One more huge miscalculation to heap on all the others regarding the Democrat government shutdown was that the cut-off of SNAP benefits revealed that there are 42,000,000 people getting food stamps. Now, the shutdown may be over by the time this goes to print – even the dumbest Dems are starting to sense it’s been a disaster – but one lasting impact will be the revelation that so many people in the country are getting handouts. Normal people are tired of it – there’s no way that 42 million people are so grossly disabled they can’t support themselves or their families, and we’re sick of doing it for them.
Note that I did not use the words “citizens” above. I used the phrase “people in the country” because you don’t need to be a citizen to get a handout. You just need to be. They’ll scream that “illegal aliens can’t get food stamps by law!” and fail to note the illegal part of “illegal alien.” Let’s leave the accounting gimmicks aside for a moment – “See, the free money they are getting for food is a different program than EBT, so let’s pretend illegal aliens are not getting free money from hardworking Americans when they shouldn’t even be here at all.” If these criminals – yes, being an illegal alien is a crime – will cavalierly ignore our immigration laws, you can bet they are not going to be particularly careful to observe our laws about receiving free money from people who earned it.
But why should legal aliens get any welfare at all? Go home if you can’t cut it here. There was once the idea that if you came here, you should not be a public charge. That’s gone – now the idea is “Welcome to America, here’s stuff actual Americans worked for and that we extracted from their paychecks because you fake Americans are more American than these terrible actual Americans.” If immigration is so awesome and these people are so amazing and hardworking and stuff, how about we treat them that way? How about we expect them to contribute to us, not vice versa. They are not doing us a favor.
But let’s not let the Americans who sponge off the system get off scot free. Too many Americans are bums, deadbeats, and/or losers with their paws out, looking to cash in on the efforts of others. Every regime media story is a tale of woe about some victim of circumstances who absolutely must be on the dole forever because, well, look how sad she and her seven kids by eight fathers are. And look at the iPhone, PlayStation, and big screen in the background of the shot. Scratch a sob story and you will almost inevitably find bad choices, dumb moves, and laziness paired with a sense of entitlement.
Here’s what we need to do – adopt the old presumption that everyone must support themselves and their families. Period. Yeah, it’s hard sometimes, yet somehow most of us manage to do it and also support the dead weight. And those of us bearing their burden are getting sick of it. We have social media to thank for some of this. The TikTok welfare queens – Reagan was absolutely right about them, no matter how hard the Dems lie and deny – making EBT Day videos, loading up their shopping carts with free junk food, as the next generation of sloths capers about, are a blessing. Their smug entitlement is a red flag, and we are the bulls.
But what about the disabled? There’s “disabled” and then there’s actually disabled. We are under no obligation to refill the bottomless EBT debit card of some massive behemoth in perpetuity because she found some quack to sign a paper attesting to her diagnosis of “Allergic to work.”
Along with the presumption of self-sufficiency should come the return of shame. You should feel bad if you have to take government money. Are there circumstances where this happens, where bad things occur outside your power that force you into having to take charity? That could happen. It’s not common – the vast majority of people in dire straits get there in whole or in part because of their own actions or (often) inactions. But you should want off as soon as you can. You should have some pride, and it should hurt your pride not to do what other adults easily accomplish – support yourself and your family.
But Kurt, that’s mean! No, it’s honest. Do you respect someone who fails to support himself or others? No, you don’t, because you know that self-sufficiency is the baseline for being worthy of respect and that welfare is a soul-crushing vortex of failure. So, what you are doing when you pretend that one taking welfare is just like everyone else is lying. I say we stop lying to ourselves and to the people who need to be splashed in the face with a bucket of ice-cold “Get your Schiff together.”
Are you subject to the Mark of Cain forever because you once went on public assistance? Of course not. That’s stupid. We all screw up. We all do things we wish we had never done, things we are not proud of. I bought a Springsteen album once. While I generally made good decisions, it is possible I could have ended up (for as short a time as I could possibly be) on some form of welfare. But you can get past it and grow. It does not define you; you screw up and get up. That’s what we want – people who make mistakes to fix them and get back in the game. Lots of people we respect were intertwined with the dole; “were.” They got out of it, and they are stronger for it. But this fraudulent, self-serving lie that being on welfare is no biggie – it’s self-serving because we place our feeling good about being “nice” over actually helping by doing the hard and sometimes unpleasant work of telling people they are screwing up – condemns people to a future of misery, mediocrity, and mendacity.
We see cookies at Safeway marked “EBT ELIGIBLE,” and we’re told, “Don’t poor kids deserve a cookie?” And they do deserve a cookie. Every kid should get an occasional cookie – not too many, or they become JB Pritzker. But that cookie should be provided by their parents, who should work to earn the money to buy it. Neither you nor I owes that kid a cookie, and it is especially repellent that we are forced to labor and then have the fruit of our work extracted from us by men with guns – police come and put you in prison for failing to pay taxes – so that others can redirect our money toward other people’s kids. If you want a kid whose parents aren’t cutting it to get a cookie, go buy it yourself. No one’s stopping you, but that means forgoing the sweet satisfaction of making others perform your charity. Forcing us to buy it is the injustice; to the extent the kid is being wronged by confection denial, talk to mommy and (too rarely) daddy. We are not morally obligated to care more about other people’s kids than the other people do.
But we are morally obligated to care about the poor. That’s non-negotiable. It’s in the Bible. We must give charity. Give charity, not have it stolen from us by the government to be redistributed to satisfy the egos of do-gooders who think the height of doing good is to do it with other people’s money.
But when we give charity – and we must – we should also pay heed to how the Bible reflects on other aspects of the issue of poverty. It admonishes people to care for themselves and their families. The parables highlight the importance of diligence and honest work. It forbids treating the poor unjustly, but that is different from forbidding the expectation that people will make an honest effort to support themselves and their own.
We can and must help – with favors, teaching, examples, and yes, giving our own money. But our help should be to lift them out of the cesspool of poverty, not let them float in it. Far too many in our broken culture want a lot of poor people. Some want it for political power. Some make their own money off “fixing poverty” – how many Dems draw a paycheck from some “anti-poverty” NGO that does nothing but perpetuate pathologies? And others love having a bunch of poor people because it gives them an opportunity for moral preening and a chance to scold us for failing to be as caring as they are.
The idea of 42 million people on food stamps is a cultural, social, political, and moral abomination. We need to fix that. We need to re-establish basic common-sense principles. You support yourself and your people, and if you are a foreigner and you can’t, leave. It’s not being hard, nor is it being mean. It’s being clear – we’re done catering to deadbeats.
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