Nothing gets my Tea Party friends going quite like the perceived “Entitlement” programs. They will go on ad nauseum about how they have to work their behinds off, but some “lazy” people sit on their butts collecting checks and getting rich off the system. And believe me, as a hard working American myself, I do understand their ire. But as usual their reaction is founded on the misunderstanding of what’s really going on. For the sake of brevity and argument, let’s say we are only talking about people who are able to work, but don’t. If you watch the Showtime show “Shameless,” this would be the character played by William H. Macy on the show. The fact is that a comprehensive per person cost of welfare programs is very difficult to research and I was unable to get that information in time for this blog. However, from what I was able to gather and glean from several state sources, I don’t think an average range of $8,000- $12,000 per person per year is an unreasonable estimate (that would include housing and food stamp programs). Now if you don’t provide these services to people who refuse to work, then they will find a way to get what they need, and it most likely won’t be through work. The alternative is that they can (and usually will) commit crimes to get money to survive on. The cost of imprisoning that same person, who was content with being provided for at the $8,000 - $12,000 level, is $30,000/year. So while the principle is still wrong, it is more cost effective to pay for welfare than it is to pay for prison (not to mention the emotional toll a crime ridden society takes on its citizens).
The real entitlement program exists in the form of the current tax laws which greatly favor the ultra-rich. Without even getting into the costs of this tax program, I need to point out that the United States offers opportunities that are not available anywhere else in the world. The people who get rich in the U.S. do so through a combination of working hard, working smart and a certain amount of luck. If those same people were living in any other country in the world, they would most likely not enjoy the same level of success that they have been afforded here in America. So why do they think they are entitled to keep a larger share of their money without paying any back to the people and government which afforded them the luxuries they enjoy today? Surely, a person with common decency and true patriotism would gladly be willing to give back to the government and people who have been so instrumental in their success.
Today all the programs that gave the rich their opportunities to rise are in disrepair. Programs like our education system, our SBA programs and our libraries are quickly becoming phased out. The opportunities that allowed our forefathers to immigrate here and start small businesses so that we may have a better life are going away. While a tax increase won’t fix all the problems, it will fix most of them and should be the easiest to implement. Proponents of the trickledown economics theory have completely missed the part where all the jobs trickled all the way down to the Philippines and India and all the money trickled down to China. Perhaps they need to change the name to trickle outsourced economics. What we need now is a way to make those jobs trickle back up to America. And the millionaires and billionaires who have outsourced all these jobs so that they can cut costs and increase their profits, also have the tax cuts which allow them to keep a larger share of those profits with no incentive to bring any of those jobs back into America. There is no incentive to provide others the same opportunities that they were afforded.
The Tea Party wants to cut entitlement programs, meaning programs that you and I have paid into our entire lives with the promise of receiving a benefit in our old age. And those are in deed entitlement programs but I can’t understand why they’d want to cut them. After all, weren't we promised those benefits when our taxes were taken out? What they should be looking to cut are the false entitlement programs like these tax cuts for the rich and the corporations. I’m all for cutting those.
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