Sign up for a free recipe e-book →

Clarissa's Blog

Welfare

Published by

Clarissa

on

I moved significantly to the right in the past year, and there is one issue that is driving this.

The issue is welfare. I was always and remain strongly in favor of a wide range of welfare protections. However, after the fraud scandals of the past year, I no longer believe that the United States government can successfully provide welfare protections without having much of the funds eaten by outrageous, insane fraud. This fraud creates chaos and dysfunction at home and abroad. COVID fraud, for example, finances gang hits in this country and overseas, such as the assassination of the president of Haiti in 2021. These COVID payouts created terrible inflation that is eating the earnings of every one of us, and what is the upside? And besides PPP loans, all of the other forms of welfare are deeply compromised by dishonesty and fraud. They foster racial and ethnic animosity, drive up rates of diabetes and heart disease among African Americans, and vitiate the political process.

So, in theory, I still support welfare protections, but in practice, we have run into a wall, and I think they are no longer serving a useful purpose that outweighs the negative effects.

15 responses to “Welfare”

  1. donbenham Avatar
    donbenham

    Hear Hear!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  2. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    ” in favor of a wide range of welfare protections”

    What I always say is…. welfare is great as a safety net but only works if either

    a) people are grateful for it, or

    b) there is some stigma about needing it.

    Either or both work. But if welfare is deprived of stigma and/or people who receive it are not grateful… then…. yeah, results are very ugly.

    And, unpopularly, you can’t have a welfare system without at least two bureaucracies – one to monitor welfare and the other to monitor that bureaucracy. It gets a bad rep but bureaucracies are needed to keep corruption in check.

    No bureaucracy = no welfare.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      Also… there will always be some level of abuse. There’s a subset of the population who simply cannot be made to care about stigma and will do anything they can to scam the vending machine for as many free candy bars as they can shake out of it.

      It does seem like we used to have more functional, less easy to scam, aid programs in, say, the 70s, into the 80s. Public housing projects were always terrible, but at the same time… it meant sane people couldn’t wait to get out of them and anybody who had better options used the other options (had neighbors for a while who literally lived in relatives’ unfinished garage for the better part of a year while getting back on their feet financially– they’re doing better now. But why endure that if you can get free rent in a single-family house in an OK neighborhood, nobody knows but your landlord?). Rent subsidies via Section 8 have been a disaster and have some nasty knock-on effects in that they distort the low-end real estate market to favor subsidized renters over lower-income buyers– yanking the entire lower end of the affordable housing market out of the reach of wage-class families, because they can’t compete in the market with investors who now buy those houses knowing they can get a guaranteed rental income out of them via Section 8. And since that rental is in an OK neighborhood and nobody checks in regularly… the recipient can move in four or five relatives rent-free. It’s the landlord’s job to check, and they mostly don’t.

      SNAP, as we’ve seen from all the bodega fraud stories, is waaay too easy to game by organized operations. The commodity foods program that it replaced… I mean, people did sell their government cheese but the level of fraud and waste possible from selling your commodity groceries was far far less than what’s going on with organized operations to convert SNAP cards straight to cash by faking purchases with them (store owner collects the payment, no goods were purchased, cardholder gets a cash kickback). There’s only so much market for American cheese.

      What’s frustrating is that so many of the newer programs (homeless aid, migrant aid, environmental aid) seem designed for ease of fraud. Contract it out to a “private charity” that happens to belong to the mayor’s sister-in-law, and then… who’s going to complain when none of the aid materializes? The zombies? Illegals? Endangered leopard frogs?

      Like

      Reply
      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        My support for abortion decreased dramatically when I found out that the rate of abortion among black women was, I believe, 25 per 1,000 women, while it’s only 6 per 1,000 among whites. I realized that what I was unwittingly supporting was population control of blacks through abortion under the guise of women’s rights. I’m not a racist, and I think that this form of population control that is so racially skewed is immoral. I now believe that the shrillness of support for abortion among nice liberal white women is (probably completely subconsciously) but motivated to a degree by the fact that they are uncomfortable around black people. The all stinks, and I don’t want to be a part of it.

        Similarly, I was completely for SNAP, and then I found out about colorful canned pineapples and all of the other atrocities that are driving up already sky-high rates of diabetes and heart disease among black people. Again, this is population control and eugenics masquerading as charity.

        This isn’t specifically about fraud, but it is about how things often masquerade as something else. Once you see the reality behind them, you just can no longer support them.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply
        1. Avatar
          Anonymous

          Jesse Jackson once called abortion “black genocide.” I’ve often asked people, if you wanted to destroy the black race in America what would you do differently from the “welfare state”?

          Walnut

          Like

          Reply
          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            Exactly. It took me a long time to realize this but when I did, it had a big impact.

            That one statistic on abortion changed me profoundly.

            Like

            Reply
        2. el Avatar
          el

          \\ the rate of abortion among black women was, I believe, 25 per 1,000 women, while it’s only 6 per 1,000 among whites. I realized that what I was unwittingly supporting was population control of blacks through abortion

          I would guess the word “black” could be replaced by “poor”, and reflect reality even better after this substitution.

          Would you be OK with supporting higher rates of abortion among the poor?

          Like

          Reply
          1. Avatar
            Anonymous

            For women at less than 100% of the federal poverty level, black women have abortions at roughly 3x the rate of their white counterparts. Hispanic levels are slightly higher in that group, though lower above the FPL. Poverty rate disparity does clearly drive some of the overall rate difference but cannot account for all of it.

            Like

            Reply
      2. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        ” there will always be some level of abuse”

        I know that and, in principle, accept it as the cost of helping those who really need it. If you run a soup kitchen some (hopefully small) percentage will be lining up just cause it’s free or because it’s a way to save money they want to spend on booze (or worse). To help the needy you also have to end up helping some not so needy…

        “so many of the newer programs (homeless aid, migrant aid, environmental aid) seem designed for ease of fraud”

        Yeah, turbo-charged fraud is, unfortunately, one of the guiding principles of the day in almost every facet of life, along with the disparagement and loss of status of the jobs that actually keep societies running.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply
  3. Stille Avatar
    Stille

    Think the individual dimensions in this are more interesting than the main one. I ended up a Republican on economy and risk management, a Democrat on moral traditionalism and an Independent on foreign politics

    Like

    Reply
    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      The real test is where you stand on the issue of masked geriatric lesbians in Massachusetts. 😆😆

      Like

      Reply
      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        Bless their hearts.

        Like

        Reply
        1. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          The dear old things.

          Like

          Reply
      2. Stille Avatar
        Stille

        Hard times create strong women. Strong women create real change. Real change creates good times. Good times create bored women. Bored women create lesbian bar drama. Lesbian bar drama is why I’m glad I’m just bi.

        Tragedy of early retirement really. They’d be far happier if they retrained as plumbers or something.!

        Like

        Reply
  4. PaulS Avatar
    PaulS

    In SA, the jobs were the welfare. That’s why the collapse of the state didn’t mean much to black people since they’ve always mostly worked for the private sector and never benefited from public sector jobs or services

    Like

    Reply

Leave a comment

A conservative literary critic and college professor

Recent posts