The United Welfare States of America (Part 2)
October 8, 2007 | From theTrumpet.com
America, and much of the Western world, is addicted to welfare. Leaving aside the vast economic costs, the fabric of society is being ripped apart. By Robert Morley
When America’s founding fathers revolted against Britain, history books tell us they were rejecting the heavy taxation and oppressive government. Part 1 of this article showed that America has become a giant welfare state burdened with taxes far in excess of what Washington, Jefferson, or any other founding father would ever have imagined.
Although the economic consequences associated with becoming a welfare state are about to be felt, America is already experiencing many of the social consequences.
Today, government has become so large and all-encompassing that it acts like a big mother hen still nurturing her 40-year-old children who refuse to leave the family nest.
This big-mother approach promotes a culture of irresponsibility. Take the effects of welfarism on family life, for example.
Despite the welfare reforms of the late 1990s, the U.S. government still requires the state to meet every material need of a child despite the actions of his or her parents. The welfare solution is to provide money for disadvantaged children by taxing everyone else. Nobody considers that by rewarding certain lifestyle choices, welfarism only encourages negligent behavior by detaching it from its consequences.
Welfare continues to act as a giant engine powering the production of fatherless children, and consequently child misery and poverty. Millions of young girls get pregnant out of wedlock—and the state, instead of focusing on the cause of the fatherless children, deals with the effect by providing a range of welfare benefits including generous “income disregards,” government accommodation, and in-home visitation by nurses. Other young girls see their peers experiencing a life that looks appealing; young men see no consequences. So there is little deterrent, and the welfare cycle continues, drawing in more young mothers and creating more fatherless, disadvantaged children.
In essence, welfare programs often undermine the role of the father in the home. The welfare culture tells recipients that the father is not necessary to the family; the breadwinner is a welfare check. But an ethereal state figure cannot provide authority and love that helps build proper character that keeps adolescents out of crime.
The welfare mentality has also eroded basic individual responsibility for things like planning for the future and determining how you will put food on your own table once you retire. Before big government welfare programs and the mandated Social Security tax, “social security” meant family, a good work ethic and responsible planning. If an aging parent could no longer work, his children would provide for his needs. Family came together to take care of Mom and Dad. Elderly parents weren’t left for the state to pay for. If someone slipped through the cracks, these real needs were taken care of by charitable organizations and churches. (Again, the biblical economic model does have a system of welfare to provide for the truly needy.)
With Social Security, because the government has plundered the Social Security fund to finance its spending, the younger generation is taxed, effectively, to pay today’s retirees. It is a similar situation with Medicare and other government-sponsored programs. Aging parents don’t need kids—the state takes care of them. And kids don’t want to care for parents because it is cheaper and easier to foist them on the state—which is actually the taxpayers.
The problems with welfare in America are even worse in Britain. Commenting on that system, Melanie Phillips wrote, “It is the welfare state which, more than anything else, has created a culture of incivility, irresponsibility, family breakdown and disorder …. Yet no politician, even Conservative ones, will go near this subject. For all the windy rhetoric about irresponsibility and state interference, the root cause of these problems—the welfare state—remains a political untouchable” (Daily Mail, April 26).
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