. per student (see the Washington Post: The Real Cost of Public Schools) - on a par with the Obama girls' elite school - so few seem to escape the poverty/government dependence cycle: why work if you've grown up seeing nonworking adults take a check out of their mailbox each month? Why try to achieve if you don't have to? And I'm using DC because I'm familiar with that city. I noticed at Stimulus Watch that in Virginia, at least, the cities targeted for funds are those with heavy black populations - and as the commenter known as The Resident Old Married Man (not Tripp, btw) noted yesterday, all Virginia districts that turned out for Obama last November (thanks again, ACORN). I wills say it loud and clear: I think there is racism, payback and corruption stacked in the so-called Stimulus Bill. It is not about helping the American people, but about enslaving an ever-growing number.
It is a slap in the face to those who've played by the rules.
I am shocked that our first African-American president would perpetuate this hopeless dependency cycle on his own people. But let's face it, these are not his people. He is only half-black (and his father was actually more Arabic than African), and his daughters attend the most elite school in DC. No political correctness there. While O&Co play the race card when convenient, let's face it: he is more identified with the class who feels entitled to privilege and power. (Again, I recommend a rereading of Animal Farm
For further study on Obam's New Welfare State, check out the Heritage Foundation's analysis:
February 11, 2009
Stimulus Bill Abolishes Welfare Reform and Adds New Welfare Spending
by Robert E. Rector and Katherine BradleyA major public policy success, welfare reform in the mid-1990s led to a dramatic reduction in welfare dependency and child poverty. This successful reform, however is now in jeopardy: Little-noted provisions in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate stimulus bills actually abolish this historic reform. In addition, the stimulus bills will add nearly $800 billion in new means-tested welfare spending over the next decade. This new spending amounts to around $22,500 for every poor person in the U.S. The cost of the new welfare spending amounts, on average, to over $10,000 for each family paying income tax.
Ending Welfare Reform
The welfare reform of 1996 replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a new program named Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The key to welfare reform's reduction in dependency was the change in the funding structure of AFDC.[1]
Under the old AFDC program, states were given more federal funds if their welfare caseloads were increased, and funds were cut whenever the state caseload fell. This structure created a strong incentive for states to swell the welfare rolls. Prior to reform, one child in seven was receiving AFDC benefits.
When welfare reform replaced the old AFDC system with TANF, this perverse financial incentive to increase dependence was eliminated. Each state was given a flat funding level that did not vary whether the state increased or decreased its caseload. In addition, states were given the goal of reducing welfare dependence (or at least of requiring welfare recipients to prepare for employment).
The House and Senate stimulus bills will overturn the fiscal foundation of welfare reform and restore an AFDC-style funding system. For the first time since 1996, the federal government would begin paying states bonuses to increase their welfare caseloads. Indeed, the new welfare system created by the stimulus bills is actually worse than the old AFDC program because it rewards the states more heavily to increase their caseloads. Under the stimulus bills, the federal government will pay 80 percent of cost for each new family that a state enrolls in welfare; this matching rate is far higher than it was under AFDC.
Read entire article here.
In fact, you may want to explore The Heritage Foundation, which has been doing an excellent job of analyzing the first month of radical changes wrought in our new Obama Nation.
Posted in Obama Nation | Permalink
