Tag Archives: Welfare

They’ll Use the Welfare State to Get Compliance on Vaccine Mandates, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on December 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

Nothing from the government is ever free. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

A Democratic state lawmaker in Illinois has introduced legislation requiring unvaccinated residents to pay out-of-pocket for healthcare services. It’s all part of an effort to come up with new and creative ways to punish people who refuse to get the covid jab. WBBM Radio in Chicago reports:

[Jonathan] Carroll’s legislation would amend the state’s insurance code so that “a person who is eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine and chooses not to be vaccinated shall pay for health care expenses out-of-pocket if the person becomes hospitalized because of COVID-19 symptoms.”

In other words, Carroll is trying to ensure that the unvaccinated will be denied health insurance for covid treatments, even in cases where private insurance is already bought and paid for. Moreover, intervening in private insurance won’t even be necessary in many cases, since one-third of the population is already receiving government-funded healthcare.

This policy is quite remarkable coming from a progressive like Carroll. After all, for decades, we’ve been hearing from the Left that “healthcare is a human right” and that it must be provided to anyone and everyone at taxpayer expense. Anything short of universal state subsidized healthcare, we’ve been told, is unacceptable.

Yet, apparently, the mandatory vaccine advocates—found largely on the left, of course—are so obsessed with forcing mandatory vaccines on the entire population that they’re now looking for ways to deny people healthcare.

But we should have seen this coming. Until recently, the Left has also claimed it wants universal employment and a “chicken in every pot.” But since the Biden administration hatched the idea of tying employment to vaccines earlier this year, advocates of vaccine mandates now want to you be destitute and jobless if you refuse the jab.

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History Lesson, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on July 4, 2020 | Leave a comment

White liberal “progressives” have done American blacks more harm than good. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Now I am going to tell you why BLM is a hustle, and how it came to this. Here is an opening to that honest conversation about race everyone’s been pretending to ask for. That’s been a hustle too, so far, because when anybody actually ventures to launch it, the cries of “racist” shut it down.

The BLM hustle has turned into a violent insurrection supported by a body of bad ideas geared to driving the nation insane. The action on-the-ground is like the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution seasoned with the murderous derangement of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. As biologist Bret Weinstein said in his podcast last week with linguistics prof John McWhorter: “If you attempt a Maoist takeover of the US, you’ll get a civil war.”

What we’re seeing in the looting and burning, the “canceling” of careers and lives, the toppling of statues and the attempt to rewrite history, the pathetic obeisance of political leaders to raging mobs, and the lives lost in senseless acts of violence is the unfinished business of the civil rights movement. That business was the full participation of Black citizens in American life. The main grievance now is that Black Americans are still denied full participation due to “systemic racism.” That’s a dodge. What actually happened is that Black America opted out and lost itself in a quandary of its own making with the assistance of their white dis-enablers, the well-intentioned “progressives.”

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Police Aren’t Enough, by Walter E. Williams

Posted on April 3, 2019 | 1 comment

Police can’t “fix” massive cultural deterioration and the government-promoted breakup of families. From Walter E. Williams at lewrockwell.com:

Sometimes, during my drive to work, I listen to Clarence Maurice Mitchell IV, host of the Baltimore’s WBAL C4 radio show. Mitchell was formerly a member of Maryland’s House of Delegates and its Senate. In recent weeks, Mitchell has been talking about the terrible crime situation in Baltimore. In 2018, there were 308 homicides. So far this year, there have been 69. That’s in a 2018 population of 611,648 — down from nearly a million in 1950. The city is pinning its hopes to reduce homicides and other crime on new Police Commissioner Michael Harrison.

Another hot news item in Baltimore is the fact that Johns Hopkins University wants to hire 100 armed police officers to patrol its campuses, hospital and surrounding neighborhoods. The hospital president, Dr. Redonda Miller testified in Annapolis hearings that patients and employees are “scared when they walk home, they’re scared when they walk to their cars.”

Philadelphia’s Temple University police department is the largest university police force in the United States, with 130 campus police officers, including supervisors and detectives.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Government, Morality, race relations, Society

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Study Shows Migrants Use Almost TWICE The Welfare Benefits As Native-Born Americans, by Mac Slavo

Posted on March 14, 2019 | Leave a comment

What happens when the facts are politically incorrect? From Mac Slavo at shtfplan.com:

New research has discovered that foreign noncitizens use nearly two times the amount of welfare as native-born Americans. Both legal and illegal aliens fall into the category of foreigners who take from the welfare system.

According to a report by Breitbart, in recently released research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), analysts discovered that about 63 percent of noncitizen households, those who live legally and illegally in the U.S., use some form of public welfare while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.

California and Texas have the most expansive welfare-dependent immigration. For example, more than 7-in-10 noncitizen households in California use at least one form of welfare compared to just 35 percent of native-born American households that use welfare in the state.

In Texas, nearly 70 percent of noncitizen households use welfare. Similar to California, only 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare. -Breitbart

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News earlier this week, President Donald Trump said he wanted an end to all welfare-dependent legal immigration that burdens American taxpayers with the costs. “I don’t like the idea of people coming in and going on welfare for 50 years, and that’s what they want to be able to do—and it’s no good,” Trump said.  And it is an obvious burden.  For what one receives without working for, another must work for without earning.  It’s a vicious and immoral practice to steal money from some in order to give it to others.

The Trump administration is considering a new regulation this year that would limit immigrants’ ability to live off the producers (taxpayers). It would effectively ban legal immigrants from permanently resettling in the U.S. if they are a burden on American taxpayers. This would be a net win for those being stolen from (“taxpayers”). Legal immigration controls suggested by the government would be equal an annual $57.4 billion tax cut — the amount taxpayers spend every year on paying for the welfare, crime, and schooling costs of the country’s mass importation of 1.5 million new, mostly low-skilled legal immigrants.

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Build the Welfare Wall Now, by Andrew Moran

Posted on January 12, 2019 | 1 comment

Taking away the welfare magnet might be more effective than building a wall for keeping out illegal immigrants. From Andrew Moran at libertynation.com:

Would a welfare wall be more effective than a physical barrier?

There is an old tale about a small New Zealand town that was suffering from an influx of vipers. To eradicate the problem, local officials established a viper bounty, offering people money to bring in these dead snakes. It resulted in residents breeding these reptiles in their basements and killing them. The plan didn’t solve the original problem, and the limited resources were flushed down the drain.

Former President Ronald Reagan famously said, “If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.” This is one of the first principles you learn in economics.

When the war on poverty was initiated by former President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s, the federal government extended generous welfare payments to single-parent households. The unintended consequences were more women having children out of wedlock, the destruction of the nuclear family, and impoverished children. The Heritage Foundation writes, “Marriage is a powerful force in reducing poverty; a single mother with children is four times more likely to be poor than a similar mother who is married.”

And, thus, this is the problem with illegal immigration in America today: subsidization.

Subsidizing Illegal Immigration

The crisis at the border, as President Donald Trump recently declared in his televised speech to the nation, is the result of years of incentivizing illegal migration. Republicans and Democrats have manufactured this disaster at all three levels of government through lavish welfare benefits, social services, and other big government goodies that will attract millions from across the globe.

Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) proposed a new program in the budget that would make California the only state to offer coverage to undocumented young adults through its Medicaid program. And this was his first day in office.

According to a 2011 study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), 70% of illegal immigrants in Texas received social assistance, getting many of these benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children. These consisted of school lunches for low-income students, rent subsidies, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

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Before and After Welfare Handouts, by Walter E. Williams

Posted on May 9, 2018 | 1 comment

Private charity often leads to gratitude and efforts at self-improvement among the recipients. Welfare encourages the opposite. From Walter E. Williams at lewrockwell.com:

Before the massive growth of our welfare state, private charity was the sole option for an individual or family facing insurmountable financial difficulties or other challenges. How do we know that? There is no history of Americans dying on the streets because they could not find food or basic medical assistance. Respecting the biblical commandment to honor thy father and mother, children took care of their elderly or infirm parents. Family members and the local church also helped those who had fallen on hard times.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, charities started playing a major role. In 1887, religious leaders founded the Charity Organization Society, which became the first United Way organization. In 1904, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America started helping at-risk youths reach their full potential. In 1913, the American Cancer Society, dedicated to curing and eliminating cancer, was formed. With their millions of dollars, industrial giants such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller created our nation’s first philanthropic organizations.

Generosity has always been a part of the American genome. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French civil servant, made a nine-month visit to our country in 1831 and 1832, ostensibly to study our prisons. Instead, his visit resulted in his writing “Democracy in America,” one of the most influential books about our nation. Tocqueville didn’t use the term “philanthropy,” but he wrote extensively about how Americans love to form all kinds of nongovernmental associations to help one another. These associations include professional, social, civic and other volunteer organizations seeking to serve the public good and improve the quality of human lives. The bottom line is that we Americans are the most generous people in the world, according to the new Almanac of American Philanthropy — something we should be proud of.

To continue reading: Before and After Welfare Handouts

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Posted in Government, Morality, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology

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Get Government out of the Welfare Business, by Lee Friday

Posted on December 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

Like most everything the government does, it fights poverty poorly. From Lee Friday at mises.org:

Fighting poverty is a favorite pastime of government because politicians get to portray themselves as champions of the poor. However, the unfortunate few tend to be far fewer in number when aid is extended privately instead of through tax funded programs.

Government Bureaucracies Benefit from Welfare Programs

Coercion is used to acquire the revenue (taxes) to finance welfare programs. As evidenced by the commission it retains prior to redistributing this wealth, government bureaucracies are one of the beneficiaries of these programs, and thus highly incentivized to claim a perpetual need for the programs. I live in Canada, where the number of federal government welfare program employees increased by 43% between 2006 and 2012. Clearly, it serves the interests of politicians and bureaucrats to create (impose) a culture of dependency. As Murray Rothbard wrote in For a New Liberty:

Since welfare families are paid proportionately to the number of their children, the system provides an important subsidy for the production or more children. Furthermore, the people being induced to have more children are precisely those who can afford it least; the result can only be to perpetuate their dependence on welfare, and, in fact, to develop generations who are permanently dependent on the welfare dole.

Economist Thomas Sowell wrote:

The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.

The government exacerbates the problems it is supposedly trying to solve.

Why Private Aid is Superior to Public Aid

Drawing on the work of David Beito, historian Hildegard Hoeller describes the presence of decentralized systems of mutual aid:

Regardless of where they came from, the members of nearly all ethnic and national groups erected formidable networks of individual and collective self-help for protection. These social welfare systems fell into two broad categories: hierarchical and reciprocal relief.

To continue reading: Get Government out of the Welfare Business

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The Welfare State’s Legacy, by Walter E. Williams

Posted on September 20, 2017 | 3 comments

Government has hurt far more than helped blacks. From Walter E. Williams at lewrockwell.com:

That the problems of today’s black Americans are a result of a legacy of slavery, racial discrimination and poverty has achieved an axiomatic status, thought to be self-evident and beyond question. This is what academics and the civil rights establishment have taught. But as with so much of what’s claimed by leftists, there is little evidence to support it.

The No. 1 problem among blacks is the effects stemming from a very weak family structure. Children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes and end up in prison. They are also likelier to live in poverty-stricken households. But is the weak black family a legacy of slavery? In 1960, just 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Fifty years later, more than 70 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Here’s my question: Was the increase in single-parent black families after 1960 a legacy of slavery, or might it be a legacy of the welfare state ushered in by the War on Poverty?

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. Today about 75 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Is that supposed to be a delayed response to the legacy of slavery? The bottom line is that the black family was stronger the first 100 years after slavery than during what will be the second 100 years.

At one time, almost all black families were poor, regardless of whether one or both parents were present. Today roughly 30 percent of blacks are poor. However, two-parent black families are rarely poor. Only 8 percent of black married-couple families live in poverty. Among black families in which both the husband and wife work full time, the poverty rate is under 5 percent. Poverty in black families headed by single women is 37 percent. The undeniable truth is that neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor the harshest racism has decimated the black family the way the welfare state has.

To continue reading: The Welfare State’s Legacy

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Posted in demographics, Education, Government

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Welfare is the new work, by Stephen Moore

Posted on August 2, 2016 | Leave a comment

It’s getting easier and easier to live on somebody else’s dime, and harder and harder to make it on one’s own. From Stephen Moore on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

Two recent news stories highlight how pernicious the welfare state has become in America today.

The first was an announcement by the feds that food stamps can be used to have groceries delivered right to a recipient’s door. Service with a smile. The Obama administration says it is too much of a hardship for those on welfare to actually travel to the grocery store. What’s next? Cooking the meal for them? If only the DMV would do home deliveries for drivers The second story was about the hullabaloo over a proposal by Maine governor Paul LePage to prohibit food stamp recipients from using their food aid to purchase junk foods like sugary soft drinks and candy bars.

He says that the state has an obesity problem and he will “implement reform unilaterally or cease Maine’s administration of the food stamp program altogether.” The Obama administration rejected his request and the left activists act as if the idea that a welfare recipient can’t buy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream at taxpayer expense is a violation of civil liberties.

The welfare/entitlement state of mind has spiraled out of control in America. No one is lifting a finger of opposition. The cost of welfare is now well over $1 trillion a year. Food stamps are so ubiquitous that they have replaced dollars as the new standard currency in many inner cities in America. Even in affluent areas with upscale grocery stores, food stamp recipients fill their carts with everything from cakes to lobster.

Liberals love welfare. It was only a few years ago that Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi opined that putting more people on food stamps and unemployment insurance is one of the “best ways to stimulate the economy.” Which is more astonishing? That she believes this lunacy or that she would be dumb enough to say it out loud.

We are in the seventh year of a so-called recovery, yet 45 million Americans depend on taxpayers to put food on their table. This is roughly 5 million more than when President Obama took office. Medicaid rolls have exploded by more than 10 million, too, and Mr. Obama openly boasts about how many people he’s moved into the program. Unemployment insurance beneficiaries have fallen, thankfully, but the number of Americans collecting disability has continued to climb. Wow this is some recovery.

By the way, disability rolls are growing even as worker safety has hit an all-time high. Shouldn’t safety and automation mean fewer disabled workers? The reality, as everyone in the welfare industry knows, is that food stamps and disability are the new welfare. Neither one of them requires work in exchange for benefits.

No one wants to admit that the ease of entry into the welfare state and the generosity of the benefits is one big reason why labor force participation has collapsed. Why work?

Welfare expert Peter Ferrara notes that a big instigator for the welfare state expansion has been the decimation of welfare reform laws passed in 1996. “It’s infuriating that a law that worked incredibly well in lowering costs and getting the unemployed into the workforce, has been largely gutted,” he concludes.

To continue reading: Welfare is the new work

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