| |
There once was an America when nearly everyone believed that, if able, people should work for what one received.
There once was an America, where nearly everyone was expected to repay what one borrowed or what one owed. There once was an America where these
principles constituted an ethic that made America great. It was called the American Ethic: Americans worked hard and paid their
obligations.
There were other countries around the world that marched down a different path. In those countries, many held out their
hands and accepted the dole. People in those counties took money without earning it and even borrowed money that they could never repay and didn’t
expect to repay. Those countries sank into mediocrity and failed to experience the joy of achievement and success that became characteristic of
America. America became the envy of the world with what it achieved and accomplished during the nearly two-and-a-half centuries since its
founding.
But today, America is rapidly slipping into mediocrity! Americans are being told that hard work is no
longer an ideal or even a basic requirement. Americans are being told that they are under no obligation to earn what they receive – ‘the government’
will give Americans everything they need without its citizens having to work for this largesse. Americans are bombarded with advertisements on radio
and television telling them that they can ring up bills on their credit card without the need to repay their obligations in full. Americans are told
by the government and by commercial companies that they do not have to believe the IRS when it tells them to pay their income tax obligations.
Americans are told to hold their hands out to receive whatever they want from their Santa Clause government. At the same time, we Americans are
told not to ask where our government is getting all this money that it is so freely giving away. Apparently, “heaven will provide”.
How often have you seen or heard the commercials that are telling Americans:
“Does The IRS Say You Owe Them Money? . . . Did You Know The IRS Writes Off Millions Each Year In Tax Debt? . . . Get Relief Here. . . . The result
is an elimination of your tax debt problems quickly and simply.”
Or
“If the IRS is harassing you because you owe back taxes, you don’t have to pay what you owe! Contact us and we’ll reduce or eliminate what you
owe!”
Or
“Don’t let the credit card companies fool you when they tell you have to pay them what you owe!” “The credit card companies are lying to
you! Contact us and we’ll eliminate or reduce your credit card debt!” (Ref. 1)
There was a time – not so long ago – when Democrats used to be the party of working people. They applauded and praised
those Americans who worked hard. Now, the Democrats sneer at people who work hard.
Under President Joe Biden, Democrats spent most of 2021 pushing to pass the Build Back Better bill which would
have had a single parent with two kids take home well over $31,000 in cash and noncash federal benefits a year, tax-free, without having to work.
The handouts would have been even higher in states that offer generous benefits. QUESTION: So why get a job?
Nonworking adults were already eligible for food stamps, housing vouchers and health care. On top of that, those Democrats
wanted to send them monthly checks if they had kids — up to $300 per kid. The checks, nicknamed Biden Bucks, originated in 2021 to help
tide over families who lost their jobs because of COVID. President Joe Biden’s team wanted to convert them into a permanent entitlement.
House Republicans mocked it as “cash-for-kids.”
While everyone wants to help kids, thinking Republicans and one lone Democratic senator, Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) quite
rightly opposed handing out cash to able-bodied parents without requiring them to work or train for a job. Democrats and their media allies
complained that this opposition was an example of cruelty. One Washington newspaper columnist attacked work requirements as a “time tax and ritual
humiliation” on poor people. Really? The rest of us have to work, and there’s nothing humiliating about it.
The political battle over Biden Bucks is one key element of where we as a nation are now
headed.
Back in 1996, President Bill Clinton and a bipartisan majority in Congress passed welfare reform, eliminating cash welfare
without work or job preparation. It worked. Child poverty dropped from 13% to less than 4%, and teen pregnancies and welfare dependence
plummeted. But some 25 years later, the Democrats wanted to undo these reforms.
In 1996, Biden himself supported the work requirement. But in 2021, he said he was adamantly against it. What had changed?
What happened to common sense? So much for Biden’s blue-collar credentials. The president had apparently overcome his “fear that poor people might
take advantage of government aid by choosing not to work.” A fear borne out by social science and common sense. University of Chicago economists
calculated that the monthly cash payments would encourage 1.5 million parents to quit working.
Don’t be misled by proposals to sunset the monthly checks after one year, or five, instead of making them
permanent. Once created, entitlements are almost never allowed to sunset. History teaches us that the funding would be renewed in
succeeding years.
America will fast become starkly divided between the hardworking people who foot the bills and the millions on welfare,
cheering on politicians to increase the dole. The burden on working people will become intolerable.
When fewer people work, fewer goods are produced, and they cost more. Inflation. In 2021 and again in 2024,
Americans were shellshocked by rising food and fuel prices. They had to recalculate how much they could afford and how it would impact their life
plans. Yet the Biden team was telling them they had to support able-bodied adults who didn’t want to work. The reaction should be pure
rage.[2]
For an extremely detailed and thoroughly researched report on the impact of the Biden Build Back Better Act,
the reader is urged to go to Largest Welfare Increase in U.S. History Will Boost Government Support to $76,400 per Poor Family by Robert
Rector and Jamie Hall.[3] A much abbreviated summary of this study is presented below.
The U.S. has an extensive and heavily funded support system for poor and lower-income families with children. This total
government support system consists of government spending on cash, food, housing, medical care, direct social services, and public education for
those families. In 2018, before the COVID pandemic, taxpayers spent $695.7 billion on this system. The government resources received by the
average family defined as poor by the government (a family that typically has two children) came to approximately $65,200 per year.
The combined total resources of poor and lower-income families with children may be defined as their benefits and subsidies
from the government support system plus any earnings and other private income obtained by the family. In 2018, the total combined resources of the
average family defined as poor by the government came to $83,300 per year. Earnings plus cash aid, food and housing benefits, and medical care alone
came to more than $55,900 - more than twice the official poverty level for that family, thus indicating that claims of widespread hunger,
undernutrition, and inadequate housing are misleading.
Be aware that conventional reports on government spending, economic resources, and poverty are both incomplete and
inaccurate. For example, each year, the Census Bureau releases an official poverty report. That report begins by ignoring all taxpayer spending on
education and medical care for the poor. It also excludes nearly all government welfare programs such as food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit,
Section 8 housing vouchers, and public housing. In 2018, out of the $378 billion that taxpayers spent on cash, food, housing, and medical benefits
for poor and lower-income families, only $34.3 billion (9 percent) appeared in the Census report on official poverty. Even private earnings were
substantially underreported.
Since the beginning of the War on Poverty, the U.S. has spent $34 trillion on means-tested welfare, but the Census has
counted only $2.6 trillion of this $34 trillion for purposes of measuring poverty and income. From the perspective of the Census, the missing
$31.4 trillion is simply “off the books.” As far as government poverty statistics go, the War on Poverty never actually happened. Because the
official Census poverty report is the basis of most public discourse about poverty in the United States, it should therefore be no surprise that
the extensive taxpayer support system for poor families remains largely invisible and unknown.
Massive underreporting of government support leads to the widespread misperception that the U.S. has a meager welfare
system. The Biden Administration capitalized on this misperception to demand the largest expansion of means-tested welfare in U.S.
history - the Build Back Better Act. The revised bill would increase spending on low-income families with children by at least
$650 billion over five years (as of Nov. 2021).
Under the President’s proposal, government benefits for the average poor family with children would be increased by nearly
$11,300 per year. This would include an annual increase of $9,300 in cash, food, and housing benefits combined with $700 in new medical benefits and
$1,300 in child care and education spending for low-income children. Cash, food, and housing benefits plus earnings and other private cash income
for the average poor family already totaled $37,300 in the pre-COVID era. Adding $9,300 in new cash, food, and housing benefits would bring these
resources to $47,600 per year - almost twice the 2021 poverty level for the average poor family.
Total government spending on the average poor family would rise from $65,200 per year to more than $76,400. When limited
private earnings were added to this massive government spending, combined total resources would reach nearly $94,600 per year for the
average poor family. So who exactly is poor in this country? What does the word “poor” even mean?
The Build Back Better plan would also eliminate the work requirements from one of the government’s largest
means-tested cash programs. The plan would create a completely new system of unconditional cash grants for families that chose not to work during
the year. In making this change, the Biden plan would overturn on a narrow partisan basis the fundamental principles of the bipartisan work-based
welfare reform from the Clinton era. That earlier reform was rooted in the concept that welfare should not be a one-way handout. Instead, welfare
assistance should be based on reciprocal obligation: Society should support those who need assistance, but able-bodied recipients of aid should be
required to work or at least prepare for work in exchange for the aid given.
A sound welfare system should begin with an accurate assessment of the total taxpayer resources devoted to supporting
the poor and the actual economic resources currently available to poor families. This information is lacking in the current
system.
Any welfare system should be based on balanced, reciprocal obligations. Able-bodied recipients should be expected to
contribute something back for the very large level of taxpayer support they receive. Finally, the welfare system should be designed so that it
strongly promotes work and marriage. Not only are these the most efficient roads out of financial poverty; they also provide strong intrinsic
rewards in themselves, increasing personal, familial, and social well-being.[3] Unfortunately,
the president and his administration lost sight of or they have totally ignored these facts.
In 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday, in so doing, recognizing
that hard work was an essential part of the American dream. But these days, an increasing number of young Americans dream of only working enough to
get by, if at all.
These days, help wanted signs are everywhere. But fewer and fewer Americans are stepping up to the plate. The Labor Force
Participation Rate – the percentage of able-bodied workers who are either employed or looking for work — was at a near 25-year low in 2023. That
meant that over 37% of able-bodied Americans — who are neither students, retired, nor caring for children at home — had voluntarily dropped out of
the workforce. That’s millions of potential workers who, for whatever reason, chose a life of idleness.
The left encourages indolence with handouts and by cultivating an entitlement mentality. Pennsylvania
State Representative Roni Green – a Democrat, as if you couldn’t guess —announced that she would introduce legislation for a 32-hour work week for
employers of more than 500, without a reduction in pay. This is the same as taking money out of the pockets of employers and putting it in the
pockets of employees. But when did legalized theft ever stop the party of plunder? Under President Biden, whose administration is committed
to expanding the dole, the welfare state has metastasized.
Food Stamp enrollment was at a historic high, with 41.2 million participating – 12.5% of the total population and
4.5 million more than at the start of the COVID-19 epidemic. Besides the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps by another name),
there’s unemployment insurance, Medicaid, housing vouchers, child-care payments and energy subsidies. Most are needs-based, thus disincentivizing
work.
But the problem goes much deeper. Work has a moral dimension. The way you view work reflects the way you view life. If life
has no meaning for you, neither will work. The earliest colonists embraced what came to be called the Protestant Work Ethic. The Puritans
were famous for their belief in the redemptive quality of labor. In the Jamestown colony, John Smith inveighed against “idleness and sloth.” “For
the labors of thirty or forty honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintain a hundred and fifty idle loiterers.”
We work because we recognize our responsibility to our family, our community and our nation. We want to take pride in
ourselves and set an example for our children. The flight from work “has meant slower economic growth for the country, wider income and wealth gaps,
more dependence on government welfare programs, more pressure on fragile families, less social mobility, less involvement in society, and a lot more
deaths of despair.”
The left’s attitude toward work is consistent with its Marxist agenda. It wants to continually expand the dependent class.
Simultaneously, it punishes hard work with confiscatory taxes and by stigmatizing the most productive as despoilers of the planet and exploiters of
the underclass. Now, it looks like it’s trying to engineer a new COVID-19 lockdown to keep more potential workers at home and necessitate increased
welfare spending - the opposite of what Grover Cleveland, the last conservative Democrat in the White House, had in
mind.[4]
Most Americans believe in the need for a reliable government safety net in America, so that when people fall on
tough times or lose their jobs, their families will not go hungry, lose their homes or suffer deprivation. Most Americans also believe that
government assistance should be short-term and aimed at quickly getting people back on their feet, into a job and on the road to being financially
self-sufficient and a contributor to our economy. Today’s welfare programs are failing to accomplish that goal.
Families earning half a million dollars a year can still receive ObamaCare subsidies? In some states, unemployment
insurance benefits can be equivalent to a job with annual pay of $100,000?
Welfare benefits under the Biden administration failed to get people back into the workforce. Even years after the end of
COVID-19, there were still at least 3 million fewer Americans working than prior to the pandemic. A reason? In many states, welfare pays more than
or nearly as much as respectable middle-class jobs.
Under Presidents Barack Obama and Biden, many of the highly effective work requirements, which were instituted in the
historic 1996 bipartisan welfare reforms, were eviscerated. Often, limits for public benefits also disappeared while Congress and states made
benefits more generous. In some states families can earn over six figures annually in unemployment benefits.
While many programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (A.K.A. food stamps), are means tested, other
handouts are not - including unemployment insurance and ObamaCare subsidies. The value of these benefits can be staggering - much higher, in fact,
than many blue-collar professions. While unemployment insurance is at least time-limited to six months in most states, the financial incentive to
jump into the job market is low. In addition, people move in and out of the unemployment system - working just enough months until they again
qualify for benefits.
The Biden administration’s expansion of ObamaCare was a handout to the wealthy donor class of the Democratic Party, while
doing nothing to help those who were truly poor. The expansion of the welfare state created situations where work often didn’t pay. In many states,
working a $20-an-hour job for 40 hours a week would mean a reduction in income compared to two parents receiving their unemployment benefits and
health care subsidies. Until the unemployment runs out, there is very little incentive to go back to work, especially when the family is receiving
more than their blue-collar counterparts who are on the job. If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider that the median household’s annual
income and benefits are worth about $93,000. In New Jersey, unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies alone are worth an annualized
$122,000 — that’s 30% more for not working in most occupations.
Programs that discourage work don’t benefit the families that receive the welfare program assistance.
Most studies conclude that work is associated with happiness, more financial security over time and better health with a longer life
expectancy.
The whole idea of welfare - when many of these programs were started 50 years ago during the Great Society - was to get
Americans back into the workforce. President Lyndon B. Johnson famously declared that “the day of the dole are numbered.” In the 1990s, Congress
aimed to “end welfare as we know it.” None of these goals has been achieved. In many ways, welfare is more generous than ever.
A major government goal is to achieve a just and productive society and make America a place that rewards work - not
welfare. But the left has adopted a strategy of a “national guaranteed income” for Americans whether they work or not. The result is a record-low
labor-force participation rate - meaning fewer Americans working and higher taxes for those who do
work.[5]
Here in the year 2024, many American workers and their families are making more money by not working and accepting
government handouts in place of earned wages. As a consequence, America is slipping into Mediocrity.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References:
- Do You Owe The IRS | Now Is The Time To Make A Deal, www.nationwide-tax-relief.com, Accessed 1 November 2021.
- Biden bucks = cash for kids, no work required, Betsy McCaughey, Boston Herald: Page 15, 1 November 2021.
- Largest Welfare Increase in U.S. History Will Boost Government Support to $76,400 per Poor Family, Robert Rector and Jamie Hall,
The Heritage Foundation, 8 November 2021.
- America is losing its work ethic, Don Feder, The Washington Times, 26 August 2023.
- It pays not to work in Biden’s America — and here’s the proof, Steve Moore, Casey Mulligan and E. J. Antoni,
New York Post, 19 December 2022.
|
|
