welfare

How Tough Are You Ready to Be?

Mark Noonan44 Comments

Floating across my Twitter TL earlier was a video of a housing contractor having a bad day – the video showed a house deep in the process of being constructed and his complaint was that for three days in a row, nobody showed up for work. The man’s claim was that he could offer $40 an hour and he’d get no-shows. It was very sad to watch.

But it is also something I’ve heard more and more of – work going begging because people simply won’t show up for it. And we all know why: there is so much money floating around out there for people sitting on their butts that butt-sitting is preferable to work even when work pays more. Its like this: you could make 75 grand a year by working hard…or you can milk the system for 32 grand a year and get to stay home or go hang out. It is a lot less money…but it is almost all tax free and you don’t have to work for it. Human nature: when we don’t have to persist, most of us don’t.

The problem is widespread not just in the United States, but all around the Western world. The welfare State is shoving money at people – and no surprise: the Welfare State dies if people are working property owners. If they are forever waiting for their EBT card to reload, then the Welfare State lives forever. An additional benefit for the Ruling Class is that people waiting for their EBT won’t rebel for fear of losing it. In the United States and around the West, there probably total several hundred million people who are a simple drain on the economy – either by directly taking government money or by working in perfectly useless government-funded or subsidized jobs. Needless to say, this is not sustainable.

As I have endlessly yammered on about, real national wealth is only what we make, mine or grow. It isn’t our dollars. It isn’t government spending which is counted as part of GDP. It is what is made, mined or grown – physical things which people need. Write a report about farming and you’ve created no wealth even if someone pays you a million dollars for it. Grow one ear of corn and you’ve created wealth. Make one nail. Dig one ounce of copper out of the ground: wealth is created. But the back end of that is we must have people who will make, mine and grow things.

One of the unstated things about illegal immigration is that very often it isn’t so much that illegals will take less money (though that is a big factor) but that they’ll show up – especially for the hard, dirty work. Some years back I wrote about finding that tens of millions of acres of American farmland lie fallow because nobody would farm it – my solution to that was to import, say, Nigerian farmers…give them the basics and some instruction on American farming (which is different from Nigerian farming for a host of reason; farming isn’t, of course, just putting a seed into the ground and waiting)…and then let them have the land if they farm it for five years. This is Great Replacement in action, I’m afraid, and I’m all-in on it – damn straight I’ll replace a white welfare bum with a Nigerian farmer every day and twice on Sunday (though, honestly, a Mexican or Sri Lankan farmer would do just as well for my purposes).

To carry it further – bring in miners. Bring in construction workers. Not this unvetted surge of illegals. Not the Corporate visa programs which just rip off American and foreign workers – but bring in people who want to work and just need the land, tools and law and order to make it happen. In other words, bring in Americans. We’ve lost a lot of those we had to welfare: so, let’s go find some more.

But even that is just a stop gap; an assist. Because we can’t allow millions of our own to lay around uselessly. It isn’t fair to those of us who work now, and it won’t be fair to any we import to pick up the slack in the hard/dirty but rewarding work. We must get our own people to get back to work. Many things go into making a Republic work but one of the crucial things is that the overwhelming mass of the people be independent, hard-working, law-abiding citizens. It just doesn’t work any other way. And this isn’t new. As the Roman Republic entered its final crisis, many people tried to restore the old Roman ways – various schemes to get people off the dole and into productive work. They were defeated by people who figured, instead, that increasing the dole was the path to power – that dependents would endure a Caesar a lot better than yeoman farmers would. Sound familiar?

What I’m driving at here is that if we really want to save our Republic, then we’re going to have to get a bit hard nosed in our demands upon our people. Right now, I do believe that the majority is still very much American (November 8th will go a long way towards ratifying or falsifying my view, depending on how it goes), but the number who cease being Americans and become dependents is rising all the time – we have to end that sort of thing. The rule must be, as it has been through all time, if you will not work, you will not eat. It is Biblical, after all: 2 Thessalonians 3:10.

This is not to say that the physically incapable should be forced to work or starve – but if you are under the age of retirement and are physically fit, you must work or we will literally watch you starve in front of us. Now, this does mean that there must be work – something to be done by the fit person to earn their daily bread. Yes, this will require some make-work in some cases. But on the other side of that, each of us bears the moral obligation to ensure that our brothers and sisters live dignified lives. We must, if needs be, pay taxes in order to provide work as necessary to those who cannot find employment at any given time.

But make no mistake about it: if there’s a job, the person must take it. If the only job available is cleaning sewers, then sewer cleaner it shall be. Nobody gets the Welfare without the Work. This will provide a massive disincentive to be on welfare and a huge incentive to get off it at the earliest opportunity. But, also, if someone can’t get any other work than welfare work, then at least they’ll be able to hold their head up and say, “I earned my food”. That, I think, is the very crucial thing – the moral thing; that which makes the program an act of love. We’ve been letting people slack off for so long that is has lost its stigma, but that stigma must return. We must retrain people to be ashamed of taking anything they played no part in making. And we must, then, also revive the notion that all honest work is honorable to the worker and everyone who works to earn their daily bread deserves our respect no matter how lowly the sort of work is.

But, as I said, this will take a bit of hardness on our part – an unwillingness to listen to sob stories. You are either a child, an invalid, a retiree or a worker – those are the four things you can be. There must be no room in society for the bum, the hobo, the layabout. People who insist upon not working must find every door slammed in their faces. No help, not even in the least thing. It might sound cruel but if we are honestly providing some sort of work in return for sufficient aid to live, then it isn’t cruel at all – it is, indeed, an act of mercy to the bum. It is his chance for redemption. A chance to join us and contribute, even if in a very small way.

But it will seem like cruelty. And the bums will howl and the Left will give us tear-jerking stories…and we must set our faces like flint, point to the shovel and say, “get to work, ya bum”. Work is ennobling. It is decreed by God as the means whereby we earn our bread. Anything set up to short-circuit the relationship between work and bread is evil and it must go, if we are to survive.

Welfare Outnumbers Full Time Workers

Mark Noonan11 Comments

They want to make beggars out of us because beggars are easier to please:

Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau.

They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.

There were 108,592,000 people in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2011 who were recipients of one or more means-tested government benefit programs, the Census Bureau said in data released this week. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau, there were 101,716,000 people who worked full-time year round in 2011. That included both private-sector and government workers

Note that – the number of workers only gets up to 101.7 million because of government workers; which means when you add up total government dependency, it outnumbers self-sufficiency even more.  This is the terrible result of economic policies which reward crony capitalism and social policies which encourage dependency.  In a rational world, those who are dependent should be no more than 10% or so of the total population, not rising above 50% because – point blank – one man producing wealth cannot support one man consuming wealth.  Almost everyone should be self sufficient, or your nation is in terminal decline.

This is why I say we’ve only got a few years left – if we don’t halt and reverse this soon, America will collapse.  There will be no United States of America any longer as each section breaks free – especially among the areas with the least amount of dependency who will no longer wish to tax themselves in to penury to pay for the dependents.  It is change or die.

Moral Decay Plus Welfare Equals…

Mark Noonan14 Comments

This – from the Daily Mail:

While many families are worrying about how to afford Christmas this year, one jobless single mother has revealed she receives so much in benefits she has £2,000 to spend on designer gifts, clothes and partying.

Mother-of-two Leanna Broderick plans to buy 20 presents for each of her children, including Burberry and Ralph Lauren outfits, iPads and gold jewellery.

The 20-year-old, who has never worked, claims nearly £15,500 a year in state handouts…

Whatever you do, don’t you dare get mad at the girl.  She’s just doing what she’s been told to do.

She was told it was ok to have sex before marriage, then she was told it was ok to be on welfare…and then the welfare system pays her more than entry-level work and, presto, you’ve got a “welfare queen”.  If you get mad at her then you are just being absurd:  this is the system of incentives provided and she has reacted to them in a perfectly reasonable manner.

And, of course, this does happen here in the United States as well – there are millions here who have no incentive to work because welfare benefits, of various types, are either equal to or greater than what can be earned by entry-level work…and even if you have a circumstance where the welfare is slightly less than a 40 hour a week, minimum wage job, not having to go to work beats going to work if its only a matter of 10-15% total income difference.

Yes, of course it is a disgrace – it is better than a lot of welfare situations where mom is a drug addict or some such (at least she does seem to be treating the kids well), but its still a horrid destruction of a human being, and apt to be repeated in the next generation by her daughters who will likely live by their mother’s example…and may not be so lucky on the drug-addiction issue.  We have, in some areas, several generations of people who live like this – who don’t work, never have worked and don’t even know what working is like.  And as liberal policies go their natural course, more and more people are hooked on welfare of one sort of another and yet more and more people develope a disconnect between work and reward.

There is a way to cure this, but it would take some guts and some willingness to genuinely reform the economy.

The guts part of it is this:

Total welfare benefits – from whatever source – for a physically fit person under retirement age must never exceed 80% of the value of a full time, minimum wage job.  They can be up to 100% of a minimum wage job if the welfare recipient is married and both persons have resided at the same address for 365 consecutive days or longer.  No additional benefits may be provided for children born while receiving welfare benefits.  That will take guts because to propose it is to immediately get howls of “racist!” and “hater!” and other such nonsense thrown at you.

The reform the economy part goes like this:

If we are to restrict welfare benefits like that, then we’d better buckets of entry-level jobs for these people to start working at – and that means manufacturing, farming and mining jobs, so we’d better restructure our economy for production rather than consumption and that will require much smaller government, a hard currency and a high cost for personal debt.

Or, we can just keep going as we are until we reach that tipping point where too many hands are in the till and the whole thing collapses.  That is, at most, four or five years from now.  So we’d better choose wisely…

 

Abuse of the Welfare State

Mark Noonan77 Comments

Writ large in Michigan – from Detroit News:

…Here we go again — the cold-harded GOP elitists are balancing the budget on the back of the poor.

More than 11,000 people will see their welfare benefits end on Oct. 1.

What will they do? Well, most haven’t considered working as an option.

The Department of Human Services sent letters to 11,062 welfare recipients, notifying them their checks are coming to an end. Included was a toll-free number people could call for information and assistance.

The hotline got 1,401 calls. Of that number, only eight callers requested help in finding a job.

Many of those being cut off have been on public assistance for 14 years. That’s not a safety net; it’s a hammock…

Except for those actually incapable of work – and, remember, I have an exceptionally high bar for that – all people must work.  I don’t care if its just picking up trash in the city streets, no one should ever be allowed to sit on their rear and collect any sort of government benefit.  Furthermore, in order to ensure that the search for work is diligent, welfare should never pay more 80% of a minimum wage job.  Any job, any where – even those “jobs Americans won’t do” and are thus filled by illegals – should pay more than government assistance.  Welfare should only be just enough to keep body and soul together until the recipient finds a job.

The best estimate that I have found of non-health care, non-Social Security welfare spending by the United States government is in the range of $350 to $500 billion per year (its hard to tell because Uncle Sam – determined to not make it easy for us – doesn’t have a category of spending called “welfare”…you have to dig around for it).  I’ll bet that State and local welfare spending adds at least 25% to that figure (and it is probably higher)…even at the low end, we’re talking more than $400 billion per year spent by government in various transfer payments to people who didn’t pay any “input” taxes (in other words, didn’t pay SS taxes, didn’t pay taxes which fund unemployment, etc).  I’ll bet that three quarters (at least) of that money is going to people who can work, but choose not to.

Add in the waste and fraud in Social Security disability, the number of people who get healthcare on the public dime without putting in anything, the drain caused by illegal immigration, and the money spent on worthless aspects of education (what is that?  Worthwhile education spending:  education spending which results in an engineer, teacher or doctor.  Worthless education:  spending which results in diversity coordinators, corporate bureaucrats and lawyers) and you’re probably getting in to the range of a trillion dollars per year of drain on the economy…money which is spent that has no net, positive benefit.  Money which just goes to leeches.

This has to change – and the welfare reform in Michigan shows why:  some people are so long on the public dime that they simply have no desire to get off it.  They must be forced off – work, or starve.  A complete audit of all recipients of government money must be done…and all able-bodied people with no minor children must be kicked off of government support; those with children must be forced to do at least some work in payment for their welfare; only those absolutely incapable of working (or on a program they directly paid in to over the years) should be allowed to remain.

There is still plenty of work on the low end in the United States…work which doesn’t need even a high school diploma (how many from the backwaters of Mexico and the third world who come here illegally have such?).  It is, often, hard and dirty work…but work is honorable, and all honest work creates personal dignity.  Better to be poor digging a ditch than poor watching daytime television.  Mind you, I’ll go ten thousand extra miles to help out anyone who is working hard and still not able to make ends meet…you put in your 40 hours and you’re still short, you can count on me to either work it through charity or, if need be, enact laws to ensure that you and your family have decent food, housing, clothing and basic health care…but the first step is that 40 hours of work.

We must become a nation of hard work, thrift and careful investment…massive reforms need to be undertaken, and none of them can really be done in isolation.  Big Corporation also needs to feel the hammer; Big government, naturally; all of us have to stand up and do what is right…after generations of coasting on  borrowed money.  The only way we keep our nation is if we work for it.  Period, end of story.  Anyone who says otherwise is simply not understanding the nature of life.

 

Poll Reveals Americans Understand Big Goverment Scam

Mark Noonan38 Comments

From Rasmussen:

…A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 71% of American Adults say the bigger problem with welfare programs in the United States is that too many people get welfare who should not be getting it. Just 18% say the bigger issue is that too many people who should receive welfare do not get it, while another 11% are not sure.

Republicans (91%) and adults not affiliated with either political party (70%) believe much more strongly than Democrats (51%) that the bigger problem with welfare is that too many ineligible people are on it.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of all Americans think immigrants who follow the law and enter the United States legally should have to wait three years or more before collecting welfare benefits, including 31% who believe they should wait more than five years. Seventeen percent (17%) think three years is enough, while 11% prefer a five-year waiting period…

What is the scam?  Get as many people as possible hooked on Big Government hand outs, then claim that any proposed cut is a cruel, inhuman cut-off of someone who otherwise will die.  Use these in alternating efforts to continually grow government so that you can get ever richer and more powerful.  For the longest time, this worked…but this poll indicates that more and more people are understanding that massive numbers of people are on the dole who really shouldn’t be.

While I have no way to test my theory – it would take a large staff and a pretty big budget to do it – I firmly assert that at least half of the people receiving government benefits should be kicked off and forced to get back to work.  As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve got a pretty high standard for disability…no one will ever be able to erase from my memory my late colleague who was a wheelchair-bound victim of a horrific genetic disease who couldn’t even use all the fingers of her hands and yet managed to hold down a 40 hour a week job until just a few months before her death.

If she could work, then most people on disability can work.  Period.  End of story.  No, shut up you lazy SOBs with your whines about “stress”…get back to work and get off my wallet.  I’ve got stress, too – a great deal of which stems from having to get up and go to work in the morning while millions of people are on their backside watching daytime television and waiting for their EBT card to be re-filled.  In my view, you’re only excused from working if you can’t work…can’t get out of bed, can’t stand up for more than a few minutes, can’t sit down for more than a few minutes, are blind…missing your legs or arms…something like that (and this is Biblical – In fact, when we were with you, we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat – 2 Thessalonians 3:10 – so don’t any of you liberals try to throw Christian charity at me…I know the command to charity; but charity isn’t the act of supporting layabouts who can otherwise support themselves).

A great deal of the reform of America will be re-imposing the requirement of hard work.  Hard, dirty work, at that.  A nation which will not engage in hard work is a nation which will die – it is really just as simple as that.  Each person is required to labor to the limit of the talents God has provided him or her – those who can do much, must do so; those who can do little, must still do at least that…and those who really can do nothing, must be provided with every last thing they need from those of us who can.  But there are no free rides – if you are living off the wealth of others then it must only be because there is no other way for you to live.  A complete review of all those on government aid should be done – excluding only those on social security retirement and military pensions (you get SS because you earned it by working…you get your military pension because you earned it by risking your life over many years for your nation) – everyone on government aid should be forced to justify their dependency.  Tell us why you can’t work – show us your complete incapacity for any work whatsoever.  If that is indeed the case, then you can count on us to provide all you need…but if you can work, at all, then you’d better get to work.

Enough is enough – there really is no free lunch and it is time we called a halt to this liberal nonsense.