Time to Get Tough (14 page)

We have to combat the welfare mentality that says individuals are entitled to live off taxpayers. We need to reaffirm that mothers and fathers have a responsibility to their children—and that it starts with getting married before they have them. But unfortunately our welfare system has created monetary incentives to avoid marriage and to have more out-of-wedlock children in order to get bigger welfare benefits. Each year, taxpayers shell out $300 billion to unmarried parents.
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That's almost a third of a trillion dollars that could easily be saved if we could restore personal responsibility and the importance of marriage before childbearing. Your tax dollars in the form of Medicaid also pick up the delivery costs for 40 percent of all children born in America, most of those children being born to never-married mothers.
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For too many of these mothers and their children, living off welfare becomes a way of life. Consider these numbers: since becoming president, Obama has added 8 million more Americans to the rolls,
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and food stamp spending has more than doubled since 2007, going from $33 billion to $77 billion.
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But even more shocking than these figures is that half of food stamps go to people who have been on public assistance for eight and a half years or more.
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The only good thing about this for Obama, and he knows it . . . they will all be voting for him.

The food stamp program was originally created as temporary assistance for families with momentary times of need. And it shouldn't be needed often. Thankfully, 96 percent of America's poor parents say their children never suffer even a day of hunger.
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But when half of food stamp recipients have been on the dole for nearly a decade, something is clearly wrong, and some of it has to do with fraud.

The
Wall Street Journal
has reported that Obama's food stamp policies are ushering in a massive “food stamp crime wave.”
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That's been matched by fewer prosecutions of illegal food stamp transactions involving alcohol or other non-eligible items.
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And “millionaires are now legally entitled to collect food stamps as long as they have little or no monthly income.”
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As the
Wall Street Journal
notes, “The Obama administration is far more enthusiastic about boosting food-stamp enrollment than about preventing fraud.” Under Obama's rapid expansion of food stamps, recipients are selling welfare benefit cards on Facebook and Craigslist and using
the money to buy drugs,
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food stamp checks are going to prison inmates,
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a $2 million lottery winner qualified for food stamps (and complained that he still deserved food stamps because the government took half his winnings in taxes),
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and the program is rife with incredibly costly scams including one enterprising crook who created more than 1,000 fraudulent food stamp claims and pocketed $8 million.
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And that's just scratching the surface of the program's waste, fraud, and abuse. The really infuriating thing is that the Obama administration doesn't seem to care about how taxpayers are being shaken down by this outrageously mismanaged government program.

The blatant waste of taxpayers' dollars doesn't bother Obama, because it's all part of his broader nanny-state agenda. It seems he believes the more voters he gives welfare goodies to, the more votes he'll rack up for reelection. Perhaps that's why his administration doesn't give a rip about policing fraud or administering responsible oversight—he's buying votes! And like any good leftist knows, the bigger you grow the welfare state, the bigger you grow your electoral army. It's an outrageous betrayal of the American taxpayer and of the twin pillars of hard work and self-reliance that support the American Dream of freedom, progress, and bettering oneself and one's family.

We see the same trend in public housing, where since Barack Obama's election, massive crowds have been lining up to get Section 8 housing. In Atlanta, for example, 30,000 people showed up in the hopes of getting government housing applications or vouchers.
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There's no doubt that some of those individuals are truly in need, whether due to age or disability, but the fact is that we know that able-bodied, non-elderly individuals without
children routinely enter the program and spend on average nearly eight years in public housing.
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That's outrageous.

People who have the ability to work should. But with the government happy to send checks, too many of them don't. On average, able-bodied welfare recipients work just sixteen hours a
week
. How can anyone expect to climb out of poverty working just over three hours a day in a five-day work week?
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More hours at work equals more income. But our government's welfare trap has built a system that creates a disincentive for work. The more hours you work the fewer welfare goodies you get. So what do you think people are going to do? They keep their work hours artificially low to keep their welfare checks artificially high. And once again, America's twin virtues of hard work and self-reliance take a beating.

When you realize that every seventh person you pass on the sidewalk now receives food stamps, and that Obama has upped welfare spending to just under $1 trillion a year, it becomes painfully clear that this president's rapid expansion of the welfare industry is part of a much broader effort to “fundamentally transform America,” as Obama put it early in his presidency.

I've got a newsflash for you, Mr. President: America likes America the way the Founding Fathers built her—as a nation that deeply values hard work and self-reliance. The next president America elects must be committed to serious welfare reforms that overhaul the system and roll back Obama's disastrous public assistance policies.

We know how to reform welfare because we've done it before. In 1996, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans passed and pushed President Clinton to sign the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. In the wake
of the bill's passage, the liberal
New York Times
ran a breathless op-ed with the headline: “A Sad Day for Poor Children.” “This is not reform, it is punishment,” read the article. “The effect on cities will be devastating.”
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As usual, the
New York Times
could not have been more wrong. The results were as dramatic as they were hopeful: welfare caseloads went down 60 percent, 2.8 million families transitioned from welfare to work, and 1.6 million kids climbed out of poverty.
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The secret to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act's success was that it tied welfare to work. To get your check, you had to prove that you were enrolled in job-training or trying to find work. But here's the rub: the 1996 Welfare Reform Act only dealt with one program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), not the other seventy-six welfare programs which, today, cost taxpayers more than $900 billion annually.
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We need to take a page from the 1996 reform and do the same for other welfare programs. Benefits should have strings attached to them. After all, if it's our money recipients are getting, we the people should have a say in how it's spent.

The way forward is to do what we did with AFDC and attach welfare benefits to work. The Welfare Reform Act of 2011—proposed by Republican Congressmen Jim Jordan of Ohio, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Scott Garrett of New Jersey—does just that.
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Their bill, if enacted, would make sure that welfare programs would serve only those who truly need them, place a cap on welfare expenditures to prevent bureaucrats from endlessly expanding the programs, give more authority to the states over welfare spending, prevent federal funding of abortions through welfare
programs, and enforce work requirements, among other reforms.
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It's a serious plan that deserves to be passed and signed into law.

Of course, just as with the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, liberals will cry, kick, scream, and throw temper tantrums. But let them. It's far more important that we help poor people to become independent, self-sufficient individuals who gain the benefits of work. Let's get it done.

Next, I believe that the state of Florida made a smart move when in 2011 it became the only state to require drug testing of all recipients of the welfare program Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). As Florida Governor Rick Scott said, “While there are certainly legitimate needs for public assistance, it is unfair for Florida taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction. This new law will encourage personal accountability and will help to prevent the misuse of tax dollars.”
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The governor is right. It's common sense. By the way, Rick Scott is doing a great job and not getting the credit he deserves.

Look, millions of employees have to get drug tested for their jobs. Do they make a big stink about it? No. It's only smart. But leave it to the know-nothings at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to whine and cry about a requirement that millions of hard-working taxpayers go through year in and year out. “The wasteful program created by this law subjects Floridians who are impacted by the economic downturn, as well as their families, to a humiliating search of their urine and body fluids,” said a foolish Howard Simon, executive director of ACLU Florida.
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Humiliating? Excuse me? How is it “humiliating” to make sure that taxpayers aren't funding a drug addict's next hit? And how is it “humiliating” to take a drug screen that millions of working people take with no problem? It's not.
It's just one more example of liberals' attempting to erode personal responsibility and waste taxpayers' money.

The bill requires that TANF recipients take and pass a drug test. If it's a two-parent household, both individuals get tested. Anyone who tests positive for drugs is ineligible for benefits for a year. If they fail it a second time they are ineligible for three years. Recipients cover the cost of the screening, which they later recoup through benefits.
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If parents fail the drug test, benefits for children can be awarded to a third-party recipient acting as a guardian provided he or she passes a drug test.
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This common sense approach should be a no-brainer. It's insane to ask taxpayers to foot the bill for some junkie's drug habit when America is already $15 trillion in the hole and many Americans are fighting to survive in the Obama economy. Bottom line: you do drugs, no welfare check. End of story.

Finally, it's time to get tough on those who cheat and defraud taxpayers. The Obama-fueled welfare “crime wave” must end fast. Otherwise, it will further spread the mindset that says, “Who cares if I cheat the system, it's not my money. I deserve free stuff.” That means punishing violators, not turning a blind eye like the Obama administration has done. And that includes punishing corrupt bureaucrats who run scams and leave taxpayers holding the bill. Also, no more millionaires getting welfare checks. That's outrageous and must be stopped immediately.

America has a big heart. We believe in helping our fellow citizens when they are down on their luck, become seriously disabled, or reach an age
when they can't care for themselves. For those folks, the safety net is necessary and totally appropriate.

Yet for too many people, welfare has become a way of life. There's nothing “compassionate” about allowing welfare dependency to be passed from generation to generation. Kids deserve better. America deserves better.

President Reagan put it best: “Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”

 

 

 

 

F
ormer Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Congress had to pass Obamacare so we could find out what's in it. Now we have. And what's inside those 2,733 pages is a job-killing, health care-destroying monstrosity. It can't be reformed, salvaged, or fixed. It's that bad. Obamacare has to be killed now before it grows into an even bigger mess, as it inevitably will. Obamacare takes full effect in 2014. If it's not repealed before then, it will be more than just another failed government entitlement program—it will be the trillion-ton weight that finally takes down our economy forever.

Polls show that more than 80 percent of Americans are reasonably pleased with their current health insurance plan.
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That's an impressive number. Still, everyone agrees we need to take steps to reduce the rising costs of health care and make insurance more affordable. But socialized medicine is not the solution. That's why the majority of Americans are against Obamacare. They know that giving our inept, bumbling federal government control over health care is an invitation to disaster. Obamacare is a heat-seeking missile that will destroy jobs and small businesses; it will explode health-care costs; and it will lead to health care that is far less innovative than it is today. Every argument that you'd make against socialism you can make against socialized health care, and any candidate who isn't 100 percent committed to scrapping Obamacare is not someone America should elect president. Repealing Obamacare may be one of the most important and consequential actions our next president takes.