Dependency and Votes
by Thomas Sowell
Recently
by Thomas Sowell: The
'Education' Mantra
Those who
regard government "entitlement" programs as sacrosanct, and regard
those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a
world very different from the world of reality.
To listen to
some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the
heart of the present financial crisis, you might think that anything
the government fails to provide is something that people will be
deprived of.
In other words,
if you cut spending on school lunches, children will go hungry.
If you fail to subsidize housing, people will be homeless. If you
fail to subsidize prescription drugs, old people will have to eat
dog food in order to be able to afford their meds.
This is the
vision promoted by many politicians and much of the media. But,
in the world of reality, it is not even true for most people who
are living below the official poverty line.
Most Americans
living below the official poverty line own a car or truck – and
government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks.
Most people living below the official poverty line also have air
conditioning, color television and a microwave oven – and these
too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs.
Cell phones
and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income
neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there
were no school lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are
overweight even more often than other Americans.
As for housing
and homelessness, housing prices are higher and homelessness a bigger
problem in places where there has been massive government intervention,
such as liberal bastions like New York City and San Francisco. As
for the elderly, 80 percent are homeowners. whose monthly housing
costs are less than $400, including property taxes, utilities, and
maintenance.
The desperately
poor elderly conjured up in political and media rhetoric are – in
the world of reality – the wealthiest segment of the American population.
The average wealth of older households is nearly three times the
wealth of households headed by people in the 35 to 44-year-old bracket,
and more than 15 times the wealth of households headed by someone
under 35 years of age.
If the wealthiest
segment of the population cannot pay their own medical bills, who
can? The country as a whole is not any richer because the government
pays our medical bills – with money that it takes from us.
What about
the truly poor, in whatever age brackets? First of all, even in
low-income and high-crime neighborhoods, people are not stealing
bread to feed their children. The fraction of the people in such
neighborhoods who commit most of the crimes are far more likely
to steal luxury products that they can either use or sell to get
money to support their parasitic lifestyle.
As for the
rest of the poor, Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University
long ago showed that you could give the poor enough money to lift
them all above the official poverty line for a fraction of what
it costs to support a massive welfare state bureaucracy.
We don't need
to send the country into bankruptcy, in the name of the poor, by
spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor, and who
could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human
shields behind which the expanding welfare state can advance.
The
goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency,
because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play
Santa Claus.
We have all
heard the old saying about how giving a man a fish feeds him for
a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Independence
makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes
for politicians.
For politicians,
giving a man a fish every day of his life is the way to keep getting
his vote. "Entitlement" is just a fancy word for dependency.
As for the
scary stories politicians tell, in order to keep the entitlement
programs going, as long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling
it.
May
24, 2011
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate web page.
The
Best of Thomas Sowell
Copyright ©
2011 Creators Syndicate
|