Here’s free advice for Mitt Romney. Before bringing up the poor again, read my book “Uncle Sam’s Plantation.”Romney has been taking a drubbing about his remarks in a CNN interview that he is “not worried about the very poor … we have a safety net there…. If it needs a repair, I will fix it.” And then going on to say it is “… middle income Americans … that are really struggling…” that are his concern.What the now Republican presidential front-runner missed in his off-the-cuff economic analysis of American class is that the cause driving the struggle among both low and middle income Americans is the same: Economic stagnation and social breakdown caused by welfare state socialism.
As I explain in “Uncle Sam’s Plantation,” America’s inner cities offer laboratory results for what is wrong today with the whole country.
If you want to know why America is failing, look at why our inner cities are failing.
Romney is incorrect to label as a safety net welfare state programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training, Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children, Section 8 Housing, and Food Stamps.
A safety net is what is provided when a free person, acting on his or her own initiative, falls and we offer assistance to help them get back up and start again.
The welfare state amounts to wholesale takeover of individual lives. As opposed to government stepping in to soften the blow, the welfare state assumes from the start that individuals won’t make it without government managing their lives.
It is not an accident that despite some $10 trillion spent on anti-poverty programs since the 1960s, there is little discernable change in our poverty rate.
The problem was made worse because the broken families and broken spirits resulting from government-plantation dependence have institutionalized inner-city poverty.
If America is going to get back on track, we must appreciate that we are doing to our whole country what we did to America’s poor.
Seventy percent of government spending today consists of transfer payments — government redistributing funds from one set of individuals to others.
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He will not mind if the entire "middle class", or what's left of it, becomes the "very poor", because there's a "safety net" for that. Just so he and the Elite Friends Network all come through alright...
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