Welfare trap = wealth gap (The Michigan View 08.25.11)

Posted by hpayne on August 25, 2011

Ignorant of the welfare trap, Michigan’s Left is predictably purple over Governor Snyder’s cutoff of state welfare benefits at four – yes, four – years.

Long live the wealth gap.

“The state’s new 48-month limit on welfare, and tighter enforcement of the federal 60-month limit, is expected to result in more than 11,000 recipients losing benefits Oct. 1, the start of the fiscal year,” raged the Detroit Free Press on its front page. “Advocates for poor people called the move heartless. They said it would lead to homelessness and desperation for many single-parent families.”

“This bill takes food away from the parents,” raged Rep. Kate Segal, D-Battle Creek. “We cannot continue to abuse the children of this state.”

Ah, the ol’ heartless, child-abusing GOP. But the caricature doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

In fact, as the Heritage Foundation’s brilliant Robert Rector notes, welfare is a failed system that has created a perpetual underclass of dependency in America – sustaining the very “wealth gap” (now at record levels despite record welfare spending) that liberals claim to decry by providing incentives that weaken the family. And the family is the foundation of success in American culture.

“Marriage not only has a dramatic affect in reducing poverty in the U.S., it also has a major affect on differences in wealth,” says Rector. “Married couple families have substantially higher incomes than do single parent families. The large differences in marriage rates between different ethnic groups contribute strongly to differences in poverty, income, and wealth.”

Indeed, the poverty rate in America has grown from 12 percent in 2002 to 14 percent in 2009 despite $4 trillion in welfare spending.

As Rector notes, this is because Medicaid (up 87 percent in the last decade), food stamps (up 256 percent), low income energy assistance (190 percent) and other direct payments to low wage earners (up 353 percent) create an incentive for single parenthood – destroying the family cradle in which wealth grows.

The result is Detroit, which is far poorer today than before welfare assistance thanks to 80 percent illegitimacy rates.

Of course, you will never read that in the Free Press or other MSM outlets. They would prefer to wash their hands of the poor by handing them welfare, then retreating to their suburban ivory towers to avoid the illegitimacy culture’s offspring: illiteracy and crime.

 

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