Posted on 08/01/2002 6:48:18 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
There's good money in poverty. Yes, you read that right. As a taxpayer, you might have innocently assumed that government was dedicated to reducing the numbers of poor folks in our midst. You would be mistaken. At least half of our government is dedicated to increasing their numbers.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, "the Democrats must surely love the poor folks, because they've made so many of them." One of the ways Democrats increase the number of poor people is by their support for the policies of the poverty lobby. This powerful lobby is an industrious group of primarily nonprofit organizations that actually benefit financially from poverty. They receive government grants to provide services to the poor. The bulk of these grants go to pay the salaries of their executives and employees. Services, not cash, are delivered to the poor. The more poor people who need such services, the larger the grants these organizations can expect to receive from the government.
Not all organizations that receive government grants to help poor people are part of this poverty lobby. What distinguishes the poverty lobby is their staunch resistance to and organized political mobilization against any change in government policy that would actually reduce the number of poor people who need their "help."
There is nothing quite like an idea whose time has come – one that might actually be effective in reducing the number of poor people among us – to bring these groups and their Democratic enablers out in force, armed to the teeth and ready to fight to the death against the idea. That being the case, we should all take a close look at the resistance building to President Bush's initiative to promote getting married and staying married to welfare mothers.
"A slap in the face!" is how Kim Gandy of the National Organization of Women described the proposal. "Marrying women off to get them out of poverty is not only backward, it is insulting to women." Notice that her statement never questioned the effectiveness of the proposal. Far better, I suppose, that local Democratic politicians should continue to be her election-year lovers and government bureaucrats, funded by the taxman, stand-in father to her children?
Stephanie Coontz, speaking for the Council on Contemporary Families, termed the proposal "unrealistic" and "counterproductive." She then reveals her agenda when she says, "Many couples have good reasons not to commit to marriage. Marriage is not the only family structure in which people help each other." Notice how the issue of providing a stable home for raising children is discretely left out of the objections?
Intact families have an extraordinarily successful record in raising the next generation. In fact, nothing else has ever worked. I know that upsets the agendas of militant feminists who want nothing from men but their genes. The family's record at producing self-reliant, well-adjusted children who become the next generation and mirror their parents' behavior also bodes ill for the poverty lobby. Fewer problem learners will cut the funds available to teacher unions. Fewer juvenile delinquents becoming hardened criminals reduces the market for the industry that serves prison bureaucrats. Less promiscuity among young women living in intact families with a father means fewer "unwanted children" for the abortion industry to cannibalize. And on it goes.
But perhaps the worst news in all this is for the Democratic Party. Intact families who work their way out of poverty and provide for their children are not likely to want to return to the poverty trap of government dependency. Without an army of malcontents shielded from the results of their own decisions and billed as society's problem, the Democratic voting constituency is likely to continue shrinking as the president's proposal picks up steam.
Reporters frequently talk about "following the money trail" when they investigate corporate corruption. It's a pity they haven't followed that advice and investigated the dollars that flow into poverty. The abortion industry is but one example. It depends on a continuous stream of promiscuous, irresponsible women who become pregnant and then require their "service" to end the life of an unborn child using taxpayer dollars at one of the industry's "facilities."
No, intact families are not perfect, and broken families have produced extraordinary children. The odds, however, are stacked against such a gamble, and we as society need to stop rolling the dice and then lamenting the outcome. The more vigorously this poverty lobby protests the marriage initiative, the more certain we can be of the effectiveness of the idea.
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