Payne: Peters’ failed compassion ( The Michigan View 10.04.11)

Posted by hpayne on October 4, 2011

“We know that almost two thirds of the people affected by this decision are children and because of that, I oppose this policy on both economic and moral grounds,” demagogued Michigan Rep. Gary Peters about Governor Snyder’s new law limiting Michiganians to 4 years of welfare benefits.

But it is Peters who is playing Scrooge.

Snyder’s law of capping welfare is exactly the remedy that frees Michiganians of the dependency culture and gets them back to work. What the Oct. 1 deadline has starkly revealed is that Democrats have little concern for the poor outside of using them as political props.

Living in posh Oakland County, Peters & Co. use welfare as a Cadillac bumper sticker to advertize their compassion. Divorced from the mean streets of Detroit, they never do an accounting of welfare’s unintended consequences in destroying the family and creating a permanent underclass that is dooming generations of children to poverty.

So here are some accounting numbers for you: Over 40 years, the War on Poverty has spent $16 trillion with Obama’s 2011 budget spending a record $953 billion. Welfare spending since 1964 has increased from 1.5 percent of GDP to 5 percent and now accounts for 1 in 7 of every federal, state, and local dollar spent. The result?

In 2010, the national poverty rate climbed to a record 15.1 percent of the population, the highest recorded in the Census Bureau’s 52 years of record-keeping.

“I’m sure there are some people who game the system,” said Mayor Dave Bing on the Frank Beckmann Show today. In fact, as revealed by Governor Rick Snyder on the same program, MOST game the system: over 20 percent of welfare recipients are on welfare 11 years or more, 70 percent for 8 years or more.

This isn’t a leg up – it’s a way of life.

Talk to social experts like the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector or Section 8 landlords who reveal a dependency culture that uses a web of government programs from Medicaid, food stamps, housing vouchers, utilities subsistence and so on to live on. It is a culture that nurses single parenthood and dooms thousands of children to fatherless homes, crime, and the vicious poverty cycle.

What Snyder and his GOP colleagues are trying to do (their reforms exempt the disabled and elderly) is return welfare to a support program – not an income program.

“I wish we could have pushed off this decision,” says Bing, fearing the effects of a tight jobs market. No, punting will not solve the problem but prolong it.

“We need to focus on policies that will help get Michiganders back to work rather than put them on the streets,” says Peters. But that is exactly what welfare limits will do.

Detroit’s welfare dependent are unemployable as long as the government pays them not to show up for work or not to get an education. Talk to Detroit employers: Adults who are illiterate and not punctual are unemployable – both a direct consequence of family implosion.

If Democrats really cared about the poor they would hold a daily press conference explaining that the lack of a 2-parent household is the #1 cause of poverty – not Governor Snyder’s welfare caps.

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