Posted on 04/21/2015 4:50:41 AM PDT by Kaslin
When liberals look at the poor, first and foremost, they see people who will vote for them in exchange for goodies. This gives liberals a perverse incentive to keep as many Americans mired in poverty as humanly possible.
This is why liberals are always willing to make a government handout a little bigger, easier to qualify for, or to make sure as many people as possible are using it. They want poor people to remain poor – and no wonder. Show me a ghetto in America and I will show you an area that votes heavily Democrat despite the fact that its condition never seems to improve.
Incidentally, that’s just how liberals like it. If you’re poor today, they’d like you to remain poor next year, the next ten years or even for the rest of your life. Then, not only do liberals get your vote, they get to feel better about themselves because they’re “helping” a “pitiful, helpless failure” like you. It’s the best of all worlds for liberals: they get to feel “generous,” it helps keep them in power, and other people pick up the bill.
Of course, it’s certainly not the best of all worlds for the poor.
Having been poor, I can tell you that it’s no picnic. Nobody likes living in a dangerous neighborhood, struggling to pay the rent or not knowing where the money will come from if his car breaks down. This is where liberals try get the fishhook in your jaw. They offer “free” money, “free food,” “free” housing. When you’re struggling, that looks pretty good.
But, what many poor people eventually realize is that all the “free” things liberals want to give them are part of a trap. Sure, government benefits make life a little easier, but they also help keep you poor long term. Being on the dole undercuts your motivation to change your situation. It encourages you to treat receiving handouts from the government as a primary source of income. In fact, many people start to worry that if they do TOO WELL, they’ll lose their “free” benefits.
On the other hand, conservatives don’t believe anyone is destined to remain poor.
We believe if you make good decisions, work hard and are willing to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you can at least join the middle class. Unlike the Democrats, Republicans get most of their votes from the middle class; so unlike them, we’re incentivized to help poor Americans improve their situation financially. The same poor person who won’t vote Republican today may vote for the GOP tomorrow if he is off the dole, has a better job and is living in a better neighborhood.
So conservatives do believe in a social safety net, but we believe it should be temporary. We don’t want anyone to become dependent on the government or to take advantage of the system. In other words, we don’t want the safety net to become a hammock.
That’s why we want people to work for welfare, think drug addicts should be ineligible and believe there should be limits to how long someone can stay on a program.
We agree with Ronald Reagan who once said, "I believe the best social program is a job."
Want to know why conservatives oppose high corporate taxes and want to keep taxes low in general? Why we don’t like the minimum wage? Why we try to cut regulations as much as possible?
It’s mostly about jobs. If the economy is growing, thriving and creating lots of jobs, it helps everybody, including the poor. Increasing the minimum wage to $15 may help a few people live more comfortably in poverty, but it will also lead to the loss of starter jobs for millions of poor people who desperately need the experience so they can improve their situations.
The government will NEVER lift you out of poverty, but a good job can. That’s where we believe we should be focusing our efforts. That’s why conservatives have long touted enterprise zones that allow businesses to have tax breaks in poor neighborhoods. The more businesses that move into low-income areas, the more poor Americans can get jobs.
Conservatives also believe in being tough on crime and protecting the Second Amendment rights of Americans. Nobody benefits more from that than the poor who are often trapped in crime-ridden neighborhoods that Democrats haven’t bothered to clean up, despite being in charge for decades.
Conservatives don’t believe there’s anything shameful about being poor, but we also believe the best thing we can do to help poor Americans is to make it possible for them leave poverty behind for good. A liberal “success story” is someone who gets lots of government benefits while he lives in poverty for decades. A conservative “success story” is a poor American who no longer needs government benefits because he got a good job and moved into the middle class.
That’s why liberalism is for poor people who are content to remain poor and conservatism is for poor people who want to make a better life for themselves.
Having been in need in the past for assistance, I can say this is the exact opposite for me. Being on the dole increased my drive to get off of it. I hated taking things without earning them.
Perhaps you were on hard times a while ago, before the easy, anonymous ways of EBT. A person with EBT shops and pays the same way as a person with a platinum credit card. They don’t have to pull out food stamps. They don’t have to eat surplus government cheese products and mystery meats.
Similarly, although less obviously, other programs have become easier to access. Here, I have to go on what I’m told and not what I’ve seen directly. SSDI comes to mind.
If you were getting aid 30 years ago, it was enough of a pain that you wanted to work to get off it if you were at all normal.
From what I see, the liberal formula for success includes going to the right prep school, the highest name recognition university, and then spending the rest of your life climbing the ladder by manipulation, association, and Alinsky-type subterfuge. This is not a formula that can be used to build a great nation and to help provide people with the opportunity to contribute and succeed at high levels. It’s actually a formula for cynicism and reduced ambition - which is rampant currently.
There is politics everywhere in society, and IMHO one of the important roles of government and laws is to help provide a level playing field so that people can fail or succeed on the basis of their hard work - not their connections.
Upward mobility in American society is absolutely dependent upon this, particularly since those coming from the lower socioeconomic ranks don’t generally have connections (especially if they don’t fit into a politically ‘favored’ demographic).
The left, in their hypocritical and false embrace of ‘equality’ are absolutely by their actions the party of pedigree (”where did you go to school?”), connection (”who do you know?”), and influence (”how much money can you give us?”). As such, I can’t imagine them having a legitimate solution for helping the poor.
This is SO true ... and it may never have been better articulated than when Newt handed Juan his arse in the S.C. debate ....
John Kasich of Ohio has his problems, but his ideas for those on entitlements should be heard. He thinks helping if fine, but any help without a plan to get the people off of the help they’re receiving is simply digging the hole deeper for those unfortunates and for successive generations.
He believes it isn’t just ‘ending’ eligibility for benefits after a period of time that is the answer, but that for so many it’s a matter of training or retraining for gainful employment. As the IBD article points out today, though, the programs are so addictive financially that many can’t get away from those benefits because the immediate loss of benefits per dollar earned puts the recipients immediately back in financial crisis.
This nation must find a way to get people off of the dole, or a financial crisis will crash the economy in such a way that those people will draw nothing from a government that has nothing.
If only .....
I NEVER tire of watching that ...
I never was on the dole. I remember having a bare pantry, and $20 in my pocket to my name. I took a $100 financial calculator to the supermarket to make sure I didn’t put more than $20 in my shopping cart. When I was a clerk in that supermarket I saw people carefully adding up the prices of what they put in their cart. I never thought I’d be doing it. I bought a lot of Kraft mac and cheese, which was 25 cents a pack, and a lot of cans of tuna. I suppose that I might have been able to afford steak and lobster if I had taken food stamps.
I hope to never be in that situation again. I don't understand how people can live like that on purpose.
I know a lady who moved here from Great Britain after marrying a Yank. After she gave birth to four of his children he picked-up and ran off with a younger model. Desperate, she went on welfare for a time. She told me she would never do it again because “those people (the bureaucrats) treated me like absolute sh**. and I refuse to allow myself to be degraded like that ever again”.
She has worked 2 and 3 jobs to support herself ever since.
Or Breads and Circuses.
I really enjoyed the article. Thanks for posting it.
Many of those who play the system today see it as a game to get as much as they can for as long as they can. i.e., the less cash they have to spend for food, housing, WIC items or whatever = the more money they can spend on booze, drugs, cheap hookers or whatever is really important to them.
A vendor told me about a woman from near his home in Massachusetts who shut down a can recycling machine because she was too lazy to even drink the pop she had gotten with her food stamps. She wanted to turn the value of the cans into quick cash. Here in Pennsylvania, our slackards will at least drink it first.
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