OK, with the holidays, I freely admit being horribly behind in my reading..
Sister Toldjah, just before Christmas: [1]
I read this blogpost by Michelle Malkin [2] this morning about a fanatical black woman shouting down white people during an angry New Orleans city council hearing last week in which a debate was held about razing public housing [3]. The woman, Sharon Jasper, would have you believe she’s a poor, helpless, victim, but in reality this woman is a known activist in the area who lives in the projects – and just so happens to have a mammoth wide-screen TV sitting in her livingroom. Check out the picture of Jasper’s livingroom here [4], and take special note of the quote underneath the picture. Here’s what it reads (emphasis added):
Sharon Jasper sits in the living room of her voucher-backed private residence. “I might be poor but I don’t like to live poor. I thank God for a place to live but it’s pitiful what people give you.”
To say that this is the epitome of the severe damage liberal “entitlement” programs have done to society would be an understatement of epic proportions. We have an entire class of people in this country who “expect” others to do everything for them, including subsidize their very existence, and they don’t want it done “on the cheap.” Oh, I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule, and that there are a minority of people who live in poverty who are fighting to get out of it, but for the most part, if you look around you, if you do your research, you’ll see that poverty is, for the most part, generational, and by that I mean if you read up on the projects today, you’ll find third generation families who live in public housing much like the generation before them did. I’ve read about it in the Charlotte Observer (a virtual re-print of the NYT) in sympathetic articles about public housing and how the city should “do more” to “clean up” public housing developments and do more to make them “crime free.” These third-generation “slum” dwellers know how to work the system because they learned it from generations before them who did the same thing.
This is a direct result of the Great Society programs implemented by the Johnson administration in the mid 60s, programs that were put into place to “correct” problems that were exaggerated by the “enlightened” of the time, “problems” that were, in actuality, declining – no thanks to any major “help” from the federal government.
Exactly so. Part of the idea here is that the Democrats have built so much of their power base on such people. it’s always easier to float downstream than it is to swim upstream. The So-called “Great Society” for all of its good intentions, did more to trap people in a permanent poverty situation. Then it all of the discrimination, and other abuses you could name.
The Republican Congress back in 1995 managed to put a clamp on the amount of money going towards welfare programs with what it laughingly called at the time, “welfare reform”. The trouble is, that was only a small part of the total package, and in the end didn’t do a great deal to solve the whole problem. That’s because events overtook the progress being made, and we ended up in a situation where the vast majority of the federal government’s expenditures are direct payments to individuals. do it for long enough, and it becomes a habit, both on the part of the federal government and those receiving its largess.
The article I’m linking here is worth your time, I commend it to your reading. you will notice if you look closely that I am also putting this under the category of swamp stompers, and the intent of that group is to eliminate some of the nonsense it’s been going on in Congress… to ‘drain the swamp’ if you will. I submit to you that the only way that’s going to happen, is if we refocus our thinking on eliminating governmental largess to people who really don’t need it. The only people that it benefits, is those seeking to buy votes. Democrats, mostly.