Ben Franklin once said: “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”Ronald Reagan once said: “Welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”
Yet about 250 years after Ben Franklin spoke those words and 35 years after Ronald Reagan spoke his, the dependence on government has never been stronger. Each year, billions of your dollars are spent funding social programs, such as welfare, subsidized housing, food stamps and a host of other “socially beneficial” programs.
This clearly isn’t what the founding fathers had in mind.
The founding fathers fought for independence from a king who taxed the colonies without representation to further the wealth of England. In their eyes, they were being taxed without seeing any benefit from it. This is where I stand on taxes that promote social programs. Where is the benefit? I am worse off after being taxed because I no longer have the money I paid in taxes in my pocket. The person who receives my tax dollars is no better off, because all they received is next month’s rent, or some cash to put some food on the table. They didn’t receive anything to help themselves, well, help themselves. If we’re going to be taxed anywhere up to 35% of our income (not including state and local taxes) I demand that something be done to honor the views of Franklin and Reagan.
Let’s make people on welfare work for the money they receive. And don’t make it some cushy job that they won’t want to leave, make it be the most awful jobs, that no one wants. Make them work next to felons walking along highways picking up the trash, and stamping license plates. They should be compensated, as even prisoners are compensated for the work they do – but it shouldn’t be any more than whatever the prisoners get paid, and if it is, no more than minimum wage. No holiday or overtime pay. When there’s work to be done, they should show up and get the job done. If they don’t want to show up, fine, they don’t get paid.
Now I can see there being a benefit to this. These unemployed people will be more willing to take a real job, even if it isn’t something that they really want to do, as even working at McDonald’s probably beats picking up someone else’s McDonald’s wrapper on the side of the interstate. With more people earning a wage in the private sector, there will be fewer people depending on the government for their paycheck – and as a result fewer people depending on you and I to pay higher taxes. These people will also start to pay taxes rather than consume them, reducing the burden on the rest of us.
Now there are some of you who will call me cruel for wanting to give these people jobs like this. But who says we have to give them anything? If you ask me, giving someone who is down on their luck a job, any job, is better than handing them money they did nothing to earn. At least this way they’ll take some pride in what money they do have, and want to earn more of it.
Social programs like welfare are the easy way out of a problem. They’re easy for the government, because they just write a check and it keeps the poor and the unemployed quiet. And they’re easy for the poor and the unemployed because they don’t have to do anything to get their checks, except of course for remaining unemployed. It shouldn’t be this way though. It just isn’t fair to those who take pride in what they do and earn a fair living. It isn’t right to take away what was earned and give it to someone who did literally nothing to earn it.
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