Relief of Poverty: Four Centuries of Futility

More than 400 years ago, the British adopted the Poor Law system, under which local communities were made responsible for the relief of poverty. For the next four centuries the Poor Laws were amended again and again, as the following argument went to and fro: Was the system providing necessary relief or was it in various ways interfering with the natural workings of the labor market by subsidizing idleness and encouraging indolence.

Read more at Townhall.com
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Majority of Immigrant Households Are on Welfare

A new report by my colleague Steven Camarota finds that most immigrant households use welfare. That immigrants receive taxpayer-funded benefits at higher rates than the native-born isn’t a new finding. But previous research (including by CIS) has never found such a high rate. The reason is that Camarota used a different Census Bureau data source, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), that is more difficult to use but, as its name suggests, provides the most comprehensive view of welfare use (a.k.a “program participation”).

Read more at National Review
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Obama Blames Rich People Like Him For The Country's Poor

Welfare: President Obama talked this week about poverty, a subject he should know a lot about, since he's done such a good job of expanding it. Instead, he offered only fact-challenged and badly misguided ideas. --Earlier this week, Obama was part of a panel discussion on poverty hosted by Georgetown University and attended by Catholics and evangelical Christians. --He started off OK. "I think we can all stipulate that the best anti-poverty program is a job," he said, and "we don't dispute that the free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history."

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Singapore Has Found A Workable Alternative to the Welfare State

Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, died last week at age 91. Almost every obituary has remarked on the radical transition his leadership heralded. As John Fund wrote at National Review: “By embracing free trade, capital formation, vigorous meritocratic education, low taxes, and a reliable judicial system, Lee raised the per capita income of his country from $500 a year to some $52,000 a year today. That’s 50 percent higher than that of Britain, the colonial power that ruled Singapore for 150 years. Its average annual growth rate has averaged 7 percent since the 1970s.”

 

Part of the reason for Singapore’s remarkable climb up the international income ladder is bread and butter capitalism.

Read more at Townhall.com
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32 Year Old Woman on Why She Abuses Welfare, Doesn’t Work, and Happily Takes Your Money

A woman named Lucy called in to a Texas radio station as they were discussing welfare abuse. What happened would surprise anyone. Not that this happens – just how proud this woman is of it. Lucy proceeds to laugh at taxpayers like they are suckers taking bait and proceeds to detail her marijuana usage and laziness. She admits that her parents and most likely her children will also take advantage of living this lazy, no-work life.

Listen to the video clip at TTPN
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The Robin Hood Fallacy: Piketty Would Take from the Rich to Give to the Poor

FOUNDRY, by Stephen Moore - In public policy, bad ideas—no matter how many times they have been discredited—never completely go away. They seem to pop up over and over. Enter the hot new book that has captured the imagination and attention of the left because it endorses an 80 percent tax rate on the rich in the name of “leveling” incomes. ✧ The book is entitled “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by French economist Thomas Piketty, and in addition to 1970s-style tax rates, he wants a new wealth tax on the rich and more money for social welfare programs. He’s being treated like the modern-day Adam Smith by the media [THE LEFT]. ✧ The way to create a more equal distribution of income, apparently, is by making everyone poorer. Piketty warns that “meritocratic extremism”—which is another way of saying you get to keep the fruits of your labor—is ruining our nation’s economy and if we don’t divide the pie more equally, the result could be “truly frightening.” He says that his goal is to “save capitalism… [ahem]”

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TII: Let’s Privatize the Welfare State

By John C. Goodman
Have you ever given money to the food stamp program? Do you know anyone who has? ✧ Actually, some people do occasionally make gifts to federal entitlement programs. But gifts to the entire federal government were a paltry $241 million in 2010, the last year for which statistics are available. ✧ By contrast, Americans donated almost $300 billion last year to private sector charities in addition to volunteer time valued at $158 billion. ✧ The money we spend on food stamps (technically called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) almost all comes from coercive taxation, rather than charitable contributions. EXCELLENT ARTICLE! Keep reading at the Independent Institute... Read More......

On government spending, GOP faces a reckoning

(Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) It is not surprising that House Republicans have chosen to embrace sequestration’s arbitrary reductions and promote even harsher cuts to government health and education services. Reducing government’s size has been the central goal of the conservative coalition in Congress for at least a decade. ✧ But the so-called sequester may well be the beginning of the end of the budget wars that have long gripped Washington, because Republicans may soon face an electoral reckoning they cannot overcome. The rising coalition of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, women and young people that helped reelect President Obama does not share the anti-government sentiment of the conservative base. Time is running out for those on the right who are seeking to slash the size of government. Read more at the Washington Post...

Related: Chicks on the Right - This Is Conservatism's Biggest Challenge Read More......

Morning Bell: The End of Welfare Reform As We Know It

The Obama Administration made yet another end run around Congress last week—this time, to gut the successful welfare reform law of 1996. If this is allowed to stand, it will mean rewinding years of progress that lifted millions out of poverty. Read more by Amy Payne at Morning Bell... Read More......

Is registering the poor to vote un-American?

By Matthew Vadum (Hat tip: JHD)- Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote? ✧ Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Read more at American Thinker...

Note the difference between what Cloward & Piven want(ed) to achieve and what Thomas Sowell knows will lift the poor out of poverty in his recent article, "Two Different Worlds." --bc Read More......

Lest we become bankrupt...

“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” Cicero – 55 BC
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Recession Ends in France, Without Massive and Costly U.S.-Style Stimulus Package

OPEN MARKET.ORG, 8/13/2009 by Hans Bader - France’s conservative President adopted a much smaller $31 billion stimulus package, which, unlike Obama’s, was focused on productive investment, not welfare or social services. $14.5 billion of France’s stimulus package was earmarked for injection “into private sector enterprises.” Billions more were for investments in infrastructure, construction projects, and railways. Read more at Open Markets...

Republicans ask Obama to pay the unspent stimulus money back to the people and reduce the nation's debt. Read More......

Peggy sees the change 'she wants' in Obama

From Obama 2.0 - I’ve got to give this to Barack Obama - he sure is a good salesman. Despite the reality that his increased spending, promised tax cuts and welfare checks are simply not feasible, he’s sold his story to lots of people who think he’s going to give them a free ride. One woman, Peggy Joseph, took her daughter out of school early to attend an Obama rally and she couldn’t contain her joy about what would be in store if Obama were to be elected.

“I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he’s going to help me.”

Poor Peggy, she is in for a surprise.

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Changing Priorities

This 2006 Washington Post chart using data from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget shows us what a difference 50 years has made as we've moved closer and closer toward a welfare state.

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SCHIP Wreck

Oregon voters send a message on HillaryCare.
Opinion Journal REVIEW & OUTLOOK, November 8, 2007 (Hat tip: Maureen)

Oregon voters passed judgment Tuesday on a plan that would have made their state children's health insurance program "universal." Sound familiar?

It should, because Oregon reproduced the current Schip fracas in D.C. on the state level--and the referendum took a major shellacking, with voters siding three to two against. Oregon's expansion was almost identical to the one backed by Congressional Democrats, so let's conduct a post-mortem, which may also be a portent.

Like Beltway Democrats, Governor Ted Kulongoski and his legislature wanted to broaden eligibility for Oregon's "Healthy Kids" Schip program to 300% of the federal poverty level. They would also allow all families to opt in, regardless of income, though higher earners wouldn't get subsidies. Again like Congress, Salem intended to pay for the expansion with cigarette taxes, which would increase to $2.02 from $1.18 a pack. That would be one of the highest state tobacco levies in the nation.

Democrats couldn't dredge up the three-fifths approval required for a tax increase in the legislature, so they kicked the expansion over to the ballot. And already, Measure 50's defeat is being blamed on $12 million in advertising by Big Tobacco. "What happened was, the tobacco industry bought the election," Governor Kulongoski declared yesterday.

We're surprised the Governor thinks voters in his left-leaning state are so easily gulled--especially in a contest between "healthy kids" and cigarettes. More persuasive is the notion that voters didn't want to pass a state tax increase to finance a health-care expansion that Congress might soon pass, along with buckets of federal dollars. But most likely, voters understood that a tax increase on cigarettes is still a tax increase, and a highly regressive one at that. Only about 20% of Oregonians smoke, and most of those are lower income.

They may also have figured that to the extent tobacco taxes reduce smoking, they will soon not yield enough revenue to pay for ever-growing health costs. An analysis by William Conerly, a member of Governor Kulongoski's own Council of Economic Advisors, found that a straight Schip expansion funded by a tobacco tax was unsustainable, with costs exceeding revenues by $115 million by 2017.

Counting "crowd out"--the migration to public from private insurance--Mr. Conerly predicted a $638 million deficit within the decade. Oregon tried a similar universal health experiment in the 1990s, only to see it raise havoc, and voters may not have been eager for a low-budget sequel.

There are political lessons here, in case anyone in Washington is paying attention. Voters are rightly concerned about health care and would like everyone to have insurance, but they realize that government programs are very expensive. Americans also don't seem to want to pay for health-care reforms directly through higher taxes. That accounts for the reliance by politicians on the easier sell of tobacco taxes, and it also explains why Congress has disguised the real cost of its Schip contraption with a $30 billion budget gimmick. (No thanks to GOP Senators Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley.)

As for state-level reforms beyond Schip, California may be the next overhyped reform to fail. The last, best hope for Arnold Schwarzenegger's foundering "universal" plan is to imitate Oregon by passing a legislative blueprint and then dumping funding responsibility onto the voters via a referendum. Tuesday's vote doesn't bode well for that prospect.

As for 2008, most of the national press corps has already assumed "universal" coverage will both carry Hillary Clinton to the White House and march easily into law. The message from the Oregon trail is--not so fast, especially if her Republican opponent advances a credible free-market alternative. Read More......

Europe’s Reagan Revolution

The Global Guru, 2007 Archives, Nicholas Vardy wrote,

A specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of the Reagan revolution. Europe -- both Old and New -- has felt the aftershocks of the Reagan revolution more than even its greatest supporters could have ever predicted. While anti-Americanism has reached fever pitch as never before, the economic policies of European governments are increasingly echoing those of the man most universally despised in Europe. Thirty years after the launch of Margaret Thatcher's free market revolution, even socialist Sweden is starting to abandon its much vaunted Nordic model. France's surrender to Reagan was uncharacteristically late. Yet there is little doubt that the election last Sunday of Nicolas Sarkozy as French president is yet another nail in the coffin of the European welfare state. Continued at the Global Guru...

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