“Don’t care how, I want it now.”
~ Veruca Salt ~
Please go to a search engine and look up “Matthew Lesko.” You’ll know it’s him when you find yourself rapt, confused, and staring into the face of a Riddler even Batman wouldn’t touch. You may have already spotted Lesko in one of his late-night infomercials. He wears a suit covered in question marks. He yells a lot. Wild gesticulations, fistfuls of money, and flying spittle are his shtick. If you have one of those cable packages with entire blocks of infomercials, he’ll eventually haunt your nightmares, shrieking at you about “FREE MONEY!!!”
Lesko specializes in four things.
1. Selling his books and products, mostly through infomercials
2. Claiming his books and products will help you tap into huge wealth streams (unclaimed governments funds, i.e, “free money”)
3. Calamitous sartorial choices
4. Yelling and shrieking
Like the ouroboros, forever swallowing its tail, we’ll circle back to the shrieking question mark man soon enough.
First, let’s go shopping. I was in a Walmart recently (yes, I shop at Walmart, and I’m proud of it!) when I noticed something disturbing in the checkout line. No, not the magazine cover with the fifty worst celebrity beach bodies. It was the woman in front of me.
You know the type. Michael Kors handbag, OMG shoes, and a blouse neither you nor I could afford. Perfectly manicured nails tapped away on her new iPhone, which I’m surprised she could even see with her Prada shades on and her nose stuck high in the air.
When the teenage cashier’s voice interrupted her texting with the total and she reached into her bag, I was expecting one of those fabled AmEx “black cards.” But out came an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card, and with one swipe, she paid for all of her items with government welfare!
Now, for all of you who have been too busy watching Honey Boo Boo reruns or reading those trashy magazines to notice what’s been going on during the last couple of years, EBT cards are the modern version of food stamps—and an astounding number of Americans now depend on them.
It was at that exact moment in Walmart when I realized just how far-reaching and out of hand the welfare state has become, all thanks to the granddaddy of our never-ending helplessness, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I’m sure you’ve heard of him, and how “great” he was, plenty of times. Left-wing zealots in the media and in higher education are constantly pounding it into our heads that FDR single-handedly rescued our country from economic depression with his heroic New Deal (possibly while riding on a white horse and wielding a fiery sword, depending on whom you ask).
What FDR actually did was jack up our taxes and establish legions of federal programs—think rent control, Social Security, and unemployment payments. While the Deal may have been a quick fix for the Great Depression, it set a seriously scary precedent of long-term government dependency, taxpayer-subsidized goodies, and the “gimme gimme” culture that is more prevalent today than ever before.
Now let’s go back and look at Matthew Lesko and his question-mark suit. Do you know why he continues to make his commercials? Because it’s worth his time. And who makes it worth his time? The people who buy his line of crap. And the people who buy his crap are the people who want a quick fix, an easy answer, and free money.
We all know there is no such thing as free money. But too many of us, as demonstrated by the longevity of Lesko’s career, click and buy anyway, hoping for the easy way out.
And sometimes, we get it. But folks, none of that is sustainable, and we’ve been feeling the impact ever since the New Deal.
In 1932—just one year before Roosevelt took office—the highest income tax rate that anyone in the country had to pay was 25 percent. Just thirteen years later, America’s top rate income tax was 94 percent.1 Ninety-four percent!!! Where is the incentive to work all day when you’re giving virtually all your income to the feds, who will inevitably redistribute it to their special-interest buddies and waste it on failed dependency programs?
Many contemporary liberals hold the view that the federal government has the answers to all economic and political problems. There is no evidence of this. And it was FDR and his New Deal who provided the building blocks that helped give rise to this foolhardy, throw-caution-to-the-wind liberalism.
We can thank the FDR school of thought for the explosion of disability payments, despite the fact that the United States has only become safer every year (we’ll get to this later, but see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined), food stamps, Obamaphones (yes, those are real), unemployment payments with no work requirement, and what is sure to be known as the single biggest government failure of our time—Obamacare.
Here’s the basic gist: The New Deal set the precedent for the mess we’re in today, and unfortunately for the generations that followed (including us), this bankrupt way of managing public policy has only gotten worse—and worse.
Of all the welfare programs to choose from (and there are tons), the booby prize of our modern entitlement culture would have to be food stamps. Dubbed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), food stamps have grown into an expensive and bloated failure. Again, I get it: If tragedy strikes or someone loses his job unexpectedly, a temporary, effective, and efficient safety net to help struggling Americans put food on the table undoubtedly makes sense. But as it stands now, SNAP is straight-up broken.
How bad is it? Well, nearly 43 million Americans now receive food stamps, and that number had increased by 13 million since President Tax-and-Spend Obama took office.2 Take a look at the photo of the crowd at Obama’s inauguration. It was in the neighborhood of 2 million. Now multiply that crowd by 23 and consider just how many people are on food stamps. That means about 20 percent of U.S. households are receiving food stamps, and some states lean more heavily on that crutch.3 Oregon ranks number two in food stamp enrollment with about 20 percent.4 The current leader, at 23 percent, is none other than our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.5
Are you ready for the real kicker? Forty percent of Americans on food stamps are obese.6 Yes, our tax dollars are literally being used to fund Pop-Tart addictions across the nation. (But at least they have Obamacare to subsidize those doctor’s appointments for their type 2 diabetes.)
Here’s how SNAP works (I’m assuming you aren’t on food stamps): Recipients receive an EBT card, which looks and functions just like your everyday debit card but is supposed to be used only to purchase food. Yet it’s been documented again and again how recipients are able to swipe the card and get cash instead, supposedly for food and food alone, but come on. Give a burnout, a junkie, an alcoholic, or a sex addict a thick wad of free cash, and how do you think they’re going to spend that money? Buying broccoli, avocados, and peaches? Not really. They’ll be spending it on drugs, booze, and hookers.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to tell you how to spend your hard-earned cash. That’s completely up to you. I believe wholeheartedly in your right to eat pink-slime-filled fast-food nuggets, wash them down with malt liquor, and indulge in a pack of cigarettes (just don’t blow your smoke in my face). I’m not your mother. I’m not going to follow you around yelling, “Eat your green beans!” Hell, if you want to take the money you earn from teaching kindergarten and spend it all on blow, that’s your prerogative. But when we’re talking about money that comes from hardworking taxpayers—that’s an entirely different story. I don’t know about you, but I’m not busting my rump in the office every day to pay for some junkie’s next fix. But sadly, thanks to SNAP, we all are.
Don’t expect SNAP to downsize anytime soon. Despite spending an eye-popping $74 billion on food stamps in 2014, the USDA is making the case that the program needs more funding.7 This is another danger about creating a big, fat federal government. Not only do our citizens become dependent, but the institutions themselves—these “departments”—have a vested interest in their own survival. And they’re never satisfied with what they get.
The USDA is so set on expanding SNAP that in 2011 alone it spent over $43 million to advertise food stamps.8 It makes me wish Mad Men had run for another forty years so I could have seen Don Draper come up with the perfect pitch for the program:
“Snacks. In the original Greek the word for snacks meant ‘crunchtastic.’ It was a twinge you felt in your waistband. That doesn’t mean you have to feel the old wound in your wallet. The EBT card is a scrapbook. It reminds you of all the things you’ve ever tasted… and that you’ll taste in the future. It returns us, with a poignant ache, to a time when our mouths were full of snacks. And we can do it. We can go home… to a place where our mouths are always full.”
On the other hand, perhaps it’s a good thing that Matthew Weiner ended the series. Nevertheless, government-produced, slick, colorful commercials are out there enthusiastically encouraging people to sign up for the subsidies. No, thanks! Sorry, Uncle Sam, we don’t want your corrupt handouts.
By the way, shouldn’t getting on welfare be discouraged? And remember, it’s our tax dollars that pay for all of this. These commercials portray food stamps in a wholly positive light. Government efforts to distribute food stamps should not demean or denigrate recipients in need—fair enough. But we need a better balance between safeguarding the dignity of these recipients and making them feel that SNAP assistance is an unending and unqualified right.
That “gimme gimme” entitlement mentality promoted by the overgrown SNAP program has gone international—there are even SNAP ads targeted at illegal immigrants! Yes, you read that right. Your hard-earned tax dollars are spent on encouraging illegal aliens to get on the dole in a joint effort between the USDA and the Mexican government.9 We have actually produced and sent Spanish-language fliers to the Mexican Embassy, telling Mexicans that if they cross our border they can receive SNAP without having to declare their immigration status. Emphasized in bold and underlined, the fliers say, “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”10
WTF? And when you compound this with what we’ve been shelling out for all the Central Americans who have been flooding the southwestern United States in recent years, we’re effectively climbing on top of an economic powder keg and lighting the fuse.
It’s not like the USDA is diligent with SNAP funds, in general. In 2013 alone, the department spent $6.2 billion improperly—$2 billion of that was spent on food stamp overpayments.11 Oops.
If that wasn’t enough (is it ever?), SNAP is also riddled with fraud. This is not cynical fatalism. It is not pessimism to describe a negative situation realistically. The fact is, anything that can be exploited will be. Exhibit A, Walmart lady. Though it might be difficult to believe, the Queen of Walmart is not the worst example of welfare abuse. Lots of recipients trade in their food stamps for cash, allowing them to use that money for whatever the hell they want: booze, illegal drugs, cigarettes, even donuts and Twinkies.
Many of these transactions take place on Craigslist. One such posting in the Atlanta area read, “I have $500 worth and it costs $350 cash. No I will not do half!”12 It’s win-win—the original SNAP recipient gets cash, and the buyer saves a couple hundred bucks at the grocery store. And what does our government do to address this issue? A big fat nothing.
The USDA has done a terrible job enforcing its “food only” regulation—the rules have basically become just squishy guidelines. Especially since the program has a “cash assistance” program that lets recipients use their EBT cards to take out cash at ATM machines. As a result, food stamps have been accepted as payment for lots of items that will make you go “whaaaa?” Here are just a few of the many, many things you can buy with your EBT card:
• Taco Bell and KFC.13 Hey, deep-fried shit still gets your stomach full.
• Dildos, thongs, and condoms. Kiss My Lingerie in Louisiana was approved to accept EBT cards as payment in 2014.14 If I’m going to be kissing Southern Fried unmentionables, I don’t want them to come from the government.
• Strip teases. A FOIA request several years ago revealed that welfare recipients were using their EBT cards to withdraw cash near infamous strip clubs and jiggle joints.15 Erections are free and easy to come by, but apparently we need to subsidize them.
• Bail. Felons have reportedly used their food stamp benefits to pay their way out of jail.16 Is this, or is this not, the lamest “jail break” in history?
Here’s another disturbing SNAP tidbit: McDonald’s encourages and helps its employees and their families sign up for welfare—most notably, food stamps—through its “McResource” program.17 Imagine that you go in to a job for your new staff orientation and right out of the gate your HR manager is talking to you about the glamorous lifestyle of welfare. Why, why, why? Isn’t the purpose of an employer to provide gainful employment?
This is employment without the gain.
It’s simple: McDonald’s can pay lower wages if more of its employees are on food stamps. We taxpayers are subsidizing a good chunk of every fast-food worker’s salary, leaving the savings for McDonald’s.
Walmart does the same thing. Not only is the retailer our nation’s largest private sector employer, it’s also the biggest consumer of taxpayer-subsidized welfare. Its employees are the single biggest group receiving taxpayer subsidies. The average Walmart worker receives $1,000 per month in welfare.18 America currently hosts about five thousand Walmart stores and clubs. That’s a lot of working welfare recipients.
And it’s not just big chain companies that are doing this; lots of little guys are taking advantage of us taxpayers for their corporate gain, too. The summer after I graduated from college, I met an old roommate for lunch who had just landed a job working at a nonprofit in Boston. She was going on about how shitty the pay was but then added, “It’s cool though, they’re helping us sign up for food stamps. At least I won’t go hungry!”
So now we’re paying for college just so graduates can end up on food stamps.
Is hiking the minimum wage the answer to these problems? Hell, no. We went over why that never works in the last chapter. The only real solution is to downsize the mammoth food stamps program. If we do, Walmart, McDonald’s, and other corporate giants would be forced to increase salaries to retain employees. Besides, the fact that 20 percent of American households receive food stamps at this point should be proof enough that it’s currently far too easy to qualify for the benefits.
The biggest fundamental problem with SNAP is that the program is fundamentally counterproductive because it discourages work. When a recipient starts making too much income, they lose the benefit. The incentive to find a job—the basic need to feed yourself and your family, to work or starve—is wiped away. No wonder enrollment continues to grow with no end in sight. Most traditional Democrats and old-school lefties assert that food stamp use is up because the economy has tanked, but that’s simply not the case. Food stamp spending nearly doubled years ago, before the current recession. The program’s budget rose from $19.8 billion in 2000 to $37.9 billion in 2007.19 And then add on what we’ve experienced since Obama became president.
If you’re looking to foster more productive and independent generations to come, this is one of the most pressing issues facing our nation today. Yet it receives almost no coverage from the mainstream media. So what’s it going to take for the media and the rest of us—the voters—to wake up? Are we going to wait until one-third, one-half, or maybe even three-quarters of us are receiving food stamps?
Since the market crash in 2008 and the advent of the so-called Great Recession, we Americans have become obsessed with the “1 percent” and the “99 percent”—or better still, the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. Isn’t it about time we turn our focus to how much the 20 percent on SNAP are taking from us, the 80 percent? Isn’t that a statistic worth raising placards and protesting in our public parks?
And let’s not forget the great and powerful Oz, I mean overseer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Clearly a byproduct of the Washington political mindset, the USDA thinks they have the answers to all of life’s problems. And it’s not just with SNAP. In all their wisdom, USDA bureaucrats have heavily regulated and subsidized the agriculture industry for decades, scaring American farmers away from real free trade until they come running to Washington, seeking help. If you thought the American farm industry was a bastion of true capitalism, think again.
For decades now, Democrats and Republicans alike have continued to increase the power, reach, and purse of the USDA, with no end in sight. According to their own office, the department “provides leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues.” Well, do you know what the latest tab was for that “leadership”? Try $146 billion.20
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln established the USDA at the outbreak of the Civil War and at a time when over 50 percent of Americans were farmers. Since a great deal of American agriculture was based in what was then the Confederacy, the Union couldn’t afford failed crops. Lincoln’s idea was to provide the farmers with good seed stock and solid information about agriculture, soil, and seasons. It was, in a way, a matter of national security. Lincoln referred to this small, focused, new agency as the “people’s department,” and it was initially headed by a commissioner without cabinet status. Oh, how times have changed.
Today fewer than 2 percent of Americans are farmers, yet the USDA has ballooned in size and scope. Cash payments alone to farmers cost between $10 billion to $30 billion each year.21 The average farm household income is $87,289—way above the average American household.22 Farm subsidies do not make economic sense, but farmers have strong armies of lobbyists, so we taxpayers continue getting stuck with these enormous bills.
It doesn’t end there. Legislators from rural farm states who want in on this pork have made deals with those from urban states who want subsidies for welfare programs like SNAP. In the end, the deal-making politicians spread the wasteful spending across various districts and political party lines—and into the pockets of their special business interests.
A few years back when I had just started out as a reporter, I discovered footage of the USDA’s “Cultural Sensitivity Training,” in which government employees were instructed to bang on tables and chant, “The pilgrims were illegal aliens.”23 (Could there possibly be a less catchy chant?)
During this “sensitivity training,” conducted on a government contract by a guy named Samuel Betances, workers were also told not to use the word minorities. Betances and his firm were paid almost $200,000 for this “training.” And do I need to remind you who paid for it? That’s right, suckers like us.
The lion’s share of the USDA’s steadily growing budget goes to other endeavors, such as regulating agricultural markets, enhancing food safety, and providing food assistance and nutrition advice. This all sounds fairly high-minded and noble, but the USDA has become yet another department that keeps expanding its waistline—just like the Pentagon and most other federal government departments. Except in this case, what began with protecting seeds has mutated into a bureaucratic behemoth that pays corporate farmers billions in subsidies and creates dependency among millions of Americans via SNAP.
Was this really Lincoln’s intention? My bet is that he’d be one of the first calling for the Department to be revamped in light of such revelations, and maybe even, I don’t know, sent out to pasture.
Ever felt a little depressed? There’s an itch between your shoulder blades that you just can’t reach, yet you’re single and thereby have no one to scratch it (or to love, for that matter). Maybe you’re counting the hours until your rent check bounces, because despite your ability to vote, drive, and retain a stack of credit cards, you still suck at math. You probably wish you had just stayed in bed, but you’re out of sick days and worried you’ll get fired if you try to take just one more. We all go through rough patches in our lives, some tougher than others. What can you do other than buck up and force one foot in front of the other?
Well, you could get paid for being down in the dumps! That’s right, Uncle Sam will cut you a check every month if you say you’re too depressed to leave the house and go to work. Honestly, they should start sending me money ASAP, because even most movie previews get me crying.
“My ex’s new girlfriend just posted a hot picture on Instagram.… She’s so much hotter than me, I’M DEPRESSED!”
“OMG I gained five pounds this week… SOOO DEPRESSED!”
“I dropped my iPhone in a parking lot and the screen is cracked… DEPRESSED!!!!!!”
My mommy tells me I’m a just drama queen with “white girl problems,” but it’s depression, dammit! I want my check!
I would never willingly become a drain on the system. But there are lots of other folks with their hands out; currently, 8.8 million Americans receive disability checks from the government.24
I first discovered disability payments for depression back when I was a youngster in New Hampshire. Rebecca, a middle-aged woman who lived in my dad’s neighborhood, told my dad that she had severe depression. So bad, in fact, that she was collecting disability because of it. Rebecca revealed that she hadn’t had a normal job in years; she was simply “too depressed” to make it into an office each day.
Here’s a thought: Maybe she was depressed because she hadn’t had a reason to leave the house in years! I imagine that staying at home day after day, with no job to give you purpose, would actually make depression a lot worse. I’m no psychologist, but I’m pretty sure most of us would be climbing the walls with depression and anxiety if we lacked a sense of purpose. I know there are plenty of cases of actual severe depression that really does hinder normal day-to-day activity. But given that a person’s subjective claim that he or she is “mentally incapacitated” is enough for that person to start collecting disability every month, it’s easy to imagine how hundreds of thousands of Americans game the system.25 And besides, do we really want to be using our tax dollars to pay able-bodied people to stay home and watch Bachelor reruns year after year? Thanks, but no thanks.
Disability payments are doled out by the Social Security Administration under the name of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). And as with most mammoth welfare programs, paying for these benefits ain’t cheap, people. The cost of the program was $144 billion in 2013—yes, we’re literally shelling out hundreds of billions to pay people not to work.26 And that has nearly doubled what it cost ten years ago.
As the spending increases indicate, the number of Americans on disability also continues to skyrocket each year; since 2008, the number of individuals receiving these benefits increased 20 percent.27 There is currently one person collecting disability in the U.S. for every thirteen people working full-time.28 The number of recipients has exploded since 1968, when one person was collecting the benefits for every fifty-one people working full-time. These troubling stats would lead you to believe America is becoming more dangerous and unsafe everyday—or why else would the number of “disabled” folks be growing so steadily?
Actually, our nation has only gotten safer over the years. Back when relatively few Americans were on disability, a larger percentage of the population worked in factories and had blue-collar jobs that often involved dangerous physical labor.
Today, most working Americans have office jobs, and as a population we suffer from fewer disabling conditions than we did in the past.29 Advances in technology and research have given birth to superior medicine and resources to help the sick and disabled. As a result, our average life span is longer than it’s ever been.
So why are disability payments skyrocketing?
The Social Security Administration argues that the growth in disability spending is due to the mass retirement of baby boomers. But that’s not the whole story. Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research discovered that only 13 percent of the recent growth in the disability program among men was due to the aging population. For women, it was just 4 percent.30
The real culprit is relaxed eligibility, making it easier than ever to collect disability benefits. And before you start blaming Obama, here’s a dirty little secret that you’ll never hear from the Republicans: Ronald Reagan is the one who relaxed the eligibility requirements. Yup, that’s right—Ronald Reagan, the right’s poster child for traditional, small government conservatism.
In 1984, under Reagan, Congress passed the Social Security Disability Benefits Reform Act (SSDBRA… don’t you just love a good government acronym?).31 Under SSDBRA, the government is required to place more weight on applicants’ own assessments of their disabilities, especially when it comes to physical pain, and to loosen the screening process for various mental illnesses.
Translation: If you tell your doctor that you’re in pain or depressed, or that your back hurts—even if there’s no way to prove it—you can get disability benefits. Easy as store-bought pie.
Reagan clearly didn’t foresee the consequences of this provision when SSDBRA was passed. When he signed the bill into law, he proudly said, “It maintains our commitment to treat disabled American citizens fairly and humanely while fulfilling our obligation to the Congress and the American taxpayers to administer the disability program effectively.”
One reason the number of disability recipients has increased so drastically since Obama took office is because after the recession of 2008, many people who had trouble finding jobs realized they were eligible for the benefits. These folks had been eligible since Reagan signed the SSDBRA, but many didn’t know it until they were out of work.
It also doesn’t help that the size of government payouts for disability has increased substantially over the years.32 And then there’s the fact that Americans of all ages who qualify for the disability benefit also automatically receive Medicare. The value of Medicare benefits also continues to balloon, simply increasing the incentive for out-of-work Americans to get on disability. Why schlep it to your shitty job answering phones and doing dull paperwork all day when you could be paid to stay home eating Fritos and talking to your dog? Did you see Million Dollar Baby? After making it big in boxing, Hilary Swank’s character surprises her enormously overweight and lazy mother with a house. She immediately protests that if she has a house she can’t collect disability. “Maybe you could get a job,” offers her daughter.
“You know I watch my stories in the afternoon,” Mom replies.
This life of ease can be yours with a simple trip to the doctor’s office for that pesky shoulder pain you’ve been having.
Wasteful spending aside, the saddest part of this situation is that the explosion of the program may actually hurt those who are genuinely sick or disabled. There are Americans out there who truly do need assistance because of crippling disabilities, but the present system does a disservice to those folks. Many able-bodied Americans are currently gaming the system, collecting disability checks for life. This makes it difficult for the Social Security Administration to direct resources adequately to those who actually need it. And since the SSDI trust fund is set to go broke soon, the only way to ensure that the legitimately disabled get assistance is to reduce spending and tighten the eligibility criteria immediately. It’s time we got rid of the rampant abuse in the disability program before the people who need it most become the ones losing out.
A family friend, Jack, owns thirty to forty low-income properties in New Hampshire. Most of the places are falling apart, with peeling paint, ripped-up carpets, and the telltale lingering cigarette stink that screams, “Nobody cares.” Jack often told us horror stories about tenants who wouldn’t pay rent. Keep in mind that a lot of these tenants weren’t nice, wholesome families with two kids and a golden retriever; many of these folks were drug dealers and others who had serious criminal records. Sometimes Jack brought a baseball bat with him for protection when collecting rent. Oftentimes, they still wouldn’t pay, and Jack was forced to evict them (not so quick or easy a process).
After several years of doing this, Jack finally figured out a way to make these problems go away: He began renting, almost exclusively, to tenants on Section 8. Section 8 recipients get up to $2,200 per month from the government to pay for their rent. That’s more than most people can afford on their own. Section 8 became the government’s solution to public housing buildings, which are notorious for being crime ridden.
The program is great for landlords like Jack. Dealing with Section 8 tenants eliminates the annoyance of having to deal with unreliable tenants who don’t pay rent. Section 8 rent checks show up in the mail every month on time, since Uncle Sam is technically the tenant. The system also benefits landlords, because it allows them to jack up rent prices—the government doesn’t make the effort to ensure that each property’s rent is set at a fair price.
But Section 8 often harms the same people it’s intended to help (shocker). If you make too much money, you lose your Section 8 benefits. So if you get a job and start earning an amount that disqualifies you from Section 8 funding, you may end up paying more for rent and reducing your disposable income substantially. Needless to say, I wasn’t shocked when Jack told me that he almost never sees one of his tenants leave the program.
Many Section 8 recipients work under the table to avoid losing the rent money. Others decide to simply not work at all. The program, which has no limit on how long recipients can receive the benefits, is literally creating generations of families dependent on Uncle Sam.
Our own government is miring people in permanent poverty by rewarding them for not working. By subsidizing people to stay in poverty, the government enables the most vulnerable in our society to remain dependent. In thirty-five states, welfare pays better than minimum wage.33 Why go out there and work your ass off flipping burgers when you can sit on it at home eating Cheetos and make more money doing it? The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that low-skilled workers are better off financially if they choose to not work at all. If you really wanna live large on welfare, move to Hawaii, which offers over $60,500 per year in benefits, not to mention the beaches and year-round sunshine.34 Hell-oha, that’s more than the average household income in the United States! Recipients also do well in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts, where annually they can collect $50,820 and $50,540, respectively, but without the palm trees and balmy weather.
And even with all of this money going out, welfare doesn’t do much to end poverty. If anything, it’s like a life support system for keeping people poor and unemployed. The numbers don’t lie. Taxpayers spent nearly $800 billion on ninety-two federal programs to help the poor. Yet the poverty level remains only 2.5 points lower than it was when President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964.35 Clearly this system of perpetual victimhood and government dependency isn’t working. Here’s an idea: Instead of spending hundreds of billions to keep poor people in poverty, why don’t we invest some of that money in things like effective teachers in our public schools and training programs? As the old saying goes, give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll get off his Cheeto-dusted ass.
It’s painfully obvious that welfare needs to be downsized across the board. At the time of this writing, nearly 50 percent of U.S. citizens receive some sort of financial assistance from the U.S. government.36 That’s half the population!
Unfortunately, welfare is on the fast track toward more and more and MORE expansion, and many Americans don’t seem to notice this problem hurtling toward us like a money-sucking meteorite. Today, many are of the opinion that Uncle Sam is obligated to provide for the every need of all Americans. Gallup polling shows that about half of Americans support an expansive government as opposed to a limited one.37 And 19 percent support a very involved government that “should take active steps in every area it can to try to improve the lives of its citizens.”
Having money in the bank, a house to live in, food to eat, medical care, a cell phone, and fast WiFi—these are all things that many Americans now believe are fundamental rights that the government has an obligation to provide. Gone are the days when hard work was mandatory to put food on the table for your family. And is it really necessary to point out that when a government provides every need of its people, that’s called Communism? I shouldn’t have to explain why that doesn’t work.
This kind of entitled mind-set reminds me of that glorious Britney Spears single called “Gimme More” (yeah, the one she released the same year she went psycho and shaved her head). Poor Brit. In her prime she was the perfect pop-princess diva-goddess all-star that every nineties girl aspired to emulate.
And speaking of more…
A few years back, a woman named Angel Adams garnered national attention. Adams, who was thirty-seven years old at the time, had fifteen kids. Her fiancé, the father of ten of her children, was in jail. Adams believed that the system failed her even though her food, her furniture, and her $800-per-month rent was all being paid for by Good Samaritans and the government. But that wasn’t enough. “Somebody needs to pay for all my children,” Adams told a local news station.38 “And all my suffering. Somebody needs to be held accountable, and they need to pay.”
Um… somebody needs to pay? Maybe that somebody should be Adams! And I shouldn’t have to point out the many ways to protect one’s self from giving birth to more than a dozen children. These poor families are given incentives to reproduce though. Each little baby they pop out bumps up their benefits.
This kind of sickening entitlement should make every American furious. There are plenty of needy Americans out there who are struggling to make ends meet; many of these folks are embarrassed and ashamed that they are on government assistance, and they will do everything in their power to get off of it as fast as they can. Those are the people who are supposed to benefit from our welfare system. Those are the people we all want to help. Not people who are unwilling to work and think they deserve everything for nothing.
The crazy thing is that it’s not just Americans who think our government owes them something. So do people from around the world. The United States is a beacon of hope, where all kinds of people can come and take their shot at the American dream. It’s a wonderful thing. But when people come to our country and demand to have their every need subsidized by hardworking taxpayers, things start to go south.
And statistics suggest that America’s generous welfare system is attracting illegal immigrants with their hands out. As of September 2015, 87 percent of illegal immigrant families were on welfare.39 There are also reports indicating some immigrants migrate to the United States illegally and then have children in the country just so they can bank on these benefits.40 It’s crippling our country, not to mention that it completely ruined that Britney song for me. Most anthems are shouted by activists who want change, but this one is just whined in between commercial breaks.
Gimme, gimme more. Gimme more. Gimme, gimme more.
Gimme, gimme more. Gimme more. Gimme, gimme more.
Gimme, gimme more. Gimme more. Gimme, gimme more.
Gimme, gimme more. Gimme more. Gimme, gimme more…
In a nutshell: Most federally managed welfare programs—whether SNAP, disability, unemployment, or the Obamaphone program—have negative unintended consequences, despite good intentions.
So how did it get this bad? The Founding Fathers wanted to promote general welfare by allowing the government to legislate law for the common good of its citizenry. But there’s no question that they’d roll over in their graves if they could see the swollen welfare system in place today, taking from some and giving to others.
In an 1816 letter to his respected friend Joseph Milligan, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.41
It doesn’t get much more direct than that. Jefferson was wise enough to predict happiness and prosperity for the nation, so long as it could “prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”42 (For a fascinating look at the evolution of Jefferson’s thinking I highly recommend American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis.)
Jefferson is often quoted by modern conservatives, He was, after all, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, which political scientists today call the first Republican Party. Democratic-Republicans opposed a powerful centralized government, fearing it would lead to monarchical tendencies. They demanded that authority be given to the states, instead.
So given that Jefferson was a small-government guy, it doesn’t come as a shock that he was explicit about his disdain for a welfare state. What is more surprising, though, is that Jefferson’s political foes—those belonging to the Federalist Party—were also quite clear in stating their opposition to the government taking from some to give to others. There’s something innately commonsense in the highly reasonable stance of, “I earned this and I want to keep it.”
John Adams was a staunch Federalist (in case you slept your way through eighth-grade history class, he was also the second president of the United States). He believed that a strong centralized government could prevent tyranny. (The word tyranny has an antiquated ring to it, so as a more modern, Orwellian, and chilling alternative, consider tyranny as totalitarianism. If you’re in a totalitarian state, it simply means that there’s no way to opt out. Think monarchies, North Korean regimes, Scientology, and so on.)
Adams clearly opposed the welfare state. In his 1787 published work, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, he wrote:
The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.43
Adams and Jefferson make the same general point: The redistribution of wealth by the government would not yield freedom or prosperity. Nothing confusing there, right?
There’s so much yammering and handwringing about what the Founders actually intended. But when it comes to handouts, it’s crystal clear. We’re lucky enough in this case to be able to go right to the source: the Constitution. The Constitution’s general welfare clause outlines simple, and very specific, duties of the federal government.44 All other powers are left to the people and to the states.
James Madison, generally regarded as the “father of the Constitution” and its principal author, said, “With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”45
Thankfully, for much of U.S. history, the Supreme Court treated the welfare clause the way the Founders wrote it. There wasn’t any reason not to. In a 1905 ruling, the Supreme Court even wrote that the Preamble of the Constitution—in which the “general welfare” is referenced—“has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or any of its Departments.”
Well, that all changed in 1933 when FDR became president and introduced the New Deal (that thing we touched on earlier in the chapter before you took a time-out to follow your favorite celebrity down a Twitter black hole). The New Deal helped us get out of the Great Depression, but in the long run it paved the way for the modern welfare state.
FDR was the first U.S. president who saw the Constitution as a “living, breathing document.” Translation: He thought that he could interpret it any way he wanted to interpret it, to make it mean anything he wanted it to mean.
Remember the rules from Animal Farm that the pigs kept perverting to the point where we got paradoxical maxims like “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”? The rules and phrases were as malleable as Play-Doh.
It reminds me of when I was in high school and my mom would say, “Make sure you come home early,” as I left for a Friday night party. Of course, I never listened and would end up rolling into the driveway around 11 P.M. She’d be all pissy about it, reminding me that she had ordered me to come home early, and I’d come back with some snide remark like, “I did come home early. Everyone else is staying at the party until at least one A.M. I was basically the first one to leave. It was a misunderstanding! I had simply interpreted what you said to mean, come home early for a Friday night.” It never worked, and I spent a lot of my teenaged years grounded. No regrets, though—that was how I ended up so good at Farmville.
FDR thought he could twist the Constitution by interpreting meanings that weren’t explicitly written in the document. Unfortunately for FDR and his grabby political descendants, words mean things. It is painfully obvious when someone is willfully twisting a phrase to suit his or her own ends.
The Supreme Court justices at the time weren’t on the same page as FDR. Despite the adulation he’s been receiving for decades, the president initially had a tough time getting major parts of the New Deal legislation passed. The justices were weary of an activist government and held strict constructionist views, meaning they applied the text of the Constitution only as it is written. (Makes sense, right? Get thee to a Webster’s Dictionary, nation, and heal thyself!)
Despite the overturning of many of his programs by the courts, FDR vowed that he would do whatever it took to end the Depression. He explicitly said in his inaugural speech of 1937 that if the powers given to him under the Constitution were not enough to do what he wanted to accomplish, he would simply give himself more powers.46 You know, kind of like a king, or a tyrant, or a Big Brother type from Orwell’s worst imaginings—exactly the sort of thing our forefathers came to America to avoid.
An insight about tyranny comes from one of Aesop’s animal fables, “The Wolf and the Lamb.” A wolf meets a lamb in a field and decides he wants to eat him, but how, oh how, can he justify it?
Their conversation is illuminating:
“Last year you grossly insulted me,” says the wolf.
“Indeed,” bleated the lamb, “I was not then born.”
Then said the wolf, “You feed in my pasture.”
“No, good sir,” replied the lamb, “I have not yet tasted grass.”
Again said the wolf, “You drink of my well.”
“No,” exclaimed the lamb: “I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother’s milk is both food and drink to me.”
Upon which the wolf seized him and ate him up, saying, “Well! I won’t remain supper-less, even though you refute every one of my imputations.”
As always with Aesop, there’s a moral, which in this case has an uncanny relevance to our discussion: The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny, and it is useless for the innocent to try by reasoning to get justice, when the oppressor intends to be unjust.
Boom. You can’t reason with or placate people who have already made up their minds. You need to know that for most of the New Deal’s myriad legislative programs, at least some parts of them were pushing the limit or over the line of any reasonable notions of constitutionality. FDR intimidated justices, packed courts, overstepped at every turn, and used the presidency as the means to bring about his utopian vision no matter what the costs.
Roosevelt’s goals were the three Rs: Relief, Recovery, and Reform. Alliteration does have its charms, but ending Great Depressions was not one of Roosevelt’s accomplishments. We have the Second World War to thank for that.
The New Deal gave birth to a never-ending, ever-expanding welfare state, where the government has taken on the role of our ineffective, fumbling caretaker. Although this notion was never the intent of our nation’s founders, it is now accepted by many Americans that it’s the responsibility of the feds to take from some to give to others. At least Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. In this case, we’re all being robbed.
The situation is grim, but there are solutions. It’s not too late to turn things around. Welfare cuts need to be made across the board. When over half of the population depends on monthly checks from the government, something is wrong. There are too many people taking advantage of the system, and it’s time to nudge these folks back into the work force.
It’s critical that we create enforceable work requirements for able-bodied welfare recipients. I know it sounds harsh, but if recipients were forced to get out there and work (or at least mandated to attend job training) to receive benefits, their families would be better off in the long run. We’ve already seen success with work requirements on the state level.
In October 2014, Maine Republican governor Paul LePage implemented a work or volunteer mandate for able-bodied adults without dependents to receive food stamps. Those who did not complete the work or volunteer requirement were denied the benefits after three months.
The result? An astounding 70 percent drop in enrollment in SNAP.47
Another solution: We could tax welfare benefits, most of which are currently tax free. This has worked relatively well in Sweden, a nation known for its generous welfare system. If recipients were paying into the system, they would be likely to support an efficient government.
And let’s not forget education. Education level plays a large role in determining who receives welfare. Investing in good teachers—and having the ability to fire bad ones (see chapter 4)—would go a long way toward equipping young Americans with the skills they need to be self-sufficient down the road. We have to be giving people opportunity, not handouts.
These are all relatively easy and simple reforms. Why isn’t Washington taking the necessary action?
As Americans, we pride ourselves on giving everyone equal opportunity and helping the most vulnerable in our society. The Statue of Liberty, a symbol of hope that’s recognized around the globe, promises a better life to those who come to our shores: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But Lady Liberty holds a torch, not a welfare check.
America has served as a beacon. We have shone brightly to guide other countries by our example and ethos. But lately we’ve turned that beacon of liberty into a poorly tended flame that threatens to flicker out completely if we don’t start fixing things soon.
“You want to downsize welfare? How heartless!”
You say: “I don’t want to downsize welfare. I want to supersize self-sustainability! Can you think of any downside to helping people get back into the workforce, and off the government dole? (Which, in case you forgot, is financed by our tax dollars.)”
“Welfare has kept millions of poor people fed and clothed when they have nothing else.”
You say: “Some people definitely need and deserve welfare. But welfare has also kept millions of able-bodied Americans stuck in perpetual poverty. And that number continues to grow with each generation raised to accept such limitations. When does a temporary accommodation become a permanent or semipermanent crutch?”
“More Americans are on food stamps because of the 2008 recession.”
You say: “I’ve heard that, too, but it’s just not the case. The food stamp program ballooned years ago, before the current recession. These are hard, verifiable numbers for anyone who’s willing to look objectively, they’re not abstractions. Here are a few places you can check out. This is all public knowledge: factcheck.org, publicagenda.org, etc.”
You say: “Sure, but there are always better choices that every single one of us can make. If everyone tried to even be a little healthier, the amount of money the government would save in payouts would be staggering. This doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If everyone made one healthier choice a day, we’d all benefit.”
“Disability abuse has been rampant since Obama became president!”
You say: “I hear that a lot, too. I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that it was Republican hero Ronald Reagan who drastically relaxed the eligibility requirements to receive disability. And if we’re talking about disability abuse, we can’t separate it from the characters of the abusers. We can’t blame any one president for the thousands who have gamed the system over the years.”