Tipping Point Achieved (almost)

No.

The dependency culture may now be officially irreversible, at least in 70% of all states.

Via Fox News:

Welfare pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, creating little incentive for Americans to take entry-level work and likely increasing their long-term dependency on government help, according to a new study by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute.

The finds come 17 years after the Clinton administration, with bipartisan support from Congress, passed landmark welfare reform legislation that was supposed to move Americans away from entitlements and into the workforce.

However, “welfare benefits continue to outpace the income that most recipients can expect to earn from an entry-level job,” the study authors said. “And the balance between welfare and work may actually have grown worse in recent years.”

Among the other findings is that welfare in 13 states pays more than $15 an hour, compared with the federal hourly minimum wage of $7.25.

 In 13 states you get double the minimum wage for staying at home?  To use the tired expression, in what universe does that make sense?

 

Of course you can expect to hear from liberals the logic-deficient argument that the situation simply requires that the minimum wage needs to be increased to above the welfare rate.  Of course doing so would simply drive businesses out of those states or ultimately, if it were a federally mandated minimum wage, off shore.  The unintended consequence (or perhaps intended) of such action would be drive yet more people onto welfare rolls.

 

If the Cato findings make headlines, expect the left to try to shape the language of the debate.  Expect minimum wage and welfare to go the way of global warming (now AGW or climate change) and be replaced with terms like living wage, and poverty threshold. The important thing for conservatives to do is not let that hijacking occur.  The issue is simple:

 

Welfare payments are too high, welfare rolls are too high, and jobs are the answer. Period.

Democrats have a circular solution

To every problem there is a solution. Where it gets tricky is when you want to look like you have a solution but really, you want the problem to continue to exist. The Democrats have come up with a brilliant, albeit underhanded solution to the educational portion of the cycle of dependency. Underhanded because it behooves them to maintain that cycle in order to maintain the political power and clout Democrats wield.

Follow the path and you see the circular series of events and actions.

A system of unequal and often poor education exists for many in the United States. It is particularly bad in lower income neighborhoods. Bad education ensures bad graduation rates and often an unqualified graduate where graduation even exists. This means that the graduates and non-graduates in these situations will remain pretty much unemployable and efforts at higher education are pre-empted by bad grades or bad school reputations. Unemployable populations ensure a population of dependants. That population will be forever in a cycle of dependence because there are no alternatives available.

This is all bad, but this is where it goes from bad to sinister. The downtrodden class is bound to call for improvement to their circumstance. Capitalizing on the image as the party of the downtrodden the Democrats are empowered to represent this group in government. Calls to fix the problem ensures calls for more money for schools, for special programs and anything else that can be regarded as an attempt to address the situation. That leads to new programs and in addition to additional national debt, a section of the electorate beholden to those that called for more on their behalf i.e. the Democrats.

But ultimately the Democrats are better off if this neglected class does not succeed. The reason is that it gives the undereducated group reason to need another solution, or preferably, more of the same solution. And the latter is the goal the Democrats have set for themselves in this circumstance. They can repeat the entire cycle basically endlessly because they can argue that they were never given enough. They can also rely on the fact that eventually a new class of undereducated voters will fall for the same tricks that their parents fell for 20 years ago. It’s a vote generating machine, provided the cycle doesn’t get disrupted.

The worst thing possible would be for someone to come along and offer an alternative like school vouchers. Imagine a child in Harlem being given the opportunity to compete for a spot fairly in a private school academy somewhere in Connecticut? How would that look as an alternative? And what would be worse for the Democrats is if that child succeeded.

It breaks the cycle of political dependence. Then those who are dependent on the scheme to maintain their political power are required to compete in the realm of real solutions. But that hasn’t happened yet. Democrats still hold unrivalled sway over the African American community and have a strong hold on the Hispanic community as well. It allows them also to distort the talking points of the discussion.

Without overtly saying so, Democrats have swung the image of equality away from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome. That’s not true equality. What it is rather, is a recipe for national mediocrity. And that in turn is a recipe for a national disaster – a mediocre country with an ever growing dependant class is, to borrow the President’s favorite word, unsustainable.