by Michael Turner
Here’s an offer for you: $38,004 per year, tax free. No work required. Apply at your local welfare office.
The federal government funds 126 separate programs targeted towards low-income people, 72 of which provide either cash or in-kind benefits to individuals. (The rest fund community-wide programs for low-income neighborhoods, with no direct benefits to individuals.) State and local governments operate more welfare programs. Of course, no individual or family gets benefits from all 72 programs, but many do get aid from a number of them at any point in time. Continue reading
by Thomas Sowell
It is hard to read a newspaper, or watch a television newscast, without encountering someone who has come up with a new “solution” to society’s “problems.” Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.
San Francisco and New York are both plagued with large “homeless” populations today, largely as a result of previous housing “reforms” that made housing more expensive, and severely limited how much housing, and of what kind, could be built.
The solution? Spend more of the taxpayers’ money making homelessness a viable lifestyle for more people.
Education is a field with endless reforms, creating endless problems, requiring endless solutions. Continue reading
Health Overhaul: Republicans are fighting over a government shutdown when they should be telling a receptive public that if ObamaCare takes effect, the result will be massive taxpayer fraud and privacy violations.
News accounts have focused on GOP threats to block any ObamaCare implementation funds in next year’s spending bills, even if that risks a presidential veto and a government shutdown.
That, naturally, has sparked a public debate among Republicans not over the merits of stopping ObamaCare, but over the political fallout of such a high-stakes face-off. Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., called it “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.” Continue reading
by Charles Krauthammer
If there’s an iron rule in economics, it is Stein’s Law (named after Herb, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers): “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.
Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there’s been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post-World War II auto boom. Continue reading
The fundamental transformation of Detroit is complete, as socialism’s theme park succumbs to government run amok, a reminder that government isn’t the solution to our problems but their cause.
The wisdom of President Reagan’s words have been lost under an administration that believes government is the entity from which all blessings flow. So has Margaret Thatcher’s observation that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Last Oct. 13, President Obama boasted in a weekly address about the bailed-out auto industry that, “We refused to throw in the towel and do nothing. We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt. I bet on American workers and American ingenuity, and three years later that bet is paying off in a big way.” Continue reading
