Another War They're Willing to Lose

Forty-nine years have elapsed since President Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty. In that time, government at all levels in the United States has spent nearly twenty trillion dollars on means-tested welfare (we'll leave Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for another time) or, in other terms, roughly three times the cost of all the real wars we've fought in our history. Between Fiscal Years 1989-2008, spending on means-tested welfare increased 292%, more than Social Security, Medicare and education, and more than double what was spent on national defense. In 2010 alone, U.S. outlays for means-tested welfare amounted to $881.2 billion; if simply converted to cash and distributed, it was more than twice what was required to bring every poor person in America out of poverty, so with such gargantuan sums having been spent, why is even one person still collecting welfare? Having denuded the national treasury for the purpose of eliminating poverty, why does poverty still exist? Indeed, why is it getting worse?

It is an article of religious faith among the Left that every human problem can be solved with a sufficient amount of money. Drought, famine, floods, hunger, disease, crime, war and yes, poverty, can all be overcome and thrown into the dumpster of history if we only write a big-enough check, and the fact that we have already spent Brobdingnagian heaps of treasure and failed in our task does not invalidate this article or deter the Left from pursuing it. Usually, we would describe such behavior as irrational but irrationality runs into other Leftist principles like a) The nobility of the goal outweighs failing to achieve it; and b) The inherent intellectual and moral superiority of liberals. They believe in their souls that if they spend just a little bit more, Utopia will descend from the heavens (New Jerusalem is just for Christians so that can't do) and a new Golden Age will ensue. The fact that poverty in America expands as welfare spending rises is blithely ignored as a statistical anomaly, not as an effect, as is the naked fact that after forty-nine years, seventy-nine Federal programs and trillions of dollars, poverty still exists: Welfare spending has increased 50% since Bill Clinton announced that we were "ending welfare as we know it." So why can't we try something else?

- ...because we know it will work. The Republican-led reforms enacted in the Nineties at the state and Federal levels grossly reduced the welfare rolls, boosted employment and the standard of living for those affected, increased home ownership and tax revenues and most importantly, freed hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people from the grip of government dependency. That makes welfare reform anathema to the Left, that explains why Priest-King arbitrarily weakened the provision in the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 for welfare recipients to work, that is why he plans to increase means-tested welfare spending to 6% of GDP by 2022, or $1.57 trillion per year. Beyond the public displays of compassion, the appeals to our common humanity, the emotional handwringing over the poor and the weak, the Left desires control. The Left will tolerate all manner of vice at a personal level as long as they can control everything else. Medical care, housing, education, transportation, employment, capital, Internet access, the size of your soft drink and when you will die are all legitimate objects of control for the Left. If millions of people depend on government for their very existence, then they will more easily submit to the government yoke and the proof is found in Priest-King's victories in 2008 and 2012. This is the state for which the Left has labored these past eighty years, the exchange of American drive and self-reliance for a breadline, but is this really the best we can expect? With the ascendance of the welfare state, our inner cities and the families who live there have been destroyed. Two generations of children have grown up without fathers or have been shot during gang violence, single mothers have struggled to live on food stamps, public schools have crumbled, illiteracy, drug addiction, alcoholism, teen pregnancy, homelessness, STD's and unemployment have climbed as a mammoth government swallows everything in its path, including hope. Is this really the new American Dream?

Of course not. We're better than this. Self-reliant, independent people don't need big government or the Democrat Party so I would encourage my fellow citizens, now deluded by Leftist propaganda, to throw off their chains, vote the bums out in 2014 and pass a better legacy to their children than a soup spoon.