Your tax dollars:
Yesterday’s Morning Bell from the Heritage Foundation tell us:
Despite its failure last week, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is continuing to push his tax-extenders bill. Bundled together with the many egregious pieces of this bill is a $2.5 billion Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) emergency fund. This provision ties right into the current administration’s philosophy on government welfare: grow the number of Americans dependent on government by increasing spending.
This is obviously the wrong approach. Instead of throwing more money at the ever-expanding and fiscally unsustainable welfare state, Congress should implement practices that work to move people out of poverty, versus those that do nothing but grow federal bureaucracies.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his famous “War on Poverty” in 1964, his intent was to win the war by eliminating the causes of poverty. He actually promised to shrink, not enlarge, the welfare state.
Just the opposite has occurred. Today, we spend 13 times more on welfare than in 1965 (even after adjusting for inflation), and the welfare state has made the problem of poverty worse by undermining the very fundamentals that decrease dependence: stable families and a strong work ethic. Out-of-wedlock childbirth is at an historic high of 40 percent and means-tested welfare has grown faster than any other sector of government.
One of the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations is to limit immigration of low-skilled workers.
Limit low-skill immigration. A significant portion (15 percent) of welfare spending goes to homes headed by lower skill immigrants with a high school degree or less. The government should limit immigration to those individuals who will be net fiscal contributors, meaning they will pay more in taxes than they take in benefits. Also, the government should not provide amnesty to illegal immigrants, as doing so would instantly add millions of people to the welfare roles.
As much as I respect the work of the Heritage Foundation in its research and documentation of issues, they seem unable to understand that their facts are meaningless to those who are pushing a political agenda that involves importing more poverty and expanding the welfare state as a way to crash our system and bring about a new form of government. They seem to think that simply by stating facts and logic they will win the political argument. See last nights post on the “purification” movement for example to see who and what they are up against. What are the odds that those revolutionaries will listen to facts, logic and reason?
See also Cloward and Piven, here.