I’ve listened to all the Presidential debates, and now I’m being bombarded by all their freakin’ television commercials, but the one thing I’m finding annoying is the continuing rhetoric of one of Obama’s worst policies. The Democrats want to increase taxes on the “elite 1%” to spread the wealth to those who are not living the “American dream.” I believe that if a person is not where they want to be in life, it’s a problem with the poor choices they’ve made during their lifetime, not something to be gained by living off the earning of others who have worked hard and made the right choices.
While my wife and I can hardly be considered part of the elite1%. There were a few years after we married where we struggled while living in apartments so rundown that were shared with many welfare recipients. We didn’t go looking for government handouts. We decided that was not the manner in which we cared to live, we wanted a house and a family. To save for a house, we began to make all the hard choices for a starting couple. We made the choice to forgo new furniture, and borrowed a couch, a dining room set and even a black-and-white TV from relatives to furnish our apartment. While we both had fulltime jobs, we stayed in that crappy complex for years, saving money for our dream house. I also decided to continue going to night school to get my graduate degree in the belief it would lead to a better job and more money. These are the choices people make to get ahead in America. Unfortunately, thanks to bleeding hearts like the Democrats and Obama, who perpetuate a welfare state, a record high 23.1% of Americans are on welfare, an astonding38% of all children under the age of five are receiving government assistance. That’s one incredibly bad choice. If you can’t afford to feed yourself, keep your pants zipped, no kids. When you add in the number of Americans on Social Security, unemployment and VA benefits the percent of Americans receiving federal aid jumps to49.3%. Frankly, I don’t see how the top 1% income earners can support half the country, and I don’t want the burden of working the rest of my life, unable to afford retirement, because the people who make bad choices in their lifetime want to sit on their asses watching TV, drinking beer, and eating bon-bons. I have plans for my future which include enjoying the fruits of my own labor, not spreading my hard-earned dollars out to people who will continue to make poor decisions What incentive do these welfare recipients have to get off welfare when our politicians insist that it’s the fat 1% who are holding them down denying their dreams of being wealthy? Apparently not pride.
Those in opposition to my argument that here are too many on welfare will claim that these people are there because they didn’t have the education and opportunities that people similar to my wife and I had in life. Bullshit! My wife went to public school in rural Indiana. Her parents were low-income farmers who couldn’t afford to send her to college. Being the intelligent, hard-working individual she is, she thought ahead and made the right class choices while studying hard to maintain high grades. Her choices and efforts earned her entrance and partial financial assistance into one of the top engineering schools in the world, Purdue University. To assist with her living expenses, she did part time work in a work/study program. Her choices and hard work paid off in the end. Upon graduation, she was hired by Ford as an industrial engineer to walk the factory floors, hardly a cake job for a woman in a man’s world, but she stuck with the seventy-hour weeks for thirty years, all the while seeing a large portion of her paycheck disappear in taxes to the government.
I believe the greatest example of a person who never had an opportunity, and yet made his own opportunities to the betterment of himself, was my father. He was born in Sullivan, Indiana, the son of a World War One vet and a terrifying scarecrow of a mother. Their farm was so poor that they sold it off by the truckload as fill dirt for the homes in nearby Chicago. He didn’t play sports in high school. He worked the farm. Like my wife, he made the right class choices in high school and maintained good grades. Also like my wife, he was accepted at Purdue, only in chemical engineering and without financial assistance. When he left for Purdue in a beat-to-shit Buick, his father gave him twenty dollars. Fortunately for him, he didn’t go alone. He’d married my mother after high school. She worked and helped support him for those years in college. His hard work paid off as well. After college, he took a finance job with National Bank of Detroit. A short time later, he was hired by Ford Motor Company, where he’d turn his hard work into promotion after promotion until eventually he became Vice-chairman of the company before retiring at age 75. And if there was anyone who hated seeing his money going to welfare recipients, it was my father. So much so, he tried tax-shelter scheme after scheme to avoid losing all his money in taxes. Some worked, most didn’t. The IRS was on to him. Eventually, the final constant caught up to him, death. But even then the government wasn’t done. They taxed the shit out of his estate.
As sort of a microcosm of what will happen to America if we continue pushing welfare, let’s look at a major metropolitan area where the majority of the residents are on welfare, Detroit. In Detroit, 54.3% of the residents sixteen years and older work. The remaining 45.7% not only don’t work, they’re not looking for work. Why should they? Many of them are third and fourth generation welfare recipients. They’ve spent their lives on welfare, just like their parents and grandparents before them. The problem deepens when they continue with this shiftless attitude. They don’t care for their homes, reducing their property values, don’t pay their water bills or property taxes. All of this puts more pressure on the city to continue services with decreasing revenues. Eventually, the city was forced to file bankruptcy, and the residents move complaining of crime and the lack of city services. Detroit is a dying city, where the population has been reduced by over fifty percent in the last fifty years.
So what’s the solution to the welfare problem? Obviously people aren’t going to start making better choices in life. Equally unlikely, would be to cut off welfare. Although we could give some people incentive to get off by taking away their phones, cable, and Internet. How about at least having them do some community service each month?
My personal solution? I may quit working, and move to Hawaii where welfare is the highest in the country, $60,590/year. 60K will buy a lot of beer, cable TV and bon-bons, plus the sunshine is free. To top it off, there are no taxes on welfare so I’d never have to pay taxes again. Then on April 15th of each year, I’d crack open a brew, tip it toward the Mainland, and say: “Mahalo, thank you, taxpayers … suckers!”