Jeff Stahler for January 13, 2014

HAR!

Reagan pulled out, went into a “war on drugs” (fail) and a war against the middle class (success), and of course that stupendous “victory” in Grenada, also costing us troops, in another fraud paving the way for Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq in the American mind of “we can’t lose”.

We already have.

LBJ started that particular “war” just over 50 years ago and we are further from winning it today than we were then. Record numbers on unemployment… Record numbers getting food stamps… More without health insurance today than even just five years ago….Seems to me this is a “war” we lost not because of the Right but because of the Progressive Left.

Oh, by the way, the single largest increase in poverty in the US in the last 50+ years has been with the massive increase in single motherhood..Also, the choice is not between someone getting government benefits and starving. Just because government benefits end doesn’t mean that someone will just sit and starve instead. As the end of perpetual welfare during the Clinton administration showed what happens instead is that those who got cut off benefits they get employed, maybe at a less than desirable job, and find a way to make a living rather than starve..LBJ’s “Model City Program” of massive handouts failed. Public housing like the Watts project failed (such projects have been failures in Europe too…) as two examples.Having the government just hand someone a living does not work as a way of social advancement. History shows it.

republicanism: The poor have too much money and the rich have too little.

My 30 year old nephew who inherited a building company recently told me that he was angry with the welfare state. He explained that he couldn’t keep people on the job. They would work long enough to qualify to go back on unemployment , stay there until it ran out then come back to work. This kid was standing in his 3/4 million dollar house telling me that he paid his employees so little that they were better off on welfare, and he thought that THEY should be ashamed of themselves. And, he was serious!!!!

The war on poverty was lost the moment it began. We’ve wasted 9 trillion dollars on this “war”, and things are no better for the poor in this country than they were 50 years ago. Time to stop subsidizing this failure…