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NOTE: Boldface text indicates emphasis by this writer and not the author of the quoted
material.
“Despite its liberal tendencies, The Washington Post editorial board once acknowledged that
in a democracy, ‘everyone can’t be entitled to everyone else’s money.’
“Well, it may have had that wrong because President Joe Biden is supersizing the entitlement
state of America at a pace that makes President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives seem like a fiscal
bargain. By the way, that was the infamous War on Poverty that spent more than $5 trillion over the next 25 years,
and as the old saying goes: We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.
“But here we go again. Biden already has spent $1.9 trillion on social welfare programs — including
unemployment benefits, free health care, more generous food stamps, rental assistance and more money for schools and state
governments. Now he wants to add to that a $3.5 trillion ‘social infrastructure bill’ — this is the new term for ‘welfare’ —
that includes all sorts of new entitlements, such as universal and fully subsidized day care, prekindergarten, free community
college and student loan forgiveness for children who went to Harvard University. Democrats are also debating whether to make
the weekly $300 ‘temporary’ bonus unemployment benefits permanent. That way, no one will ever have to work.
“Most dangerous of all is the planned expansions of Medicare and Medicaid. According to the watchdog
group , these programs already have a long-term deficit of more than $55 trillion.
“So, naturally, Biden and the Democrats want to put more passengers on this fiscal Titanic.
“The Medicare plan would provide a whole array of new benefits, such as vision, hearing and dental
care, all paid for by taxpayers. It is at a time when Medicare trustees warn that Medicare Part A’s ‘trust fund’ is likely to
run dry by about 2026 and possibly as early as 2024. Seniors should be up in arms over this raid on the Medicare trust
fund.
“David Jonas, a former staffer for Barack Obama, recently spilled the beans in a tweet about the
Democrats’ scheme. He said that ‘the politics … are near perfect’ because ‘Medicare expansions are
forever.’ He’s right, of course. Once you start giving people free things, it’s a near political
impossibility to take them away.
“Readers may be amazed that we have to continue to expand Medicare, Medicaid, ‘Obamacare’ subsidies
and the like because 12 years ago, we were told that the trillion-dollar Affordable Care Act was going to provide
universal coverage for everyone. But we keep spending hundreds of billions of tax dollars, and all we hear is how many
millions of people continue to lack health care coverage. Maybe that is because all the money the authorities spend
on health care makes the whole system way more expensive.
“If all of this isn’t enough, starting this month, people of a certain income will receive checks of
$3,000 on an annual basis per child. That is on top of the $2,000 per person we sent out earlier this year.
“University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan and {Armstrong Williams} recently published a study
sponsored by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. Thanks to Biden’s new welfare state expansions, families can get
up to $100,000 in government benefits (tax-free) without anyone working a single hour all year!
“The government will feed you; pay your rent; educate you; take care of your children and your
grandparents; pay for your college and day care; pay you if you aren’t working; and pay for your health care, your toothbrush,
your internet service and, soon, free iPhones (that should be an entitlement, shouldn’t it?).
“ The real mystery about this new cradle-to-grave entitlement state is why people still
bother to work at all.” (Ref. 1)
“When it comes to the great American work ethic, our country is hurtling down the wrong path.
The Biden administration is putting America into an increasingly dangerous situation by expanding the class of people
who simply don’t want to work, preferring instead to simply collect government checks.
“Economic support following the COVID-19 pandemic has morphed into a monster. The flow of cash into
the pockets of many Americans — courtesy of our government — threatens to blow up the U.S. deficit and create a generation of
slackers who would rather sit at home watching reality TV than to rejoin the real world where people work to make a
living.
“When the pandemic struck, the virus decimated not just the U.S. economy but the global economy. The
U.S. government was right to take far-reaching measures to combat a soaring unemployment rate that peaked at 14.8 percent in
April 2020, a stunning high not seen since 1948 when data collection started.
“But with the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines and their rapid distribution, the unemployment rate
dropped to just 6.7 percent in December 2020.
“Today {May 2021} the national unemployment rate is approximately 6 percent. Yet, many Americans are
still not returning to work. Businesses report they cannot find workers to fill necessary jobs, and some who once held these
jobs remain at home collecting government assistance. What’s happening and who is responsible?
“We all agree that the pandemic was an unprecedented disaster of epic proportions. The shutdown of
our economy was like nothing we had seen in modern history. But unfortunately, some of the measures that were taken to prop
people up during a time of need are holding them back in a time of want.
“The government’s extensions of pandemic unemployment relief are continuing indefinitely. This
‘generosity’ - courtesy of all of us who pay taxes - is having the unfortunate effect of creating a class of people who have
decided that they are better off not returning to their jobs.
“In March, President Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The action
provides for a third extension of the CARES Act unemployment provision, this time until Sept. 6, 2021.
“The first CARES Act extended unemployment benefits to gig workers, who previously were
ineligible for such benefits, and provided benefits for an additional 13 weeks to anyone out of a job because of the
pandemic. It also increased the weekly monetary benefit to $600 for jobs lost to COVID-19.
“Those benefits, which ended in July 2020, were re-upped in December 2020 under the
CARES Act II and extended through March 2021, though the $600 was halved to $300.
“Entrepreneurs and small business owners across the country are having trouble finding employees,
especially in industries that rely heavily upon unskilled workers who fetch low wages. They are having a tough time bringing
back their staff or hiring new people.
- - -
“. . . former employees are staying home because they can make more money on unemployment than they
did at work. This makes sense only if you are someone who is OK with sitting at home all day doing nothing. Under the generous
unemployment benefits, people are opting to make enough to get by, without having to work. Why should anyone go to the trouble
of having to get a job if they can indefinitely receive money for doing nothing at all?
“It is a sad state of affairs, because the American Dream is predicated on the premise that
dreams can come true if you work hard. But that idea is being turned on its head in the United States today.
“The Biden administration’s policies may create a permanent class of Americans who don’t want to
achieve the American Dream - or want one that is not predicated on hard work. For them, the American Dream may be to bide
their time and accept federal handouts for the foreseeable future.
“America needs to give her citizens a hand up, not handouts. It’s high time that men and women cut
the cord of welfare dependence and get back into the workforce. Our policymakers must start cutting off the reliance on
government programs, which taxpayers are not in a position to fund anyway. After all, we have created a deficit that
already runs into the trillions of dollars.
“The American economy could roar back now that roughly half of all Americans have received at least
one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. But businesses are crying out for help — not from the government but from unmotivated people
with no incentive to forgo Uncle Sam’s ‘free money.’
“We must immediately undertake a full-throttle effort to get American workers back on the job.
Sitting at home, spending government checks, is a sure-fire pathway to financial ruin."
(Ref. 2)
Back in 2016, at the end of the previous Democratic administration, I noted the trend of too many
Americans who were avoiding working for a living. “Another manifestation of our entitlement nation is the fact that many able
workers are simply refusing to join the work force. ‘After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in
June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working
near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14 percent. . . .
“ ‘The work rate for adult men has plunged 13 percentage points in a half-century. . . .'
“ ‘. . . This . . . transformation . . . is largely voluntary. Men who have chosen to not seek work
are two and a half times more numerous than men that government statistics count as unemployed because they are seeking
jobs.'
“ ‘. . . {Our Entitlement Nation} has made it a ‘viable option’ for ‘sturdy men’, who are neither
working nor looking for work to choose ‘to sit on the economic sidelines, living off the toil or bounty of others.’ Only
about 15 percent of men 25 to 54 who worked not at all in 2014 said they were unemployed because they could not find
work.'
“ ‘. . . The ‘economically inactive’ have eclipsed the unemployed, as government statistics measure
them, as the ‘main category of men without jobs.’
“ ‘. . . government assistance {may not} cause this, but obviously it finances it. . .'
“ ‘Largely because of government benefits and support by other family members, nonworking men 25 to
54 have household expenditures a third higher than those in the bottom income quintile {bottom 1/5th}. {T}hey ‘appear to be
better off than tens of millions of other Americans today, including the millions of single mothers who are either working
or seeking work.’ ‘ (Ref. 3) Clearly, a very large number of able bodied men have decided
that they can live comfortably off the toil and sweat of others. Why work when you can get paid for not working?”
(Ref. 4)
Today “Progressives are resisting President Joe Biden’s infrastructure deal, demanding it be
linked to massive new spending on subsidies and entitlements for a simple reason: They want to get the nation hooked on
them.
“No sooner did Biden strike a bipartisan compromise last week {week of 20 June 2021} to spend $1.2
trillion, mostly on traditional infrastructure projects, than left-leaning Dems insisted Congress first pass their
‘reconciliation’ bill (bypassing the need for 60 votes to end a filibuster) that would steer trillions more toward
non-infrastructure programs, like day care, free college, health care and other entitlements.
- - -
“. . . the point of Biden’s ‘families’ plan is to add a whopping 21 million, mostly
middle-class, Americans to the entitlement rolls, meaning more than half the nation’s working-age households would depend
on Uncle Sam . . .
“And be stuck in dependency: Federal handouts will drive up the cost of services now largely
affordable to most people, just as generous government aid has sent college costs soaring. Another price-pusher: all the
new mandates (for union pay rates, for instance) that come with the federally subsidized services.
“The result would be a middle class even more dependent on government’s good graces. Say
hello to the permanent welfare state once known as America.
“Never mind the hidden costs: Massive tax-and-spend schemes inevitably sap economic growth,
generating less cash for everything, including . . . government handouts (even if Washington boosts tax rates sky-high
for both the rich and middle class).
“Democrats see making most of America dependent on government as a way to permanently lock
in their power - no matter that it would put the nation on a brutal downward spiral.” (Ref. 5)
Is it any wonder that as the Covid-19 pandemic ended, many businesses throughout the U.S. couldn’t
hire enough help to run their operations? Why should a person waste his/her time and energy working when they could collect
all sorts of government handouts that amounted to more than they would earn by working? The workers in socialist-run countries
long ago learned that their left-leaning governments would give them all the freebies they wanted without them having to
work up a sweat by working. Check on the results in those workers’ paradises like Greece, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.
Joe Biden and the liberal politicians in his Democratic party are guilty of spreading the socialist
fantasies: "The government will take care of you" and “Everyone can have a free lunch without the need to work for it!”
The consequences of fostering these myths
are yet to be felt. But, there is no escaping the unavoidable truth that the piper will have to paid at some point down the
road. The simple truth is – and it always has been - There is no free lunch. Someone has to work for what
we produce. Someone has to pay the bill for what we get. The only questions that need to be answered are:
“When will the bill finally come due?” and “Who will get stuck with the bill?”
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References:
- In Biden’s America, everyone is entitled to everything, Stephen Moore, Boston Herald,
Page 13, 23 July 2021.
- It's time for Americans to get back to work, Armstrong Williams, The Hill,
6 May 2021.
- Men dropping out of the workforce an ‘Invisible Crisis’, George F. Will, Boston Herald,
Page 15, 6 October 2016.
- The “Entitlement” Nation, David Burton, Son of Eliyahu; Article 267,
20 October 2016.
- The left’s dangerous push to hook the middle class on government ‘help’, New York Post,
29 June 2021.
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