The catastrophe by hurricane Katrina has brought before everyone's eyes the reality of a poor class of Americans, mostly (in this case), African Americans. And so the pundits pontificate, largely wagging their finger at the Bush admin. for supposedly exaggerating their plight.

Let's talk about this -- the welfare state, poverty, etc. And we'll let Jonah Goldberg start us off.

quote:

More to the point, since the days of the Great Society, the U.S. Government has thrown literally trillions of dollars at the poor. It undoubtedly helped some and it indisputably hurt others.

The people it hurt most are poor blacks, helping to erode social and family bonds. We are told, for example, that out-of-wedlock births are a uniform cultural phenomenon these days. This is simply a lie. Seventy percent of blacks are born out of wedlock, most of them poor. Murphy Brown notwithstanding, upper-income women overwhelmingly wait to get married before they have their kids. Nothing is a better predictor of a child�s success in life than if he comes from a stable, two-parent family. It doesn�t matter if they�re rich or poor. The problem, as the University of Pennsylvania�s Amy L. Wax recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, is that there�s a shortage of poor black men willing to take on the serious responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. Of course, many are. But nowhere near enough of them.

Welfare programs, it seems, have contributed to the breaking up of the family. The statistics are there for all to see.

Of course, one criticism that has been implied is that the fate of these poor has been exacerbated by the Bush Administration. But, as William F. Buckley notes:

quote:

The proposition that the Federal Government under George W. Bush has been shortchanging welfare is in astonishing conflict with the figures. Under Bush, federal spending increases have been at the fastest rate in 30 years. Non-defense discretionary spending under Bush has grown by 35.7 percent, the highest rate of federal government growth since the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.

And now check out An Unnatural Disaster, by Robert Tracinski.

quote:

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit�but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals�and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep�on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

. . .

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them�this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

Tough talk . . . and by a fellow African American. Too tough?

Not too tough! Pulling up short only bodes more of the same, although I don't see much change in store for the future. NO will be rebuilt, in all likelihood, with even more public housing projects, since the poor are so central to the upkeep of its government. Most who return will be the welfare-addicted poor, if the new environment suggests they are able to return to their parasitic lifestyle. Entitlement systems keep incompetents on the local government payroll fat and happy, and these are inseperably linked to "The Great Society."

To this discussion, let me add this link that I was serendipitously made aware of by someone else.

Catholics for Big Government
by James K. Fitzpatrick

Welfare programs, it seems, have contributed to the breaking up of the family. The statistics are there for all to see.

Yes, Phil. I would say that the general principle at work is that people are not thinking about the possible harmful consequences of "do-gooder" actions, and then are often ignoring the harmful results when they do occur. First off, when one thinks one is doing good, one isn't likely to see, or want to see, any of the harm caused by one's efforts. The whole point was to help people. It takes a highly confident, self-aware, and ethical person with a sturdy constitution to acknowledge the harm. But "doing good" requires no more thought than voting for funds for some program (or voting for some politician who promises to do such a thing). And the way opponents to social spending are so savaged and demonized, both by politicians (basically Democrats these days) and the press, it's no wonder that the trend is towards more and more money spent on entitlements.

To solve this problem we must, as the left is want to say, "raise people's consciousness". We need to make people aware that throwing money at a problem is not only not usually the same thing as solving it (at least in terms of social programs�it works much better on things like bridges) but that it often leads to harm. It's basically a shell game worked by the politicians that preys on the average person's humane desire (and latent guilt) to care for those in need. The reason it is hard to raise the consciousness on stuff like this is because, well, we are human beings with emotions. We don't have much of a conception of a trillion dollars being wasted. But we can see, say, the benefits of an old lady in a new wheel chair provided by Medicare. What is harder to see is the dozen young mothers who are forced to cut back on what they can provide their children because of the onerous taxes that have to pay for that wheelchair. And whatever the case may be, the positive (that wheelchair) seems to be a compelling case only for the hand-outs, not reductions in hand-outs. The sh*t will surely hit the fan at the mere mention of reductions in spending. Reduction will be demagogued and equated with confining a thousand old ladies to virtual prison in their home without wheelchairs. Who among us is not subject to that kind of manipulation?

So we must stop engaging in fantasy and start engaging in reality. And we can keep all the feel-good humanity that we want, for our motivation can still be with helping people, not saving a buck. It's not an exaggeration to say that we could do more good with just half the money we spend now if we spend that money more wisely. But the good news is that we could, with just, say, 3/4 of the money we're spending now, help more people and save a ton of money (and thereby help an awful lot of struggling families live a demonstrably better life).

What we all need is one of those reflective-silver fire suits similar to what firemen use in order to go into a thousand degree burning room. We need a similar suit to protect us form political demagoguery.

Few single parents will vote themselves off the welfare dole and into the risky, self-abasing dilemma of a merit-based economy that has relatively sparse entitlements to fall back on and that lasts for several generations beyond their own lives and their children's. This is probably the main reason government officials shy away from committing themselves publicly to the tasks of this inevitably painful transition, as they are so liable to be accused of callousness, and because the time-frame extends well-beyond their own lifespan. One term of office where entitlements are reduced doesn't look like a success story in the making. Single mothers forced, or "encouraged," off welfare status must pay for daycare and encounter far more stress than the grave but simple depression of hanging out in front of the T.V. all day long. When you consider that most poor families suffer from the highest percentage of personality disorders, then the attraction to independence that brings little gratification in one's own lifetime is rather weak.

Few will vote themselves out of the welfare dole and into the risky, self-abasing dilemma of a merit-based economy that has relatively sparse entitlements to fall back on and that lasts for several generations beyond their own lives and their children's. This is probably the main reason government officials shy away from committing themselves publicly to the tasks of this inevitably painful transition, as they are so liable to be accused of callousness, and because the time-frame extends well-beyond their own lifespan. One term of office where entitlements are reduced doesn't look like a success story in the making.

quote:

The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves--in their separate, and individual capacities.

In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.

The desirable things which the individuals of a people cannot do, or cannot well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an infinite variety of subdivisions.

The first--that in relation to wrongs--embraces all crimes, misdemeanors, and non-performance of contracts. The other embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.

From this it appears that if all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government. � Abraham Lincoln

A wealthy society is going to, quite naturally, I think, liberalize the notion of what people can individually do as well for themselves. And that's fine. But I think we have to keep in mind that that's not all that's going on here � or sometimes even mostly. The political process is the political process. There will be some ugly, but necessary, realities. Madison's idea of "ambition countering ambition" is one of the most workable ideas man has ever instilled into the framework of government. It means that it allows factions of angels and factions of devils to coexist. But it doesn't ensure angels.

The reality is that what can be created via the democratic process is an entire political class of people with a relationship of "goods for votes" which is too intimate for either the person's good or the good of society at large. But that's the nature of politics. And the volume of demagoguery is so loud and so intentionally provocative that I think it makes it difficult to try to get out the message of "We care too�so much so that let's not undermine people's spirits and condemn them to poverty for personal political gain. Let's do what science, reason, and a clean conscious dictates that will be uplifting and helpful, not harmful and dependent-making."

There's an ongoing battle on how compassion is to be defined. Mixed in with this is the human (but corruptive�at least to the idea of compassion) battle for power and influence as well. Someone can disagree about what is most compassionate without necessarily being a demagogue, but, frankly, I'm not seeing a lot of that these days.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Ar...Article.asp?ID=19527


"New Orleans has been a city in trouble for a very long time. When I arrived there as a young man, my liberal Minnesota upbringing prepared me to believe that the root cause of the city's problems was poverty and racism. But the direct experience of the city revealed a much bigger problem - an ethic of government dependency and a political spoils systems that bred selfishness and corruption.

Call it what you will - The Great Society, the War on Poverty, the welfare state -- we saw the great socialist experiment that started in the 1960s come crashing down when Hurricane Katrina roared into New Orleans. The Great Society was ostensibly created to help the poor, but has in fact institutionalized poverty with the most devastating consequences reserved for the poor themselves.

The blame game is on, led by the Angry Left. They follow Gramsci's dictum: progress is incremental; if you cannot win the hearts and minds of the people by reason, then attack the moral credibility of your opponent. It's an old trick that has proved effective in the past but is slowly losing steam. The quick and generous aid of many American gives lie to the charge that America is a racist nation. And the spectacle of blacks preying on blacks in the Superdome and on the streets of New Orleans gives the lie to the idea that blacks constitute a monolithic "community" and that people like Rev. Jesse Jackson or Rev. Al Sharpton speak for them all.

Hurricane Katrina is a test of the moral character of our nation. The argument about where blame should be laid is only superficially a question about responsibility. On a deeper level it involves how the anarchy and suffering witnessed by the American people should be understood and perceived. Americans are being forced to ask if the failure in New Orleans is testimony to the culture-destroying initiatives of the Great Society, or is it due to not enough government intervention. Is the response to the civic breakdown more political involvement in the affairs of the community, or has the intrusion contributed to the disorder?"

What an outstanding article, WC. It�s what I believe. But how do we get our black brothers and sisters to believe it also? There�s such deep distrust out there and there are people making political hay out of that distrust and who are, in fact, doing about everything they can do fuel that distrust. And then the other side of the equation:

quote:

Keeping the poor in poverty was not the intention when the great socialist experiment began with Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, but the widespread belief that motives rather than consequences justify ideas keeps the destructive policies in place. The belief plays on the goodwill that rests deep in the American character. When Americans hear the moral appeal to help the poor embedded in yet another Big Government prescription, many support it with little reflection.

I do believe most people want to help but, as the writer said, they tend to support program after program with little reflection. And perhaps this is not surprising for I think most people have a real discomfort in regards to the poor and poverty. We treat them like lepers in some respects, although it�s nothing personal. But I think this is so because they remind us that we are all only a financial collapse away from their ranks. So we stab at the problem through our guilt and discomfort. We generally don�t look much closer at the effectiveness of poverty programs because we don�t really want to look closer. I think we look the other way and just pay our money as if making a bargain with the devil to keep our own lives untouched by poverty, to stave off the wolves.

Heck, guilt is better than nothing if it leads to effective help for those who are in need. But it makes us highly vulnerable to demagoguery and misunderstandings. If we can look straight at the problem without blinking then maybe we can start asking some tough, but fair, questions that will actually lead to the improvement of the lives of those who need help. As it is now, the climate is such that no one wants to appear racist or at all callous by asking some tough questions. The barrier is that some people really do zealously care, but are a bit inflexible and unwilling to rethink the problem and look at alternatives. But I think the main problem resides in the demagogues of the world who are mostly responsible for creating this hostile and inflexible climate.

Yeah, before I saw the author's name I thought, "Wow, Brad's gone public!"

Bill O'Reilly talking point for 9-15-05

quote:

We'll begin by comparing the halfway point of President Clinton's tenure to the fifty yard line of the Bush administration. In 1996, the poverty level in the USA stood at 13.7%. In 2004, the poverty level was 12.7%, so Bush beats Clinton here by a full percentage point. To be fair, Clinton did bring the poverty rate down during his administration, while it has been rising slightly since 9/11. But at the halfway point, Bush wins.

As far as entitlement spending on poverty programs is concerned, it isn't even close. In 1996, President Clinton signed a budget that directed 12.2% of spending be directed toward the poor. In 2004, Bush's budget kicked 2% more than Clinton to poverty programs, an astronomical $329 billion dollars. In fact, President Bush is spending more on poverty entitlement programs and education than any President in history. What say you, Jesse and Howard?

For a country that is often accused by leftwing loons of not caring about the poor, we are certainly putting up a good front. In 2006, almost $368 billion dollars will go for Medicaid, food stamps, family support assistance, supplemental security income, child nutrition programs, earned income tax credits, welfare payments, child care payments, foster care and adoption assistance, and child health insurance payments to the states. The truth is that the working men and women of this country are providing the tightest safety net in history for the poor. And our private charitable donations rank first in the world as well.

Phil:

It is even a debate of issues, as one can't get a leftist to show up long enough to indulge in a real conversation, which is why the tenured academy is such a refuge for them. Were they to really egage, they'd be revealed for the fantasies they live in. But, as Brad often points out, the emotional bonding via shared hatreds of a projected sort can never really be exposed in their own minds. Looks more and more to me like a mental illness indeed.

Yeah, before I saw the author's name I thought, "Wow, Brad's gone public!"

What a wonderful compliment to start the week with. Thanks, WC. But let me state for the record that I do think Shalom Place is public. I think you meant "Wow, Brad�s getting paid for mouthing off!" Welcome back, Phil.

quote:

New Orleans was partly a catastrophe of the welfare state, which has subsidized inner cities with countless billions of dollars throughout the past 30 years, with little to show for it except more social breakdown. The past few weeks should be the impetus for "bold, persistent experimentation," as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, in the country's social programs. Instead, we are likely to get more spending on more of the same, and eventually everyone's attention will shift once again from the shame of New Orleans and the persistent failure of the welfare state.

Rich Lowry
- http://www.nationalreview.com/...owry200509200816.asp

Is this good?

Absolutely not, imo, and the Bush admin. is trying to keep the relief efforts from being a pure giveaway.

quote:

The most controversial parts of the Bush aid package for New Orleans are the ones that attempt to free the poor from the tentacles of government bureaucracy. He wants to give the unemployed personal accounts to assist in their job search and create a $500 million program to fund school vouchers for displaced children to attend private schools. The current political climate is premised on the notion that no one should say "no" to any Katrina-related program, but Democrats will attempt to veto these proposals.

But of course!

Listening to a Noam Chomsky speech yesterday. (Yes, I'll go to my room without dessert) He mentioned that at America's founding the wealth ratio between rich and poor natons was 3:1 and by the 1950s had grown to 35:1 and now stands at 72:1.

This is a serious problem. I don't suggest that pouring money down a sinkhole will solve the problem, as that would be unwise stewardship. Somehow, somewhere in the hopefully not too distant future, a coalition of liberal/conservative minds will put their heads together to address this.

Although it is found nowhere in the bible, I do believe that "God helps those who help themselves." I think conservatives would sign on to global and domestic programs that show actual change and results, and are tied to personal responsibility. The private sector ties pay to performance. The public will demand this for the public sector as well. Blog sites and watchdog groups to monitor performance?

This will require something we don't have yet, changed hearts and minds...

WB, Phil, and thank you for shalomplace!

quote:

He mentioned that at America's founding the wealth ratio between rich and poor natons was 3:1 and by the 1950s had grown to 35:1 and now stands at 72:1.

This is a serious problem.

I�ll not take any statistics or even the time of day from Chomsky without triple checking them, but his Marxist implication is that the rich can only get rich by exploiting the poor. Therefore the richer the rich become, the poorer the poor must be. This is not true. Part of the problem is that you have people (rich people) like Chomsky running around telling us all that the evils of the world are caused by the rich. If this is true, why in the world should we believe this rich man then? Case closed. After all, he�s the kind of people who are supposedly exploiting the rest of us.

If you lopped American off the world map; if you made it as if they never existed by taking them completely out of space-time; if you removed all its wealth, all its influence you would still have dirt-poor countries in Africa and around the world and, worse, they would not have this economic power as both a beacon and as a source of capital and technology to help pull themselves out.

We can get into the intricacies of tax policy and whether it makes sense (it doesn�t) to tax the rich at rates as high as 90%, but it�s inherent in the whole idea of wealth production that a sign that wealth is being produced as that there is a certain disparity between rich and poor.

The real challenge is to teach people (if they want to) how to become a part of this democratic capitalistic wealth-making machine and how to make the most of it. Or we can simply, as Chomsky is apparently doing, try to apologize for our wealth and sabotage the wealth-making machinery by artificially limiting the ratio that can exist between poor countries and wealthy countries. Sounds nifty until you realize the extreme loss of freedom entailed in that. It�s been tried before. It didn�t work. It doesn�t work. It will never work.

Conservatives like to invest in things and get behind causes when they can see some good results.
Come up with a plan that can impress them and the money will flow. Some private charities have done this and I'll try to post some of them as I find them. Agreed Marx is best remembered as a group of four talented comedians. Chomsky deadpans too much!


change4thebetterornot@all.com

Conservatives like to invest in things and get behind causes when they can see some good results.
Come up with a plan that can impress them and the money will flow. Some private charities have done this and I'll try to post some of them as I find them.

Wouldn't one always be looking for good results in regards to charity? I mean, if you give money to people who are hungry you want them to be fed, not have whatever money you give them spent on booze or embezzled by aid workers.

Good point. How about a thousand points of light in the form of consumers of gov't services advocates?

Let me run another one by you. This is already being done. Vouchers for a matching fund to buy a house paid by agencies to those who attend GED classes, computer classes, domestic violence programs and smoking cessation groups. The recipient then matches
the grant with an equal amount of their own money.

So far over 100 families have become homeowners and they have so far all kept their new home.

Workfare saves alot of $$$ in the long run. Could this be a common sense solution based on personal responsibility and natural laws?

mellowyellowmeme.com

"The real challenge is to teach people (if they want to) how to become a part of this democratic capitalistic wealth-making machine and how to make the most of it."


I think this is a sensitive point deliberately avoided. It is crass, even cruel, to suggest that the poor want to be poor. But what is wanted, it seems to me, is to remain entitled, which is often what the rich, when they are narcissistic, and the poor, have in common. Poverty is mostly a lifestyle of entitlements, and often deeply links people to each other in communities and families that are inseparable from individual personal identity. From what I've been reading, when housing projects are built in affluent areas, they mostly stagnate the neighborhoods, as those receiving the leg up don't want to change; they keep living as they would were the housing projects in a poor area of town.

Here are further reflections on kinds of poverty, or responses to charity, that differentiate the dilemma far beyond what the left likes to consider:


http://www.findarticles.com/p/...201/ai_n9028733/pg_4

" . . . There were poor people who had only recently become poor, and only needed that one opportunity to get back on track. Then there were men and women who were down on their luck, in a rut. Their lives were not easy, but one could see a way out; all they needed was to catch a break, have someone care about them and help them set reachable goals. Finally, there were the hard cases of long term, multi-generational poverty. What can be done here? Training programs don't seem effective, nor does workfare. This is where I find a workfare program dangerous, that while it can work for the first two groups it cannot help the third because incentives mean little to them. They have accepted their lot and will eke out a life at whatever income support the state will offer them. For this group the only solution I can imagine is a dignified paycheque with few strings attached, if any."

For me, it always comes back to changing these stubborn levels of consciousness, the human condition if you will. Evangelistic outreach into the poor areas seems effective to me. After all, I am an evangelical. What if the Catholic church knocked on as many doors as the Jehovah's Witnesses
do? It might be anathema to liberals for the gov't to promote attendance at meditation groups, but society might be getting desperate enough to lend approval to such measures.

I still believe in the old formula of onward Christian soldiers. This group began in the most hideous slums of industrial England:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_Army

All the how-tos just seem to come together after the why-to is settled. Jesus himself is the way.
This is true for the slums and prisons,and for Beverly Hills!

The Contract With America has reduced the welfare roles by half. Women with children get two years now, or 5 years total over a lifetime. After that,
I guess Catholic charities picks up the load.

Most Republicans probably don't know this, and cummunities are very segregated nowadays. City planners build the beltways around these areas so that suburban commuters can comfortably avoid the
unpleasant sight. Jesus said something about widows and orphans, but it seldom gets preached
on Sunday.

quote:

Most Republicans probably don't know this, and cummunities are very segregated nowadays. City planners build the beltways around these areas so that suburban commuters can comfortably avoid the unpleasant sight. Jesus said something about widows and orphans, but it seldom gets preached on Sunday.

I think there�s little doubt that Katrina has highlighted the fact that we do often wall ourselves off from the plight of the poor. And one of the points made by some of us on this thread is that this is readily enough done by Democratic policies; policies that might make a few people get the warm and fuzzies but policies that nevertheless often create a wall. In no sane world that I know of do you leave 30 or so people in a nursing home to fend for themselves. But in a different disguise are the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who we leave to drown in often ill-conceived social programs.

Goodbye to All That
Is this the end of "compassionate conservatism"?
By Jonah Goldberg

quote:

The neocons didn't oppose the welfare state per se. They opposed a welfare state that made society worse. (Irving Kristol even argued for a "conservative welfare state.") Hence Social Security never bothered them much, because delaying subsidies until one's golden years is unlikely to create the sorts of perverse incentives that might lead to roving gangs of octogenarian car thieves.

The compassionate conservatism of such intellectuals as Marvin Olasky and Myron Magnet was really just a fleshing-out of these neoconservative observations (though, in Olasky's case, with a bit more religion thrown in). They emphasized that not only is it bad public policy to encourage destructive behavior, but it's uncompassionate to the very people government is trying to help.

quote:

Ultimately, this is the core problem with all ideologies that try to make government an extension of the family. Welfare-state liberalism wants the government to act like your mommy. Compassionate conservatives want the state to be your daddy. The problem: Government cannot love you, nor should it try.

MM, here�s an article that I think is somewhat sympathetic to your view that there is too much pork barreling. It provides a few answers as well.

Know Thy Place
by Chris Edwards

"Ultimately, this is the core problem with all ideologies that try to make government an extension of the family. Welfare-state liberalism wants the government to act like your mommy. Compassionate conservatives want the state to be your daddy. The problem: Government cannot love you, nor should it try."


I generally steer clear of aphorisms, but that is one worth its space and more.