Our country’s traditions and core values are on the decline

In recent years many of our cultural values have been eroding, and in some cases are being consciously abandoned.

Standing and holding your hand over your heart during the performance of the National Anthem is a part of many activities. It is a simple but sincere way of honoring our nation and paying tribute to the opportunities it provides and its protection of personal freedom that is unparalleled in the world. Rather than honor the country that has been so good to them, some now balk at this simple act, and instead remain sitting, or “take a knee” in protest.

In fact, protest is becoming the new national pastime. Most anything that upsets somebody may well become a protest movement. A large segment of the population seemingly feels led to either start a protest, or take part in them. And some things that now upset folks are things that once were hardly noticed.

For example, some women are offended when a male in a standing position talks to a female who is sitting down. “Mansplaining,” it is called, and is considered offensive because the man is deemed to consider himself superior to the woman.

And then when a male sits and spreads his legs wide apart, that, too, is offensive to some females. They term this “manspreading,” because the male is thought to hold himself in such high regard that he can take up more space than he is due.

We also see the long-established idea of working for a living and supporting yourself and your family being abandoned in favor of welfare, food stamps and Medicaid replacing earned income. Government encourages this by making it too easy to get by without working. The ethic of getting a basic education and either going to work or continuing your education to prepare for a career no longer seems important to many people.

Sometimes economic conditions and a shortage of available jobs force people onto government support. Government imposes policies that instead of encouraging job creation often stifle it through overly strict, crippling regulations and daunting taxation, and then government spends tax revenue to support the people its policies have put on the unemployment line.

Two-parent families have given way to single-parent families, and the harm to children in that situation is often substantial. These families most often lack a father figure, whose presence can and should be a positive influence on children. And, it is becoming common for single mothers to have more children, not because they want more children so much as because they get more money from the government by doing so.

Educating children about our country’s history and values no longer takes place in many homes, and that responsibility gets transferred to schools. But then many schools no longer adequately fill that role, either. Consequently, lots of our younger citizens have no idea why America is a great place to have been born and to live, and without that understanding, proper attitudes of citizenship do not form.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many college kids cannot cope with normal events in life, and react with fear when they encounter unfamiliar or different ideas? With safe spaces and trigger warnings, even if schools still present subject matter without an ideological bias, many campuses shield students from lessons that teach about life and being an adult in the 21^st century. College life should expose young people to new and different ideas and teach them to seek truth, but too often, it does not.

Further complicating the educational experience is the widely promoted idea that everyone needs a college education, and there are ample scholarships, grants and loans available to help pay for it. Colleges are embroiled in an arms race to attract students and the money they bring with them through lavish dormitories and other facilities.

Of course, not everyone needs a college education, and not everyone can complete the requirements for a diploma. And many students pursue degrees in fields that do not allow them to support themselves. Meanwhile, thousands of good paying jobs go unfilled that less expensive vocational training would have prepared people to perform.

As the college experience continues to devolve on many campuses, a group of professors from Princeton, Harvard and Yale have introduced a program that runs counter to the developing new college environment. They encourage students to avoid crippling campus groupthink and to instead think for themselves.

Sixteen professors from the three schools signed a letter warning the Class of 2021 at their school about the danger of “falling into the vice of conformism” on campus.

Princeton Professor Robert P. George told Fox News host Tucker Carlson, “We’re telling our students not to fall into that groupthink,” he said. “You should be pursuing the truth. That’s what being in college is all about. It’s learning to pursue the truth and it’s learning to become a life-long truth seeker.”

To the extent this productive attitude spreads and influences more young people, the positive college environment of old will be restored, and will produce more well-grounded young people who are prepared for adulthood. That will help a lot.

Making government operate more like a business: a really smart idea

One good thing about President Donald Trump is his businessman’s approach to government. He understands that like a business, a nation cannot survive endless deficit spending and an ever-growing national debt.

To the horror of those on the left of our political system he proposes significant, but not massive, cuts to government spending. And while the cuts are not excessive, the idea still cranked up the wild imaginations and scaremongering mechanisms of Congressional Democrats and other liberals who think money grows on trees and that the national debt is a number that really isn’t important.

Trump understands what so many on the left do not: much of government spending is wasted, fraudulent and abused, and therefore unnecessary and foolish. Actually, it’s not that the left doesn’t understand this, it’s that they couldn’t care less, because they benefit at the ballot box from lax programs that waste your money, and therefore eschew fiscal responsibility, in favor of positive elections results.

Human nature plays a role here: people often will take advantage of what is available to them free of charge. As evidence, consider the recent results from Alabama.

The Daily Signal reported that when “The Heart of Dixie” this year began requiring food stamp recipients to work, look for work, or get approved job training to get food stamps, 13 counties saw participants drop by 85 percent over a four-month period from 5,538 able-bodied adults without dependents to 831 such recipients.

“Statewide, a total of 13,663 able-bodied adults without children or other dependents were enrolled in the food stamp program before the change [was] implemented Jan. 1, according to the Alabama Department of Human Resources,” the news site AL.com reported. “As of May 1, that statewide number had dropped to 7,483, the agency said.”

Clearly, Alabama was going well beyond the goal of helping those who really need it, and Alabamans were availing themselves of Uncle Sugar’s federal assistance in a welfare program that was not being operated in a sensible manner.

Other states have had this same experience. In 2013 and 2014 Kansas and Maine implemented work requirements and reduced the number of able-bodied adults on food stamps, and last year Georgia followed suit.

And when Maine imposed work requirements on food stamp recipients in December of 2014 officials reported that the number of able-bodied adults without dependents declined from 13,332 to just 2,678 over a three-month period. Maine officials concluded that many food stamp recipients would do without the benefit rather than perform a minimum of six hours per week of community service, or other aspects of the work requirements.

These results prompted Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation who specializes in poverty and welfare programs, to project that, “If the federal government establishes and enforces similar work requirements nationwide, total food stamp enrollment would plummet in a few years, possibly saving taxpayers $10 billion per year or as much as $100 billion over the next decade,” The Daily Signal reported.

Not all of that money is federal money, of course, but about 90 percent of it is. And keeping the federal portion of those dollars in the nation’s treasury certainly is a positive thing. It’s even better when you understand that those truly needing help are not part of the reductions, and that other federal programs also suffer these same problems.

It is widely acknowledged that Americans are the most compassionate people in the world, and they certainly have no objection to helping their fellow citizens in need. Even so, they do not want their hard-earned tax dollars being wasted on people who can earn their own way. Sound business practices prohibit such sloppiness; they are business killers.

Of course, with all of these people no longer getting food stamps, having available jobs for them is important, and that feeds right into Trump’s goal of bringing back jobs and creating an environment for new job production to flourish.

Trump managed to get pledges from several companies that said they would invest in America, bringing back or creating new jobs. And good things are also happening because of his effort to remove job-killing regulations.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace recently, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said, “We’ve had almost 50,000 jobs created in the mining and coal sector alone. In fact, in the month of May, almost 7,000 jobs,” Pruitt told Wallace.

Naysayers will note that this number really isn’t that significant, but the important reality is that it is a step in the right direction, and a dramatic shift in direction from the dangerous, job-killing policies of the Obama administration.

Coal industry and related jobs killed by Obama are coming back following the removal of the foolish regulations that killed them. No one expects that coal will reach its former economic glory, but a lot of people put out of work by merciless regulations will be productive again.

Obama and others on the left think they know best and will try to control every aspect of our lives to achieve their vision. But that isn’t what America is all about. Thank goodness that Trump understands that.

Federal welfare programs give freely and demand little

Americans, it is said, are the most generous people in the world. We give to our friends and neighbors and fellow countrymen when they need help, of course, but we also help those who live thousands of miles away in other countries.

We are quick to provide a “hand up” to Americans in need, to help them over rough spots and get them back on their feet so that they can then take care of themselves. There are those who for various reasons are unable to help themselves, and we don’t mind continuing to provide assistance for them.

The hand up is sometimes called a “safety net,” a device to save those truly in need from falling into despair. But for many the safety net has turned into a hammock, no longer a device to help out in an emergency or time of trouble, but an easy way of life for those who would rather let others provide for them than provide for themselves.

This is sometimes a matter of availing themselves of a good opportunity, while at other times it is a matter of culture: Far too many Americans have been taught through actual experience that it is not so difficult to live off the government and charitable interests.

A friend taught a class in the 80s in a junior high school whose student body had a not-so-good reputation for academic achievement. He told the story about his first six-week grading period, using a grading system that was designed to reward honest effort as much as a grasp of the subject matter to get a passing grade. Of the 37 students in his class, half failed; only a few earned decent grades.

When he asked them how they were going to survive after they grew up and were on their own, if they were unable to get a passing grade in a class designed to guarantee passing if you just made an honest effort, one of the students said: “Well, Mr. Smith, I’m going to do like my parents: be on welfare.” That career choice surprised him, and so did the agreement of many of the other students.

This situation, mirrored in towns and cities across the nation, is the result not of the “hand up” efforts of caring Americans, but of hammock-like government welfare programs, which give much but demand little.

President Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty in the January 1964 State of the Union address. “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” Johnson stated.

His actual stated goal was not to prop up living standards artificially through an ever-expanding welfare state, but instead to strike “at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.” Ultimately, he wanted “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” A noble goal, as so many government initiatives are, at least at first.

Twenty years ago, another president pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” On August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton filled a campaign promise by signing welfare reform, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, into law.

This time there were new wrinkles: after two years of receiving benefits, welfare recipients would be required to work, and incentives were removed that encouraged having children out of wedlock and breaking up families to get benefits. There was also a five-year lifetime limit on total time of receiving benefits without working.

How have these programs worked out? Familyfacts.org reported in 2012, “Total federal and state welfare spending has increased more than 16-fold since 1964. Even since the 1996 welfare reform replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, spending has increased by 76 percent and by more than 20 percent since 2008.”

President Obama, the Washington Examiner reports, “took the Great Recession as an opportunity to get as many households as possible into the food stamp program, an important part of his stimulus package. One result was that the number of able-bodied adults with no children who receive food assistance doubled.”

Because the value of food stamps and welfare payments are looked at as income, the overall poverty rate has not changed much since the War on Poverty began. However, both the number of Americans on welfare and total welfare spending have soared.

The goal should be to reduce both poverty and welfare spending. Two states, Kansas and Maine, have implemented a requirement for able-bodied childless adults to work for food-stamp benefits, and the results are impressive.

In Maine, 80 percent of those affected by the requirement left the food stamp program, and in Kansas, the total of those affected dropped 75 percent very quickly, and 60 percent had work within a year, according to the Examiner.

When it was easy to stay home and collect food benefits, many were happy to do so. But when required to work, these recipients quickly got out of the hammock and went to work, abandoning government support.

People are often content to do as little as possible, but will do what they must.

America’s tendency toward over-spending leading to catastrophe

Many years ago Beatle John Lennon compared America to Rome. Some interpreted his statement as being complimentary, that America was like the Roman Empire in its glory days: the place to be. Others took it to mean that like Rome’s eventual fate, America was declining and headed for the dustbin of history.

As it turns out, both interpretations were correct, depending upon the time frame of the analysis. From its early days America was a bright spot in the world, becoming a leader in many areas and doing things never done before. The rise of the hippie movement of the 60s and 70s spawned the flower children that viewed the U.S. as tarnished and wicked. And since then, particularly in recent years, America has been transitioning to resemble Rome’s decline. Perhaps a more accurate comparison for 2015 is Greece, where out-of-control spending is about to kill the nation.

There is a steady record of troubling statistics that U.S. presidents and Congresses have negligently ignored. For example, in 1971 the federal debt was $348 billion, about 34 percent of GDP, but today it is about $18 trillion, and is more than 100 percent of GDP. This trend caused Standard and Poor’s to downgrade America’s credit rating in 2011.

Federal assistance program payments have risen from about 21 percent of GDP in the 1970s to about 70 percent today. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2008 cost $37.6 billion, but by 2012 totaled $78.4 billion.

The 2014 Index of Culture and Opportunity, published by the Heritage Foundation, reports how food-stamp participation has soared from 2003 to 2013, growing by more than 26 million people. In 1970, the number receiving food stamps was well below 10 million, growing to more than 20 million by 2003, and nearing 50 million by 2013. The index also shows that total welfare spending has climbed by $246 billion between 2003 and 2013. In 2014 the federal government operated more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing and medical care to poor and low-income Americans.

Heritage’s Robert Rector notes that government spent $916 billion on these programs in 2012, and roughly 100 million Americans – nearly one in three – received aid from at least one of them, averaging $9,000 per recipient.

Many will see the increase in these numbers as necessary support from the government for Americans in trouble. Some do truly need help, but many are simply availing themselves of easy money.

Government policies and actions have kept the economy stagnant since the recession of 2007, preventing job creation that would allow millions to provide for themselves, or at least to contribute to their own wellbeing. More than 93 million Americans desiring work – nearly one in three – are not in the labor force. These policies and actions are championed by politicians, many of whom subscribe to the same socialist ideals that are killing Greece, and who benefit from having large numbers of individuals and organizations depending upon them for their survival.

And, the common theme of government wreaking havoc by interfering with business economics rises to the fore, yet again.

One example of a foolish policy is when Obamacare reduced the number of hours of the full-time workweek from 40 to 30 in an attempt to force employers to cover some part-time workers. This resulted in thousands of full-time workers becoming part-time workers, who lost 11 hours of pay a week, as businesses suddenly faced massive new expense and were forced to counteract that by reducing the number of full-time employees by cutting their hours.

Had the leftists that threw together Obamacare in the dark, smoke-filled rooms of the Capital actually thought about what they were doing, they could have avoided some of the punishment they caused these workers. No doubt that thousands of those workers now qualify for government support as a result.

Ignoring the wisdom of not raising the minimum wage, Seattle, Washington raised its minimum wage to $11 an hour in April. And guess what? Some of the workers who benefitted from the increase are now complaining that since they are making more money they will lose their housing subsidy, and are asking to have their hours reduced so that they can keep the free money flowing. Seattle’s minimum wage is scheduled to rise to $15 an hour by 2017.

The American tradition of self-reliance, of working to improve one’s plight, has been replaced by the opportunity to benefit from “free money” from government.

“If we keep on this way, we’ll reach a tipping point where there are too many people receiving government benefits and not enough people to pay for those benefits,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) wrote in The Wall Street Journal. Currently, about half of Americans pay no income taxes. “That’s an untenable problem. The receivers cannot receive more than the givers can give.”

The politics of government largesse and the sensible policy of holding individuals and institutions responsible for their actions, the tradition of self-reliance upon which America became the wondrous nation it used to be, are inalterably opposed. The question is, how much more of this dependency can the country survive before it becomes a Greek tragedy?

Government is a poor mechanism for correcting societal problems

Most Americans think that helping truly needy people, whether they live here or in some other country, is a worthy objective. Looking at charitable contributions as a benchmark, Americans are the most generous people in the world, giving $316.23 billion to charitable organizations in 2012, about 2 percent of GDP, according to Charity Navigator, and preliminary figures for 2013 indicate a significant increase to $328 billion.

Double those numbers and it still would not be good enough for the federal government, which believes that if private sources don’t relieve every semblance of suffering for every single suffering American, the government must step in and do the job better.

Except that government can’t do it better, never has, and never will.

Government’s failure to achieve better results than normal people doing what normal people do has never been a deterrent to wasting billions of taxpayers dollars in a futile effort to try one more time to do so.

The most notorious failure was Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” which began 50 years ago in Mr. Johnson’s State of the Union message. From the beginning of the war on poverty until 2013, local, state, and federal spending on welfare programs totaled $16 trillion, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Currently, the United States spends nearly $1 trillion every year to fight poverty.

When the War on Poverty began, 33 million Americans were in poverty and the poverty rate was 19 percent. Today, approximately 46.5 million live in poverty and the poverty rate is 15 percent. Even though the poverty rate is lower than 50 years ago, because our population is much larger now than then, more people are poor today than in 1964. We have fought a long and expensive fight, and lost. Yet we still fight on.

President Barack Obama’s cause du jour is income inequality, and it’s significant other, the minimum wage. And now that “reforming” the best healthcare system in the world is well underway, he wants to declare war against income inequality.

In no free or relatively free economic system can there be income equality, for two reasons. First, inequality is a fundamental part of life. Some people sing better than others. Some are better athletes than others. And some people make more money than others, and that’s because some people are better at their job than others and deserve higher pay, and some jobs require more skill and training than others, and pay better.

So, like poverty, another area that will always exist, we will always have income inequality.

Far more important, however, is whether there is the opportunity to move up from the lower income levels, and that is an area that has been fairly stable, according to The New York Times, which reported last month that “the odds of moving up — or down — the income ladder in the United States have not changed appreciably in the last 20 years….”

That means that people in the lowest quintile are not condemned to stay there, and people in the top quintile are not guaranteed to stay there, and there is substantial movement in and out of all quintiles.

It’s a favored piece of envy politics that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But the data tell a different story. From 1967 to 2009, the real mean household income increased for every quintile, which means the poor became richer, not poorer. Americans in poverty could afford more goods and services in 2009 than in 1967, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Other factors, like where people live, have an effect. Harvard University’s Raj Chetty reported “the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4 percent in Charlotte but 12.9 percent in San Jose,” and factors such as better primary schools and greater family stability also aid upward mobility, he wrote.

Larry Kaufmann, senior advisor at Pacific Economics Group, discussed findings of the Pew Charitable Trust, which showed that “Half of children born to parents with bottom-third income levels experience upward relative mobility when the parents remain continuously married; the figure falls to 26 percent when this is not the case,” he wrote.

The Pew study shows that the poverty rate among married couples is only 6 percent, and among married couples who both have full-time jobs the poverty rate is practically zero. The poverty rate among single dads and single moms, however, is much higher: 25 percent for single dads and 31percent for single moms.

Investor’s Business Daily Senior Writer John Merline notes that income inequality has increased faster since Mr. Obama took office than under any of the three previous presidents, and that inequality is now greater than at any time since the Census Bureau started recording it back in 1947.

The message from this is that to assist folks in moving up the income ladder, Mr. Obama should replace his administration’s policies that impede economic recovery, and seriously encourage the restoration of family values among Americans. That would accomplish far more than making people think they are victims, and fomenting division among Americans.

How many of America’s “poor” are like this lady and her husband?

The way that many welfare recipients think was revealed in a call to a radio talk show on KLBJ-AM in Austin, Texas. Lucy, a 32 year-old married mother of three, whose parents also had been on welfare, said this about her situation:

“I just wanted to say while workers out there and people like you that are preaching morality at people like me that are living on welfare, can you really blame us?  I mean, I get to sit home, I get to go visit my friends all day, I even get to smoke weed, and people that I know that are illegal immigrants, that don’t contribute to society, we still going to get paid. Our check’s going to come in the mail every month and it’s going to be on time. And we get subsidized housing, we even get presents delivered for our kids at Christmas. Why should I work?”

“So you know what? You all get the benefit of saying, ‘Oh, look at me. I’m a better person,’ because you all are going to work. We’re the ones getting paid. So can you really blame us?”

Asked if her husband works, she said he does sometimes, but “he doesn’t really see the need for it.” Has she ever worked? “A couple of times.” Does she ever feel guilty about gaming the system and taking money other people have earned? “But you know, if someone offers you a million dollars, would you walk away from it? It’s easy to preach morality, and that’s the only reason why I called. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, yeah, you know, you’re making your living off of other people’s backs.’ But, you know, if somebody gave you a million dollars, and said that, here, you don’t got to work for it, no strings attached. Here, just take it, you can do whatever you want to do with it. You would take it, too.”

The host asked if she was calling in on an “Obamaphone” (a cell phone provided by the federal government) and she answered that she was. Then, when asked how much she received each month, she said she only pays $50 a month for rent that should be $600, so that’s $550, $425 in food stamps, $150 for her electric bill, and $100 on her water bill from the City of Austin. That comes to $1,225 a month, $14,700 a year, just less than the current federal minimum wage. Plus the cell phone.

She also said that when you are in government programs, “they are always coming to you and offering more programs,” and will even pay you to go to find out about where you can get more money. “They encourage you to stay on the programs.”

Asked if her money was cut off, would she get up every day and go to work, she said, “yes, I’d have to.”

This situation makes perfect sense to people like Lucy and her husband, who never learned the lesson that mature, responsible human beings make their own way in life, and who now live a relatively comfortable life without having to do anything to help themselves. They are a product of the failed War on Poverty for which we can thank President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), the namesake of the radio station Lucy called. They are among a large and growing number of Americans being taught that the government will take care of them, and they don’t have to do well in school, or learn a trade, or look for a job, or do much more than draw breath.

Last year the Census Bureau reported that 46 million Americans were in “poverty.”  But how many of those are really poor and need some help, and how many are like Lucy and her hubby; playing a system that allows those eager for a free ride to get one?

Census Bureau data reveals the following about people classified as “poor”: eighty percent of poor households enjoy air conditioning; nearly three-fourths own a car or truck, and 31 percent own two or more cars or trucks, nearly two-thirds subscribe to cable or satellite television, 50 percent own a personal computer, and one in seven owns two or more computers; 43 percent subscribe to Internet access; one-third own a wide-screen plasma or LCD television; one-fourth own a digital video recorder system, such as a TiVo; more than half of poor families with children own a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.

Poverty ain’t what it used to be.

It isn’t government’s job to help individuals who are down on their luck, and as the War on Poverty has demonstrated, it does a lousy job of it. And it surely isn’t government’s job to give taxpayer’s money to people who don’t really need it, or to actively recruit people who don’t need welfare onto welfare roles. That is the epitome of government disservice, and elected official’s self-service.

George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote has been used a lot recently, but it has never been truer than today: “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

Progressivism transforms “welfare to work” to “welfare to not work”

Millions of Americans get some kind of financial support from the federal government. Some of them have earned it (Social Security and retirement recipients), some of them really need it (the poor and disabled), some need it temporarily (like those who can’t find a job in the non-recovering economy) and some don’t really need it, but get it anyway.

The widely reported number of Americans in poverty is 46.2 million, about 15 percent of the population. July’s Household Survey revealed that 11.5 million were unemployed; 2.4 million will work but aren’t actively looking; and 8.2 million wanted full-time work but could only a find part-time job. And the Civilian Labor Force Participation rate was a very low 63.4 percent.

Yet CBS News reported that a survey of 2,000 employers showed one-third of them said lots of jobs go unfilled for three months or more. Many of the roughly three million unfilled jobs are in skilled trades and pay good wages, making one wonder about the current “everybody needs a college education” mania that now grips the country.

Another reason that good jobs go unfilled is that the federal government’s assistance programs make it easy to not work, and frequently pay more than some jobs.

The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, writing in the Los Angeles Times (Online) notes that, “Contrary to stereotypes, there is no evidence that people on welfare are lazy. Indeed, surveys of welfare recipients consistently show their desire for a job.” Yet the “U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says less than 42 percent of adult welfare recipients participate in work activities nationwide,” he continued. “Why the contradiction?”

“Perhaps it’s because, while poor people are not lazy, they are not stupid either,” he writes. “If you pay people more not to work than they can earn at a job, many won’t work.”

In looking at federal assistance programs, Mr. Tanner noted that most reports on welfare focus on only a single program, the cash benefit program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. But he explained that “focusing on this single program leaves the impression that welfare benefits are quite low, providing a bare, subsistence-level income.” However, most get assistance from more than one of the federal government’s 126 separate programs for low-income people, 72 of which provide either cash or in-kind benefits to individuals.

In order to analyze how the federal assistance programs affect recipients, the Cato Institute created a hypothetical family consisting of a mother with two children, ages 1 and 4, and then calculated the combined total of seven of the most common benefits that the family could receive in all 50 states.
In Washington, D.C., and Hawaii, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Maryland, New Hampshire and California, that group of seven programs provide benefits worth more than $35,000 a year. The value of the package in a medium-level welfare state is $28,500.

Since welfare benefits are not taxed, to put the benefits issue in perspective the Cato study calculated how much pretax income the family would need to earn in order to provide the same amount as a 40-hour-per-week job. This calculation took federal and state income taxes, earned income tax credits and the child tax credit into account.

The study found that welfare pays more than an $8-an-hour job in 33 states and the District of Columbia, and that in 12 states and the District of Columbia welfare pays more than a $15-an-hour job. And, in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, D.C., welfare pays more than a $20-an-hour job.

Comparing the results with specific jobs, the Cato study found that in California and 38 other states, it pays more than the starting wage for a secretary and in the three most generous states, welfare benefits exceed the entry-level salary for a computer programmer.

While not every welfare recipient gets these seven benefits, many do, and some receive even more than the package used by the Cato study. “Still,” Mr. Tanner concludes, “what is undeniable is that for many recipients in the most generous states — particularly those classified as long-term recipients — welfare pays substantially more than an entry-level job.”

Welfare is supposed to be a temporary thing for most recipients, not a career. Yet in many cases able-bodied men and women do not look for work because they can do better on welfare.
Such a system discourages people from taking responsibility for themselves and their families. It creates a large faction of government dependents; a status that deprives people of self-respect and the pride of accomplishment that results when one succeeds in life because of their own efforts.

Even a low wage job is better than welfare, as it often is only a first step to better jobs. U.S. Census figures show that only 2.6 percent of full-time workers are poor, while 23.9 percent of adults who do not work are poor.

This country became what it once was not by millions depending upon government to feed and clothe them, but by Americans making themselves successful through determination and hard work. That is the goal our welfare system must have.