Conservative Resentment

This is in response to a post on Facebook about a letter written to the Waco Tribune Herald of November 18, 2011.  The article was titled, "Put Me in Charge."  Rather than get into a detailed political discussion on Facebook, I decided to address it here instead.

The article was apparently written by a 21-year-old woman who was offended by the vast numbers of people on the welfare rolls.  According to the preface, she was concerned about the future economy if the government continued to overspend on social programs (though I didn't see anything of that nature in her comments).  She proposed to fix welfare by putting her in charge.

She had in mind numerous sweeping reforms:  giving out free cheese, beans, rice, and powdered milk, but not giving out food stamps.  Drug-testing welfare recipients.  Putting recipients to work in a day program.  But worst of all to me, mandatory birth control via implants and tubal ligation.

While I understand the overall sentiment, this article is very dangerous for two reasons:  One, it is a clear case of emotional reasoning.  Two, it doesn't take into account the reality of the world today.  While some of the ideas sounded pretty good, like inspecting public housing facilities and expecting residents to take care of them, much like military housing, the overall sentiment is overly harsh and just impractical in today's world.  For any real change to be made, some fundamental things about our society would have to change first.

Periodically, I see people posting on Facebook about drug-testing food stamp recipients.  This seems to be a fairly popular idea.  In fact, Florida recently implemented such a policy.  But the state of Michigan already researched drug-testing of welfare recipients in Detroit.  The results contradicted many people's prejudices.  Only 3% of the food stamp recipients tested positive, and that was for marijuana.  None of the food stamp recipients tested positive for cocaine or heroin or any other drugs.  Hmm, could it be they didn't have the money to buy drugs?  Could it be that some drug addicts, especially those on cocaine or methamphetamine or opiates, don't care about eating, and therefore don't bother to apply for food stamps?  To me, this type of knee-jerk conservatism ironically smacks of liberal prodigality.  Drug testing costs lots of money and would only catch a few minor offenders and possibly harm children or families.

I think the bigger picture here is the attitude of the article.  At times, her comments seemed sadistic or fascistic.  Again, I'm not entirely in disagreement.  I know where she's coming from.  In my experience, those who protest most loudly about welfare are hard-working folks who put in 60-70 hour work-weeks in hard-labor jobs.  They figure, If I have to work 60-70 hours a week, then why should they get something for nothing?

But no one stops to ask, Why should I have to work 60-70 hours a week just to survive?  Adjusted for inflation, factory workers in the 1960s typically made the equivalent of a six-figure income in today's economy.  On top of that, in those days, overtime was actually paid not at time-and-a-half, but at double-time, dissuading employers from overworking employees unless necessary.  Nowadays, many of these hard-working folks are "exempt" from overtime as their base salary is more than one-and-a-half times minimum wage.  Their employers take advantage of this loophole and work them outrageously long hours.  In this way, employers save about $20,000 in health insurance by hiring one person to work 80 hours rather than two.  They also save on things like company trucks, workers comp, and so forth.  The point is that, in today's economy, the choice for most people is between working like an indentured servant or collecting welfare.  The best disincentive to welfare would be real jobs paying living wages and working reasonable hours.

A real change in the economy would probably require some measures against globalization.  In the 1960s, the U.S. still had a global economy because it wasn't viable to import and export everything on the scale we do today.  If you owned a television, it was manufactured in the United States.  Today, few (perhaps no) televisions are made in the U.S.  That means there are no comparable jobs for the people who used to make televisions, or for the children of the people who used to make televisions.  Granted, now many families can afford a television in every room.  But are we really any better off?

The one thing the complainers about welfare seem to miss is that perhaps these programs are the result of very deliberate and real decisions by those who are living in a different stratosphere of wealth.  Picture the men and women at the Bilderberg Group or at Bohemian Grove getting together and discussing the global economy.  They can pay a worker in China $2 an hour AND pay an American to collect SSI for around $3.50 per hour for a total of $5.50 per hour.  If they hire an American factory worker, they will pay anywhere from $10 to $20 per hour.  They save a ton of money going with the Chinese worker.  And to keep Americans from rioting in the streets and ruining the whole system, just sell 'em a cheap TV and give 'em some food stamps and SSI.  I'm not saying this is right.  I'm just saying that my imaginary scenario is more true than most people realize.  Getting angry at welfare recipients is not the answer.

This leads to the most offensive comments in the article about forced sterilizations and birth control.  From biology we know that there are two basic strategies for having offspring.  One is to have lots of babies and hope for some of them to survive.  At the extreme, insects and fish lay lots of eggs in the expectation that a few will survive.  At the lower end of this strategy, foxes have maybe a dozen offspring.  With this large litter strategy, most of the energy is invested in having the offspring.  Once the babies are born, very little time or energy is spent on raising them.  On the other extreme, humans typically have one child at a time.  Bears have two.  In these cases, the parents spend a lot of time educating and raising their young in the hopes that this education will give them the edge to survive and, in turn, breed the next generation.

In humans, both of these survival strategies can be seen, even though the overall biology is for one child to be born at a time.  Thus, in difficult economic times, the trend is not for parents to have less children, but actually for disadvantaged mothers to have a brood of children.  Demographically, we know this to be the case.  In our culture today, with some exceptions in religious families, the poorer the mother, the more children she is likely to have.  This is not necessarily single-mothers taking advantage of a glitch in the welfare system, it is simple biology.  The more children they have, the more likely at least some will survive.  She doesn't want birth control.  She wants to have babies.  It's programmed into her biology.

So the answers to the problem of welfare are far more complex than the simplistic comments from the newspaper in Waco, Texas would lead one to believe.  Living wages, globalism, healthcare, tort-reform, and family stability are just a few of the factors that contribute to the current situation.  I'm all for real conservative solutions to liberal prodigality.  But we have traveled very far down the rabbit hole, indeed.  It will take far more than fascist posturing to fix this problem.  But I don't see anyone really doing anything meaningful to fix it.

By the way, the writer in Waco didn't even address the most egregious of the welfare programs--Public Childcare Subsidies.  It seems that every solution to welfare only makes the problem worse, as if the solutions were coming from "The ABCs of Communism."