<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; welfare state</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/welfare-state/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:20:06 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Can Republicans Win in a Post-Family America?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/can-republicans-win-in-a-post-family-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=can-republicans-win-in-a-post-family-america</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/can-republicans-win-in-a-post-family-america/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2014 04:57:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Liberty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marriage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[married]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[post-family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Single]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[small government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240705</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The end of marriage will lead to big government.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/families-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240706" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/families-1.jpg" alt="families-1" width="301" height="236" /></a>For the first time in American statistical history, the <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-09/single-americans-now-comprise-more-than-half-the-u-s-population.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">majority of American adults</span></a> are single. 124 million or 50.2% of Americans are single. Some will get married, but increasing numbers never will.</p>
<p>Demographically a population of single adults means the death of the Republican Party. It eliminates the possibility of libertarian and fiscally conservative policies. It leads inevitably to the welfare state.</p>
<p>Single people are less likely to have a support system that keeps them from becoming a public charge. Children born to single parents perform poorly in school and are more likely to engage in criminal behavior. A nation of single people will inevitably become a welfare state and a police state.</p>
<p>The statistics have always been known and the conclusions to be drawn from them are inescapable.</p>
<p>A lot of attention is being paid to the political consequences of the nation’s changing racial demographics, but it’s not a coincidence that the racial group that Republicans perform worst with is also the least likely to be married. While there are other factors in the mix, Republicans do better with married than unmarried black people.</p>
<p>The same is true of most other racial groups.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://polling.reuters.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">latest Reuters poll</span></a> shows that 36% of married Hispanics are planning to vote for a Democratic candidate in the upcoming midterm election and 28% are planning to vote for a Republican candidate. Among unmarried Hispanics, those numbers change to 42% Democratic and %15 Republican.</p>
<p>If Republicans want to start getting serious about the Hispanic vote, they might want to spend less time muttering about amnesty and more time thinking about where their strength with married voters lies.</p>
<p>Married white voters lean toward a Republican candidate by 43% to 24%. Among single white voters, Democrats lead 34% to 26%.</p>
<p>There are other factors that affect these numbers such as age, race, sexual orientation and religious affiliation. Growing minority demographics have certainly helped make single Americans a statistical majority, but it’s dangerous to ignore the bigger picture of the post-family demographic trend.</p>
<p>If Republicans insist on running against the nanny state, they will have to replace it with something. That something was traditionally the family. Take away the family and something else has to fill its place.</p>
<p>In the West, government has become the new family. The state is father and occasionally mother. The nanny state is literally a nanny. It may be hated, but it is also needed.</p>
<p>That is why married whites oppose ObamaCare 65% to 34% while single whites also oppose it, but by a narrower margin of 53% to 47%.</p>
<p>ObamaCare’s support base among whites is highest among single white men and women. (Despite Julia and Sandra Fluke, the latest poll numbers show that young <a href="http://polling.reuters.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">single white women</span></a> oppose ObamaCare by a higher margin than young <a href="http://polling.reuters.com/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">single white men</span></a>. Pajama Boy with his hot cocoa is more likely to be a fervent proponent of ObamaCare than Julia. But the margins for both sexes remain narrow.)</p>
<p>It’s unrealistic to expect people to vote against their short term interests. Without family, the individual is vulnerable. A single bad day can leave him homeless and hungry. While the system of social welfare actually intensifies the overall economic conditions that are likely lead to such a state of vulnerability, those who are caught in that cycle will choose to protect themselves from the consequences in the short term without considering the long term causation cost to themselves and everyone else.</p>
<p>That was the logic behind ObamaCare. It’s the logic behind the entire spending spree of the nanny state.</p>
<p>If Republicans are going to start winning based on something other than the public’s frustration with Obama, they will have to address this reality. Republicans have treated family as a reference point, like the United States or the dollar, a verity that would always be there, a word that they could reference to show their singular virtue without having to meaningfully assess and address what was wrong with it.</p>
<p>The American vision of limited government depended on a stable society that could fend for itself. The progressives originally gained power from the collapse of large economic institutions which they used to prove that their intervention was needed. They have gained even more power from the collapse of social institutions.</p>
<p>Without an underlying network of families maintaining a working society, the nanny state grows. And it doesn’t limit its attentions to those who seek it out. Small scale solutions are made possible by the integrity of small institutions. Without the order created by the small institution of the family, the order that teaches children right from wrong, that cares for its elderly parents and supports members of the family, the only alternative becomes the large scale solution of the totalitarian state and its bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Republicans cannot campaign on policies that assume that the family is the dominant institution once it no longer is. If they do not place a fiscally conservative agenda within the larger context of restoring the family, they will become the advocates of policies that hardly anyone except their donor base supports.</p>
<p>Three choices lie ahead.</p>
<p>The Republican Party can fight for the family. It can abandon fiscal conservatism and social conservatism in both word and deed to pursue its real program of trying to make big government work. Or it can look for alternative institutions that can replace both family and government.</p>
<p>Faith-based programs attempted to bypass the social disaster of the lost family without ceding the social territory to big government, but there is only so much that any entity outside the family can do. No amount of programs can fill the gap for a child or an adult. The family is an organic wraparound entity. Replacing it led to a Great Society in which a horde of social workers, teachers, psychologists, parole officers and sociologists struggled to fill the role of a mother and a father.</p>
<p>It doesn’t take a village to raise a child except in a failed state and no village can afford to hire an entire other village to raise its children. That, among other things, is what is bringing California to its knees.</p>
<p>Replacing the family, with or without government, is expensive and difficult. Republicans can and should champion private sector alternatives to government takeovers, faith-based or otherwise, but such an approach will only delay the inevitable. There really is no institutional replacement for the family.</p>
<p>The demographic shift taking place is critical because it will determine whether we have a big government or a small government.</p>
<p>Republicans can either adapt to a post-family America by becoming the party of the welfare state or they can work toward an America that is once again centered around the institution of the family.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/can-republicans-win-in-a-post-family-america/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>171</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Coming Collapse of the Welfare State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-coming-collapse-of-the-welfare-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-coming-collapse-of-the-welfare-state</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-coming-collapse-of-the-welfare-state/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Feb 2014 05:54:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[baby boomers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[birth rate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[decline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219640</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The left isn’t just running out of money; it’s running out of people.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BabyBoomersAged.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-219641" alt="BabyBoomersAged" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BabyBoomersAged.jpg" width="258" height="205" /></a>In 1935, the year that FDR signed the Social Security Act into law, the birth rate was 18.7 per 1,000. In 1940, when the first monthly check was issued, it had gone up to 19.4. By 1954, when Disability had been added, the birth rate at the heart of the Baby Boom stood at 25.3. </span></p>
<p>In a nation of 163 million people, 4 million babies were being born each year.</p>
<p>By 1965, when Medicare was plugged in, the birth rate had fallen back to 19.4. For the first time in ten years fewer than 4 million babies had been born in a country of 195 million. Medicare had been added in the same year that saw the single biggest drop in birth rates since the Great Depression.</p>
<p>There could not have been a worse time for Medicare than the end of the Baby Boom.</p>
<p>Today in a nation of 317 million, 4.1 million babies are being born each year for a birth rate of 13.0 per 1,000. 40.7% of those births are to unmarried mothers so that it will be a long time, if ever, before they pay back into the system, and most will never put back in as much as they are taking out.</p>
<p>Liberals and libertarians both act as if the crisis facing us can be fixed if we take more from the &#8220;wealthy elderly&#8221; or give them less. The crisis is born of demographics. It can&#8217;t be fixed by targeting the elderly because they haven&#8217;t been the problem in some time.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s the same crisis being faced by countries as diverse as Russia and Japan. The difference is that Russia is autocratic and has little concern for its people while Japan shuns immigration and has a political system dominated by the elderly.</p>
<p>The United States however takes in a million immigrants a year. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Barack Obama praised Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old Haitian woman who moved to the United States at the age of 79 and never learned to speak English, but did spend hours waiting in line in Florida to vote for Obama.</p>
<p>Between 1990 and 2010, the number of immigrants over 65 doubled from 2.7 million to 5 million. Twenty-five percent of these senior immigrants were over 80. Elderly immigrants are also much more likely to become citizens, in part because the requirements for them are lower. Many, like Desiline Victor, don&#8217;t even have to learn English to be able to stand in line and vote.</p>
<p>15 percent of senior immigrants come from Mexico largely as a result of family unification programs. If amnesty for illegal aliens goes through, before long the country will be on the hook not just for twelve million illegal aliens, but also for their grandparents.</p>
<p>The welfare state has been spending more money with an unsustainable demographic imbalance. There are fewer working families supporting more elderly, immigrants and broken families. The Russians invest money into increasing the native birth rate. Instead we fund Planned Parenthood because liberal economic eugenics dictates that we should extract &#8220;full value&#8221; from working women as a tax base to subsidize the welfare state while discarding the next generation.</p>
<p>The &#8220;modern&#8221; system that we have adopted with its low birth rates, high social spending and retirement benefits is at odds with itself. We can have low birth rates, deficit spending or Social Security; but there is no possible way that we can have all three.</p>
<p>And yet we have all three.</p>
<p>In the European model that we have adopted, men and women are supposed to spend their twenties being educated and their thirties having two children. These Johns and Julias will work in some appropriately &#8220;modern&#8221; field building apps, designing environmentally sustainable cribs for the few children being born or teaching new immigrants to speak enough English to vote. Then they plan to retire on money that doesn&#8217;t actually exist because they are still paying off their student loans.</p>
<p>John and Julia began marriage with tens of thousands in debts, only one of them will work full time, while the other balances part time work, and they will do all this while being expected to support social services for new immigrants and a native working class displaced by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, not to mention the elderly and the entire bureaucracy that has grown around them. If John and Julia are lucky, they will find work in a technology field that is still growing, or, more likely they will pry their way into the social services bureaucracy which will keep on paying them and cover their benefits until the national bankruptcy finally arrives.</p>
<p>In this post-work and post-poverty economy, those most likely to have children are also least likely to work or to be able to afford to have those children.</p>
<p>Birth rates for women on welfare are three times higher than for those who are not on welfare. Within a single year, the census survey found that unmarried women had twice as high a birth rate as married women. These demographics help perpetuate poverty and feed a welfare death spiral in which more money has to be spent on social services for a less productive tax base.</p>
<p>Children raised on welfare are far more likely to end up on welfare than the children of working families.</p>
<p>Fertility rates fall sharply above the $50,000 income line and with a graduate degree; that has ominous implications in a country whose socio-economic mobility rates continue to fall.</p>
<p>Progressive activists still talk as if we can afford any level of social service expenditures if we raise taxes on the rich, but workers can&#8217;t be created by raising taxes. Everything that the left has done, from breaking up the family to driving out manufacturing industries to promoting Third World immigration has made its own social welfare spending completely unsustainable.</p>
<p>By 2031, nearly a century after the Social Security Act, an estimated 75 million baby boomers will have retired. Aside from the demographic disparity in worker ages is a subtler disparity in worker productivity and independence as senior citizens are left chasing social spending dollars that are increasingly going to a younger population. ObamaCare with its Medicare Advantage cuts was a bellwether of the shift in health care spending from seniors to the welfare population.</p>
<p>Increasing welfare is only a form of Death Panel economic triage that doesn&#8217;t compensate for the lack of productive workers. It&#8217;s easy to model Obamerica as Detroit, a country with a huge indigent welfare population and a small wealthy tax base. The model doesn&#8217;t work in Detroit and it&#8217;s flailing in New York, California and every city and state where it&#8217;s been tried.</p>
<p>After a century of misery, the left still hasn’t learned that there is no substitute for the middle class. It’s not just running out of money, it’s running out of people.</p>
<p>The welfare state has no future. It is only a question of what terms it will implode on and what will happen to the social welfare political infrastructure when it does. The violence in Venezuela and the slow death of Detroit give us insights into the coming collapse of the welfare state.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-coming-collapse-of-the-welfare-state/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>221</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Paul Krugman is Wrong About Jobs and Income Inequality</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/paul-krugman-is-wrong-about-jobs-and-income-inequality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=paul-krugman-is-wrong-about-jobs-and-income-inequality</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/paul-krugman-is-wrong-about-jobs-and-income-inequality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 30 Jan 2014 17:54:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Krugman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217400</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The welfare state perpetuates income inequality]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/paul-krugman.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-217404" alt="paul krugman" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/paul-krugman.jpg" width="300" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Looking forward to Obama&#8217;s State of the Union session, New York Times economic court jester Paul Krugman beats his usual drum about the importance of deficit spending (no, that&#8217;s not a joke, it&#8217;s what passes for liberal economic wisdom) and then tries to make a case for the left&#8217;s latest meme of &#8220;inequality&#8221; over jobs.</p>
<blockquote><p>The usual suspects on the right will, as always when questions of income distribution comes up, shriek “Class warfare!” But there will also be seemingly more sober voices arguing that he has picked the wrong target, that jobs, not inequality, should be at the top of his agenda.</p>
<p>Here’s why they’re wrong.</p>
<p>First of all, jobs and inequality are closely linked if not identical issues. There’s a pretty good although not ironclad case that soaring inequality helped set the stage for our economic crisis, and that the highly unequal distribution of income since the crisis has perpetuated the slump, especially by making it hard for families in debt to work their way out.</p>
<p>Moreover, there’s an even stronger case to be made that high unemployment — by destroying workers’ bargaining power — has become a major source of rising inequality and stagnating incomes even for those lucky enough to have jobs.</p></blockquote>
<p>The second point isn&#8217;t even an argument. Obviously unemployment leads to income inequality. If people don&#8217;t have jobs, their income falls. But that&#8217;s a case for focusing on jobs, the cause, not income inequality, the effect.</p>
<p>Paul Krugman turning that into his &#8220;stronger case&#8221; is a basic failure of logic.</p>
<p>Krugman&#8217;s first point is even more inverted. Income inequality didn&#8217;t create the economic crisis, botched attempts to remedy inequality with government subsidies that were monetized by liberal billionaires did.</p>
<p>The roots of the economic crisis lie in the intersection between Wall Street and the welfare state. That same intersection has given us Barack Obama, Paul Krugman and severe unemployment and income inequality.</p>
<p>The drum beaters for endless spending on the welfare state are perpetuating income inequality by pretending to fight it for their own profit.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/paul-krugman2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-217406" alt="paul krugman2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/paul-krugman2.jpg" width="250" height="250" /></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/paul-krugman-is-wrong-about-jobs-and-income-inequality/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Basic Income Guarantee is Never Going to Substitute for the Welfare State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-basic-income-guarantee-is-never-going-to-substitute-for-the-welfare-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-basic-income-guarantee-is-never-going-to-substitute-for-the-welfare-state</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-basic-income-guarantee-is-never-going-to-substitute-for-the-welfare-state/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 14 Dec 2013 15:36:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212747</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Generations of welfare have destroyed budgeting skills. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/accept_ebt.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-207504" alt="accept_ebt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/accept_ebt.jpg" width="436" height="331" /></a></p>
<p>I&#8217;m not going to address the macro issue of the Basic Income Guarantee, which is basically a check that everyone gets from the government, here. Just the<a href="http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income"> micro one that it can be used as a substitute for welfare</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Current federal social welfare programs in the United States are an expensive, complicated mess. According to Michael Tanner, the federal government spent more than $668 billion on over one hundred and twenty-six anti-poverty programs in 2012. When you add in the $284 billion spent by state and local governments, that amounts to $20,610 for every poor person in America.</p>
<p>Wouldn’t it be better just to write the poor a check?</p>
<p>Each one of those anti-poverty programs comes with its own bureaucracy and its own Byzantine set of rules. If you want to shrink the size and scope of government, eliminating those departments and replacing them with a program so simple it could virtually be administered by a computer seems like a good place to start. Eliminating bloated bureaucracies means more money in the hands of the poor and lower costs to the taxpayer. Win/Win.</p></blockquote>
<p>It might indeed be better, but it&#8217;s not going to happen. The welfare state is premised on the inability of the receivers to manage their own affairs. That&#8217;s the whole premise of ObamaCare.</p>
<p>The issue has never been mere poverty. It&#8217;s the premise that the underclass is oppressed by some combination of elite supremacism and their own ineptitude. They&#8217;re not meant to be anything except wards of the state.</p>
<p>So it&#8217;s a trade off that is never going to be made. And the unfortunate truth is that a lot of the beneficiaries are not capable of managing a budget. Even a basic monthly one. The benefits they receive are structured so that they have some trouble wasting them. Food stamps are meant to go to food. Medical benefits are paid by the government. Etc&#8230;</p>
<p>Generations of welfare have destroyed budgeting skills.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-basic-income-guarantee-is-never-going-to-substitute-for-the-welfare-state/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>13 People Lost Health Insurance for Every Person Buying an ObamaCare Plan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/13-people-lost-health-insurance-for-every-person-buying-an-obamacare-plan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=13-people-lost-health-insurance-for-every-person-buying-an-obamacare-plan</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/13-people-lost-health-insurance-for-every-person-buying-an-obamacare-plan/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Dec 2013 17:30:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212961</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Millions had to lose their health insurance so the ObamaPhones could get ObamaCare]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obamacare-620x424.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-212978" alt="obamacare-620x424" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obamacare-620x424-450x307.jpg" width="450" height="307" /></a></p>
<p>It&#8217;s for the greater good. Of the minority. Apparently.</p>
<p>I emphasize bought because ObamaCare is mainly there so far as a Medicaid funnel. But even if you assume that all the people getting their Medicaid on through ObamaCare&#8217;s sites were the same people who lost their health insurance because of ObamaCare, we still have a mere gap of 4 million people.</p>
<p>Or as the media would call it a tiny minority. Unfortunately <a href="http://ace.mu.nu/archives/345625.php">the number of people actually getting health insurance </a>is an even tinier minority.</p>
<blockquote><p>Just about 1.2 million people have gained health coverage through Obamacare, according to new federal data released Wednesday morning. Approximately 365,000 of those people have purchased private insurance and 803,000 have been determined to be eligible for the public Medicaid program. These numbers count data from both October and November, and show an especially quick growth in HealthCare.gov enrollment.</p></blockquote>
<p>Surprisingly the majority of users of a government website want free stuff. The users of government who are most adept at this sort of thing, who head right to be an ObamaCare navigator in their local community center tend to be experienced consumers of taxpayer money.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re not talking the young invincibles here, the bros doing their keg stands and the hos shrieking over the Hey Girl posters. We&#8217;re talking New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. We&#8217;re talking failed cities and failed populations.</p>
<p>The private health insurance market had to be trashed and 5 million people had to lose their coverage so the ObamaPhone crowd could get more ObamaCare.</p>
<p>1- At least 5 million people have lost coverage due to policies being cancelled thanks to ObamaCare. So that 365,000 number is insignificant compared to that. There will no doubt be more uninsured on January 1 than there were on October 1. Don&#8217;t let them get away with pretending &#8220;1.2 million people who didn&#8217;t have insurance have it now!&#8221;.</p>
<p>Liberals will point to the new &#8220;enrollments&#8221; (and assume they will pay and become actual customers) while ignoring the previously uninsured who won&#8217;t get coverage in time or be able to afford the new rates and deductibles.</p>
<p>The are simply redistributing health insurance from those who paid for it to those who didn&#8217;t. This is a victory in their minds.</p>
<blockquote><p><a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cal-health-exchange-20131123,0,6276573.story#axzz2nBSFmznX">California accounts </a>for about 30% of total Obamacare sign-ups, at 107,087. New York, another state running its own exchange, has provided more than 45,000 enrollments.</p></blockquote>
<p>How <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/obamacare-sign-ups-by-state-2013-12">utterly unpredictable </a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/13-people-lost-health-insurance-for-every-person-buying-an-obamacare-plan/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>11</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8220;On Benefits and Proud&#8221; is the TV Show of the Welfare Generation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/on-benefits-and-proud-is-the-tv-show-of-the-welfare-generation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=on-benefits-and-proud-is-the-tv-show-of-the-welfare-generation</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/on-benefits-and-proud-is-the-tv-show-of-the-welfare-generation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 09 Nov 2013 20:09:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UK]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208124</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welfare is the new entertainment ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The UK&#8217;s Channel Five offers &#8220;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkKBx90UypI">On Benefits and Proud</a>&#8221; alongside &#8220;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyTV3t5tq-w">Shoplifters and Proud</a>&#8221; and it&#8217;s part of a genre like &#8220;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh-th2P52A4">We Pay Your Benefits</a>&#8220;.</p>
<p>The shows carefully stick to the UK&#8217;s native working class and away from Eastern Europeans, Africans and Muslims making them basically politically correct despite their taboo thrill of denouncing welfare parasitism. The English viewer is not shown the Muslim preachers dealing drugs and living with 11 kids and 3 wives. It&#8217;s not that they might not be up for the stardom, but there&#8217;s still an underlying agenda.</p>
<p>Still it&#8217;s revealing that this exists at all. And it would be nearly impossible to imagine this being made in the US. (Language warning.)</p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/NkKBx90UypI" height="390" width="540" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Or you can just skip to the new UK anthem.</p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/kzIEnL8FxUE?feature=player_detailpage" height="360" width="540" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Is this the new entertainment of the welfare state. As rising numbers of people simply drop out and go on benefits, society becomes divided between those who work and those who live off the dole.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/on-benefits-and-proud-is-the-tv-show-of-the-welfare-generation/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>7</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Obama&#8217;s Welfare Cost More than Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Combined</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-welfare-cost-more-than-iraq-and-afghanistan-wars-combined/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-welfare-cost-more-than-iraq-and-afghanistan-wars-combined</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-welfare-cost-more-than-iraq-and-afghanistan-wars-combined/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2013 16:11:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208376</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Over the last 5 years, the U.S. has spent about $3.7 trillion on welfare. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/obama-food-stamp-card1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-208377" alt="obama-food-stamp-card1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/obama-food-stamp-card1-450x309.jpg" width="450" height="309" /></a></p>
<p>America isn&#8217;t a warmonger. It&#8217;s a welfare-state monger.</p>
<p>Liberals like to talk about how much money we could spend on welfare if we weren&#8217;t fighting all those wars. The good news is we&#8217;re already spending more on welfare than war.</p>
<p>Average estimates of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars come out at under 4 trillion dollars. The 2011 Costs of War estimate put it at under 3 trillion dollars.</p>
<p>Meanwhile t<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/report-us-spent-37-trillion-welfare-over-last-5-years_764582.html">he cost of the welfare state easily tops that</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>New research from the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee shows that over the last 5 years, the U.S. has spent about $3.7 trillion on welfare.</p>
<p>&#8220;We have just concluded the 5th fiscal year since President Obama took office. During those five years, the federal government has spent a total $3.7 trillion on approximately 80 different means-tested poverty and welfare programs. The common feature of means-tested assistance programs is that they are graduated based on a person’s income and, in contrast to programs like Social Security or Medicare, they are a free benefit and not paid into by the recipient.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;The enormous sum spent on means-tested assistance is nearly five times greater than the combined amount spent on NASA, education, and all federal transportation projects over that time.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>But what&#8217;s a few trillion dollars here and there.</p>
<p>Sure the National Debt has hit 17 trillion dollars. That&#8217;s our entire economy. But when we pass 20 trillion, then the fireworks will really begin. The McConnell rule will protect Republicans from outraged constituents while letting Obama raise the debt ceiling until; America is Detroit.</p>
<p>The War on Poverty will never be won. But the American economy will be soundly defeated. Capitalism will be crushed and we can all enjoy living in just another bankrupt Socialist state.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/U.S.-Has-Spent-3.7-Trillion-On-Welfare-Over-Past-5-Years.preview.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-208390" alt="U.S. Has Spent $3.7 Trillion On Welfare Over Past 5 Years.preview" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/U.S.-Has-Spent-3.7-Trillion-On-Welfare-Over-Past-5-Years.preview-450x328.jpg" width="450" height="328" /></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-welfare-cost-more-than-iraq-and-afghanistan-wars-combined/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>29</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Problem Isn&#8217;t Just Welfare Abuse, it&#8217;s the Enablers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-problem-isnt-just-welfare-abuse-its-the-enablers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-problem-isnt-just-welfare-abuse-its-the-enablers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-problem-isnt-just-welfare-abuse-its-the-enablers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Oct 2013 23:38:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food stamps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207405</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We don't just have a welfare state. We have a welfare economy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/accept_ebt.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-207504" alt="accept_ebt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/accept_ebt.jpg" width="436" height="331" /></a></p>
<p>At the National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke <a href="http://nationalreview.com/article/361237/louisiana-heist-charles-c-w-cooke">writes on the Walmart EBT rush</a>, &#8220;Whether or not local authorities had legal cause to arrest the shoppers on the spot, there really should be no doubt that widespread theft took place — or, perhaps, that widespread fraud took place. Neither that the beneficiaries evidently believe that they could get away with it, nor that the victim was the unsympathetically anonymous mass of Louisianan and federal taxpayers alters the plain fact. This was a crime&#8230;</p>
<p>We are not talking here about a moral grey area, in which starving people saw and took a rare chance to feed themselves. Instead, we are talking about people who, over and above their normal allowance, elected to steal from the millions of people from whose paychecks the food-stamp program’s funds are forcibly taken — and on whose beneficence they rely.&#8221;</p>
<p>We could of course go on some more about the character failings of the people on generation welfare. But the real criminal here is Walmart.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;At Walmarts in the towns of Springhill and Mansfield, employees called corporate headquarters to ask what they should do. They were instructed to “keep the registers ringing.” This they did — and with a vengeance.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>I expect very little from the looters. This is how they live and how they have lived for generations. They have no sense of right and wrong when it comes to government aid.</p>
<p>I have no idea what it would take to change their character.</p>
<p>But Walmart, a huge corporate entity, certainly knew what it was doing. How much of Walmart&#8217;s income comes from food stamps? That&#8217;s interesting question.</p>
<p>I grew up in New York City and that means I grew up surrounded by the infrastructure of food stamps. My family never had them, but I still saw them around so often that they&#8217;re as familiar to me as currency.</p>
<p>They just were and are that ubiquitous. Looking through pictures<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/redskins-unveil-new-name-and-logo-honoring-obama/"> for my Redkins photoshop yesterda</a>y, I recognized three different types I saw growing up.</p>
<p>Yesterday standing in line at the supermarket, I saw a woman actually buying some sort of black sea fish delicacy with an EBT card, hopefully not caviar.</p>
<p>But the woman in some ways interests me less than the supermarket which would probably go out of business if food stamps really were shut down. It wouldn&#8217;t be the only one.</p>
<p>How many of the bodegas and local supermarkets in minority neighborhoods would survive? How would the banks that cover their loans do? What about the Walmarts in those areas?</p>
<p>It would not surprise me too much if the impact of taking away food stamps would wipe out a huge chunk of what we might even think of as the legitimate economy.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a reason we have a welfare state. And it&#8217;s not just because of Louisiana Walmart shoppers. It&#8217;s because there&#8217;s an equally parasitic economic infestation on top of them. And another one on top of them.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s not just true of food stamps. It&#8217;s true of every area of the welfare state. There is an infrastructure of</p>
<p>1. Government workers to administer the whole thing in the public sector,</p>
<p>2. Non-profits cashing on community service grants</p>
<p>3. Corporations and businesses making money from it on the other end</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not just that we have a welfare state. We also have a growing welfare economy backed by for-profit and non-profit lobbies.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s not much that can be done about people as degraded as these. But companies like Walmart should be held accountable for their complicity in this mess. Because they know exactly what they&#8217;re doing.</p>
<p>So do the grocery stores and supermarkets slapping EBT stickers on soda machines and deli counters.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-problem-isnt-just-welfare-abuse-its-the-enablers/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>28</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Puerto Rico May Be the Next Detroit</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/puerto-rico-may-be-the-next-detroit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=puerto-rico-may-be-the-next-detroit</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/puerto-rico-may-be-the-next-detroit/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Oct 2013 16:15:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Puerto Rico]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206952</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Puerto Rico has a $87 billion debt. Half the men in Puerto Rico don't work. One in six working-age claim disability benefits.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/puertorico2.gif"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-206955" alt="puertorico2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/puertorico2-450x291.gif" width="450" height="291" /></a></p>
<p>Anyone talking statehood for Puerto Rico <a href="http://sweetness-light.com/archive/debt-crisis-threatens-puerto-rico-wants-bailout#.UlbM-FB942s">really needs to look at these numbers.</a> We have some messed up states, but Puerto Rico is just Detroit on a larger scale.</p>
<blockquote><p>While Detroit has preoccupied Americans with its record-breaking municipal bankruptcy, another public finance crisis on a potentially greater scale has been developing off most Americans’ radar screens, in Puerto Rico.</p>
<p>Puerto Rico has been effectively shut out of the bond market and is now financing its operations with bank credit and other short-term measures that are unsustainable in the long run. The biggest concern is that the territory, which has bonds that are widely held by mutual funds, will need some sort of federal lifeline, an action for which there is no precedent.</p></blockquote>
<p>The only lifeline should involve cutting Puerto Rico loose. It&#8217;s a hole and we&#8217;ve shoved enough money down it.</p>
<blockquote><p>Puerto Rico, with 3.7 million residents, has about $87 billion of debt, counting pensions, or $23,000 for every man woman and child. That compares with about $18 billion of debt for Detroit, with a little more than 700,000 people, or about $25,000 for every person in the city. Detroit and Puerto Rico have been rapidly losing population, leaving a smaller, and poorer, group behind to shoulder the burden.</p></blockquote>
<p>And the population has been heading to the United States where they vote Democratic almost down the line. Part of the shift in Florida happened because there are more Puerto Ricans and fewer Cubans.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the average income in Puerto Rico was around 12K which leaves them even more incapable of paying off the debt than Detroit. And their unemployment rate is 13.9%.</p>
<blockquote><p><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/6980051">Half the working-age men in Puerto Rico d</a>o not work. Officially, only 46% of those who are not pursuing a degree have formal jobs, compared with a United States average of 76%.</p>
<p>Federal transfer payments to Puerto Rico rose sharply in the 1970s. Some programmes have been modified since then, but transfers still make up more than 20% of the island&#8217;s personal income. These federal handouts reflect the sensibilities of a wealthy country. So by Puerto Rican economic standards, they are huge. And the more a man or woman earns through paid work, the more they decrease.</p>
<p>Puerto Ricans are eligible for federal disability payments, for example, through Social Security. Ms Enchautegui and Mr Freeman point out that, in the territory, federal disability allowances are much higher than the United States average as a share of wages and pension income. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one in six working-age men in Puerto Rico are claiming disability benefits.</p>
<p>Many families do not view the federal handouts as temporary. Neither does Raúl Vega, who owns a consumer-finance outfit in Aguadilla. His firm treats the benefits as income when deciding whether to lend people money for new televisions.</p>
<p>What do Puerto Rico&#8217;s men do all day? Some get into trouble. But many others hang out in pleasant places that require little money, such as beaches, shopping malls and the armchairs in Borders bookstores. They also watch plenty of television</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>One idea being considered is that Congress might establish a financial control board, perhaps like the one that helped guide the District of Columbia through a turbulent period from 1995 to 2001. One of that board’s first steps was to appoint a financial official with power to override the mayor and City Council.</p></blockquote>
<p>So Congress would have to end up running Puerto Rico while battling constant accusations of racism. Because Puerto Rico&#8217;s problem is that it&#8217;s a welfare state that it can&#8217;t afford to pay for.</p>
<p>But let&#8217;s look at how Puerto Rico got into this mess.</p>
<blockquote><p>In each of the last six years, Puerto Rico sold hundreds of millions of dollars of new bonds just to meet payments on its older, outstanding bonds — a red flag. It also sold $2.5 billion worth of bonds to raise cash for its troubled pension system — a risky practice — and it sold still more long-term bonds to cover its yearly budget deficits.</p>
<p>Mutual funds in particular were eager buyers; by adding Puerto Rican debt to an otherwise ho-hum portfolio, they could lift the overall yield without seeming to add much risk.</p>
<p>That cycle — a bountiful supply of debt feeding a seemingly insatiable demand — sputtered to a halt this summer, leaving Puerto Rico with more debt than it can easily pay. Its government must still borrow to finance its operations. Now it will cost much more to do so.</p></blockquote>
<p>If this sounds familiar, it should be. It&#8217;s how a lot of American cities and the country as a whole got into this mess. <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/6980051">And Puerto Rico is a welfare state </a>that points us to where we will end up with enough Democrats in power.</p>
<p>Cut them loose.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/puerto-rico-may-be-the-next-detroit/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>16</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Welfare State is Over, Dutch King Announces</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/welfare-state-is-over-dutch-king-announces/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=welfare-state-is-over-dutch-king-announces</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/welfare-state-is-over-dutch-king-announces/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Sep 2013 13:28:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[netherlands]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205043</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["The classic welfare state brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/article-2423751-198D9D36000005DC-856_634x421.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-205047" alt="article-2423751-198D9D36000005DC-856_634x421" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/article-2423751-198D9D36000005DC-856_634x421-450x298.jpg" width="450" height="298" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2013/09/dutch-king-willem-alexander-declares.html">In other news</a>, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2423751/Dutch-King-Willem-Alexander-declares-welfare-state-20th-century-over.html">republics just don&#8217;t work</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Holland’s new king Willem-Alexander today declared the end of the welfare state in a nationally-televised annual address.</p>
<p>The king, who is at 46 the youngest monarch in Europe, said a new &#8216;participation society&#8217; would take its place, in which people must save and invest to create their own social safety net with less help from the national government.</p>
<p>&#8216;The shift to a &#8220;participation society&#8221; is especially visible in social security and long-term care,&#8217; the king said in a speech to MPs written for him by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government.</p>
<p>The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.&#8217;</p>
<p>He said that nowadays, people expect and &#8216;want to make their own choices, to arrange their own lives, and take care of each other.&#8217;</p></blockquote>
<p>Well some do. Others don&#8217;t. That&#8217;s the problem we&#8217;re all faced with. What began as a social safety net has evolved into a lifestyle for some, especially those with the least investment in their host country.</p>
<p>The toxic relationship between left-wing activists and the professional poor is destroying entire economies as the left is motivated to increase the welfare rolls and those on them are motivated to vote for the left.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/welfare-state-is-over-dutch-king-announces/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>7</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>London Spends More on Welfare than the Entire UK Spends on Defense</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/london-spends-more-on-welfare-than-the-entire-uk-spends-on-defense/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=london-spends-more-on-welfare-than-the-entire-uk-spends-on-defense</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/london-spends-more-on-welfare-than-the-entire-uk-spends-on-defense/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 25 May 2013 20:31:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UK]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=190857</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Make welfare not war seems to be the new slogan]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/make-love-not-war1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-190866" alt="make-love-not-war1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/make-love-not-war1.jpg" width="300" height="305" /></a></p>
<p>Liberals like to claim that if we only spent as much on welfare, housing for the homeless, education and the whole package as we do on all our missiles and battleships, then we wouldn&#8217;t need the missiles and battleships.</p>
<p><a href="http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2013/05/londons-36bn-benefits-bill-is-bigger.html">London may offer a different sort </a>of lesson <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/londons-36bn-benefits-bill-is-bigger-than-the-uks-whole-defence-budget-8623674.html">in the nature of welfare migration magnets</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>London&#8217;s benefits bill has soared to more than the British defence budget, a new report warned today.</p>
<p>The study by the Centre for Social Justice highlighted that £36 billion ($54,450,000,000) went on working-age welfare payments in 2011/12 in the capital, compared with defence spending of £33.8 billion ($51,159,680,000.)</p>
<p>The benefits bill in Croydon alone was £1.7 billion, followed by Newham and Enfield, both £1.6 billion, and Barnet and Ealing on £1.5 billion, according to the analysis.</p></blockquote>
<p>Make welfare not war seems to be the new slogan. It worked out well in Boston and in Woolwich. Not only are the welfare bills higher, but so are the security bills and the defense bills.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/london-spends-more-on-welfare-than-the-entire-uk-spends-on-defense/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>21</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>What&#8217;s Wrong with Sweden?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whats-wrong-with-sweden/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=whats-wrong-with-sweden</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whats-wrong-with-sweden/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2013 04:10:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Multiculturalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sweden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wealth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189970</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the all-powerful socialist state destroys the spirit of human freedom -- and why Swedes ask for more. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/swedishflag608.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-190018" alt="swedishflag608" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/swedishflag608-450x329.jpg" width="315" height="230" /></a>Europe is slowly committing suicide, but Sweden is plainly determined to do itself in faster than the rest. Earlier this month, on a visit to Lagos, Nigeria, Sweden&#8217;s Minister of Finance, a fellow named Anders Borg, made one of those staggering <a href="https://www.realisten.se/2013/05/11/anders-borg-sverige-kommer-bli-som-afrika/%20">comments</a>, drenched with contempt for one&#8217;s own nation and culture, of the sort in which Swedish officials excel. Paying tribute to the beauty of Nigerian women&#8217;s colorful attire, Borg couldn&#8217;t just leave it at that; he felt compelled to use the occasion to complain that his own countrywomen too often wear dull, black outfits. Speaking with a reporter for <i>Expressen, </i>he expressed the hope and expectation that in ten years&#8217; time his own country, and Europe generally, will look far more like Africa. It&#8217;ll be more multicultural, he explained, and thus better.</p>
<p>But is Nigeria more multicultural than Sweden? Yes, if you&#8217;re referring to the fact that it has over 250 native ethnic and linguistic groups with a wide range of cultures, from Fula to Hausa to Yoruba. But if you&#8217;re talking about multiculturalism as an ideology that compels public servants to view the establishment of greater and greater ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity as an undivided virtue, regardless of all objective evidence to the contrary, Nigeria has nothing on Sweden. While only a tiny minority of Nigeria&#8217;s population is of foreign origin, over 25% of Sweden&#8217;s inhabitants have a foreign background. And people like Borg are determined to drive that number steadily higher, by hook or by crook – on the insane grounds that a nation like Sweden should look to a nation like Nigeria as a model for its own future development.</p>
<p>Indeed, it&#8217;s a measure of the utter irrationality of the modern religion known as multiculturalism that a Western politician like Borg is able to lavish such praise on an overpopulated, underdeveloped African country whose very name is synonymous with cheesy Internet scams; a country that has a life expectancy of 47 years, a 32% illiteracy rate, a political culture rife with corruption, and a deplorable human-rights record; a country where twelve of the 36 states are governed according to sharia law,  where over a hundred people perished in Muslim riots over the 2002 Miss World pageant, and where jihadist violence has taken hundreds of lives in recent years.</p>
<p>What the hell is up with Sweden? It&#8217;s a question people have been asking for decades, and in a new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Swedish-Story-extreme-experiment/dp/1484873831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1368901086&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=The+Swedish+Story+Sjunnesson">The Swedish Story</a><i>, </i>Swedish blogger Jon Sjunnesson sets out to answer it. And he does an effective job of it: even for those of us who have paid no small amount of attention to Sweden over the years, Sjunnesson&#8217;s book offers a helpful overview of the Swedish national character and the history of the Swedish welfare state, perceptively singling out the distinctive traits that have made Sweden the “extreme experiment” that it is and succinctly summing up some of the more notorious episodes in modern Swedish history.  But this isn&#8217;t all: he also illuminates socialism and the socialist mind in a way that I think will be useful for Americans – for what he&#8217;s drawn here is a vivid map of the territory into which our president and many of his cronies and supporters wish to lead us.</p>
<p>Take education. Of course, real education means, above all, helping students learn how to think critically. In a country like Sweden, however, schools and universities are primarily sites of indoctrination whose purpose is to create good socialists. If the Swedish system celebrates kids who are great at sports while all but punishing kids who stand out academically (“Excellence of bodies yes, brains no”), part of the reason is a fanatical devotion to equality of result, and part is an awareness that kids with first-rate minds are potential critics of the system. Hence socialism&#8217;s preference for mediocrity over excellence.</p>
<p>And, one might add, for social science over hard science. Yes, Sweden awards Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and medicine, but its educational system discourages an interest in math and science – because, you see, experts in these fields end up serving industry, which exploits workers and produces environmentally hazardous waste. For decades, consequently, Sweden has suffered a deficit of scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians. Students who choose to enter these fields, furthermore, tend to be so ill-prepared that they “need remedial classes.” There&#8217;s also a lack of plumbers, construction workers, and other laborers – for just as Sweden&#8217;s social engineers distrust science, they look down on vocations involving manual labor.</p>
<p>In Sweden, the brainwashing starts early – not in school, but in day care. No fewer than 85% of Swedish children under age three are in municipal (or municipally administered) day care. This figure is probably the highest percentage in the world. It is, Sjunnesson notes, the kind of experiment in mass, government-controlled child-rearing that Plato envisioned in his <i>Republic </i>and that “was central in Orwell&#8217;s and Huxley&#8217;s dystopias<i>.” </i>If you&#8217;re a Swedish parent who doesn&#8217;t want your kid brought up to be a good little socialist soldier – well, good luck: you have few if any real alternatives. Parents who don&#8217;t put their kids in day care “are often suspect in the eyes of social authority.” As for home schooling, it&#8217;s forbidden under a 2010 law (the only such legislation in the EU aside from a German ban enacted in 1938 because “the Nazi party did not want anyone else to school the young”). In any event, the cause of home schooling hasn&#8217;t gained much traction among Swedes, who have been efficiently trained to view any expression of unease over state-run education as “deranged” and to accept the socialist proposition that children belong not to their parents but to the state.</p>
<p>Sjunnesson makes a crucial point about the high tax rates in Sweden and other Nordic countries. The high taxes are necessary, of course, to fund the welfare state. But they serve another purpose. Socialists recognize members of the middle class, who are all too frequently driven by an ambition to better their circumstances, as a potential threat to the authority of socialists, whose machinations make such ambitions harder to fulfill. How to nip this nuisance in the bud? Easy: impose sky-high taxes on them. For, as Sjunnesson points out, people who have been able to accumulate some savings in the bank are better positioned to “stand up against authority” and “rise with self-confidence”; they&#8217;re not “as servile as if they had nothing.” Sweden&#8217;s tax system, then, is designed to make it extremely hard for Swedes to save money – and it works: compared to other Western countries, “Swedes have unusually small amounts of savings.” And consequently, people who might otherwise be vocal critics of the socialist welfare state are very aware of being dependent on it, knowing that if they get sick or lose their jobs they won&#8217;t have their own resources to fall back on. Confiscatory tax, then, serves not only as a means of enriching and expanding the socialist state, but as a form, itself, of socialist control.</p>
<p>“Meek as sheep”: that&#8217;s how Sjunnesson describes his fellow Swedes. They&#8217;re afflicted with a “silent conformism,” the result of a “spiral of silence” driven by a “fear of exclusion” and a perceived need to maintain a social order founded on perceived consensus views. Whether the perceived consensus views actually <i>are</i> the consensus views doesn&#8217;t matter: “When no opposing views are heard, people do not believe there are any even if they themselves dissent.” Those who do dare to dissent are branded as extreme – even though those “extreme” views may be thoroughly mainstream in other Western countries – and are often targeted for violence by self-styled “anti-fascists” who behave exactly like fascists. Sweden is, note well, a country in which members of the anti-establishment Sweden Democrats Party are demonized for dissenting civilly and peacefully, while certain entertainers are celebrated for singing about their desire to commit acts of violence against Sweden Democrats. Then there&#8217;s the story of how a frank Fox News report on the Islamization of the city of Malmö led an irate member of Parliament to demand that the Swedish counterpart to the FCC close down Fox News&#8217;s operation in Sweden. As Sjunnesson sums it up: “freedom of speech means little in Sweden.”</p>
<p>There&#8217;s much more of interest in this book. About, for example, the inculcation of virulently anti-male attitudes at all levels of the Swedish educational system. (“Boys cry when they hear how bad they and their father are and men have always been.”) About how the system rewards irresponsibility on the part of young unmarried mothers and the men who impregnate them. (“With a baby, a single parent sidesteps all waiting lines and the child may be the only means to an apartment for decades.”) About a national self-hatred so fierce that “schools have asked pupils not to wear [Swedish flag] t-shirts or wave the yellow and blue flag as it could be interpreted as racist.” About a country where adults admire and envy youth beyond all reason, and accordingly exhibit greater levels of hedonism and infantilism than their counterparts anywhere else on the planet. And about levels of anti-Semitism that made international headlines yet again just the other day, when Israel&#8217;s Eurovision delegation was <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/israeli-eurovision-delegation-threatened-in-sweden-1.524399">harassed and threatened</a> on the streets of Malmö.</p>
<p>For an American reader, Sjunnesson&#8217;s book about a supposedly free country where the media march in lockstep and where dissent can be dangerous carries a special resonance in the wake of revelations that the IRS has targeted conservative groups and the Justice Department has snooped on AP and Fox News journalists. To some observers, the depth of the Obama administration&#8217;s hostility toward any hint of criticism in the media has been especially puzzling, given that most news media have in fact been absurdly supportive and protective of Obama throughout his presidency. But to a true socialist government, <i>any </i>dissent is intolerable. In Norway, where the domination of the news market by state-run TV channels and radio stations and by state-subsidized newspapers already give the government a very strong hand in shaping the media message about itself, officials have now gone a step further, proposing that the state award grants to fund journalistic projects of its own choosing – an outrageous suggestion in a democratic country, but a no-brainer for those with a socialist mindset.</p>
<p>In socialist countries, after all, the state doesn&#8217;t exist to serve the people; the people exist to be shaped into unquestioning servants of the state – servants who accept that the state <i>is</i> them and that they are the state. In such countries, it&#8217;s taken for granted that there&#8217;s no need to place any limit on state power or to provide mechanisms to protect citizens from that power, because, by definition, as Sjunnesson puts it, “the state always is good.” We may mock the European Union for banning jugs or bowls of olive oil on restaurant tables, but this is what socialism does: the powers that be need to have their fingers in every pie, need to minimize the number of situations under which freedom may actually be experienced, need to accustom citizens to a society in which their lives are increasingly regulated. They need, in short, to create a country in which the land and the system are, in the minds of the general public, one – a country, that is, in which the people simply cannot imagine the nation itself <i>without </i>the socialist state.</p>
<p>No so-called democracy on earth has gone as far in this direction as Sweden. For the Swedish people, Sjunneson says, “the country is the welfare state&#8230;Swedes have have no home but the welfare state and no identity outside its yarn” – outside, in other words, its narrative about itself. Winston Smith, Orwell&#8217;s narrator in <i>1984, </i>suggests that the only hope of overthrowing the totalitarian government of his native Oceania lies with “the proles”; Sjunneson, for his part, believes that his fellow Swedes are so brainwashed by welfare-state propaganda that the only way Sweden can save itself at this point is by admitting “one million new immigrants from India, China, Africa and Latin America” who have service skills or technical knowhow, who have no truck with jihadism or multiculturalism, who want to move to Sweden not for a handout but to study hard and work hard, and who will, in time, found more rigorous schools and start more vigorous businesses.</p>
<p>A pipe dream, I fear. Yet Sjunneson&#8217;s portrait of his country is a cautionary tale whose lessons the rest of us ignore at our peril.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whats-wrong-with-sweden/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>83</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Will Amnestied Illegal Aliens Bankrupt New Jersey and California?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/will-amnestied-illegal-aliens-bankrupt-new-jersey-and-california/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=will-amnestied-illegal-aliens-bankrupt-new-jersey-and-california</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/will-amnestied-illegal-aliens-bankrupt-new-jersey-and-california/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 04 May 2013 22:13:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[amnesty for illegal aliens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=187812</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Amnesty may not immediately put illegal aliens on the Federal dole, but it will immediately put them on the state and city dole. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/obama_amnesty.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-187369" alt="obama_amnesty" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/obama_amnesty.jpg" width="410" height="313" /></a></p>
<p>Amnesty for illegal aliens will hit five states hardest: California, Texas, New Jersey, Florida and Nevada. Those are the states with some of the highest percentages of illegal aliens. Amnesty, as noted by Senator Jeff Sessions, may not immediately put illegal aliens on the Federal dole, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/29/Exclusive-Immigration-bill-would-load-immediate-fiscal-burden-onto-state-local-governments-by-allowing-illegal-immigrants-onto-welfare">but it will immediately put them on the state and city dole</a>.</p>
<p>(And since states and cities get Federal funding for their social welfare spending, in practice the Federal government will be providing billions in social welfare spending for illegal aliens very quickly.)</p>
<p>Texas has the financial reserves to survive amnesty, for now. (An oil industry doesn&#8217;t provide that much of a hedge. Mexico has oil too.) But California does not.</p>
<p>California is already circling the drain. Its real hole is already somewhere<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/californias-debt-6-12x-higher-than-previously-estimated-2012-9"> between 150 billion and 300 billion</a> (despite the glowing media stories on how Jerry Brown balanced the budget and turned the state around.)</p>
<p>California has 12 percent of the nation&#8217;s population but 34 percent of its welfare population. It is <a href="http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jul/28/welfare-capital-of-the-us/">third in per capita welfare spending</a>. And while a lot of illegal aliens are already cashing in, those numbers will jump in a big way after amnesty.</p>
<p>New Jersey is surprisingly second on the list. It has high unemployment and<a href="http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/01/njs_debt_grew_by_6b_in_fiscal.html"> a 71 billion dollar hole</a>. It also has a 6.2 percent illegal alien population and <a href="http://ppinys.org/reports/jtf/2008/WelfareSpending2008.html">its welfare spending is close behind</a> California. Like California, New Jersey is sharply divided between overburdened homeowners and a welfare population of miniature Detroits. And illegal amnesty will leave it in bad shape.</p>
<p>The news isn&#8217;t good in Florida either. Few states are prepared to absorb a large surplus population that will take more than it contributes and cost more than it earns.</p>
<p>And while the Amnesty Gang claim that illegal aliens won&#8217;t go on welfare after amnesty, they will. <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/29/Exclusive-Immigration-bill-would-load-immediate-fiscal-burden-onto-state-local-governments-by-allowing-illegal-immigrants-onto-welfare">It will just be more indirect</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>If the bill were signed into law, America’s 11 million illegal immigrants would be legalized within six months, when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano submits her border security plan to Congress. Illegal immigrants would immediately be eligible for Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI) status, making them legal to live and work in the country.</p>
<p>As Sessions’ staff points out in the memo, “state laws frequently extend benefits to anyone ‘lawfully present’ in the U.S.” The Sessions team points to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) brief that details how the only requirement many state and local governments have with regard to immigrant access to public benefits is that they are “lawfully present.” The term “lawfully present” is a legal definition.</p>
<p>According to page 91 of the bill, all illegal immigrants granted legalized RPI status would legally be considered “lawfully present.”</p>
<p>“Therefore, when those here illegally who are unable to support themselves are legalized, much of the immediate fiscal burden will fall on state and local governments,” Sessions’ staff wrote in the memo.</p></blockquote>
<p>And they will pass that burden back to taxpayers and the Federal government which will provide them with more grants and pass the cost back to tapxayers.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/will-amnestied-illegal-aliens-bankrupt-new-jersey-and-california/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Tsarnaev Clan Received $100K Welfare, Now Getting Free Lawyers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/tsarnaev-clan-received-100k-welfare-now-getting-free-lawyers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=tsarnaev-clan-received-100k-welfare-now-getting-free-lawyers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/tsarnaev-clan-received-100k-welfare-now-getting-free-lawyers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:06:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dzhokhar Tsarnaev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=187780</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-12.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-186874" alt="dzhokhar-tsarnaev-12" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-12-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>The welfare train never stops for Muslim terrorists. First the <a href="http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/tsarnaev_family_received_100g_in_benefits">Tsarnaev family received over $100,000 in social welfare benefits</a> for enriching our culture with their thievery and terrorism.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.</p>
<p>“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today.</p>
<p>Transitional assistance officials also told the Herald tonight that the agency was conducting its own investigation into whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s family ever notified the DTA about his extended trip to Russia, and has since expanded its probe to include a full history of the benefits received by the entire Tsarnaev family.</p></blockquote>
<p>What is truly stunning is how many Muslim immigrants game the system to extract the maximum amount of benefits in the same way. But the welfare train doesn&#8217;t end at terrorism station. That 100K was only a downpayment on the real cost of the terrorist welfare queens.</p>
<blockquote><p>“The defense team representing the Boston Marathon bombing suspect got a major boost Monday with the addition of Judy Clarke, a San Diego lawyer who has managed to get life sentences instead of the death penalty for several high-profile clients, including the Unabomber and the gunman in the rampage that injured former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords,” reports the AP.</p>
<p>“Clarke’s appointment was approved Monday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler.”</p>
<p>CNN confirmed last night that bill for the attorney would be picked up by “Uncle Sam,” or the American taxpayer.</p></blockquote>
<p>The cost for Phase 2 of the Tsarnaev Welfarepalooza is bound to run a lot more than a mere 100K. The trial alone will run a few million. And then the taxpayers will be spending 50k a year to keep Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in his maximum security digs at the cost of 50k a year (subject to inflation and ACLU lawsuits) while answering fan mail from One Direction fans.</p>
<p>After his conviction, he is likely headed for the Souza Baranowski Center, one of two Supermax prisons in Massachusetts, where he will be able to participate in programs fostering &#8220;Emotional Healing and Awareness&#8221; and a Toastmaters club for public speaking.</p>
<p>The welfare train never stops.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/tsarnaev-clan-received-100k-welfare-now-getting-free-lawyers/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>21</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>1/4 of New York City&#8217;s Homeless People Come for the Free Stuff</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/14-of-new-york-citys-homeless-people-are-outsiders/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=14-of-new-york-citys-homeless-people-are-outsiders</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/14-of-new-york-citys-homeless-people-are-outsiders/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:57:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[homeless]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=184277</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jablonowski said he even gets a prepaid cellphone — allowing 1,000 texts and 300 minutes a month — through Medicaid and boasted, “I’m going to get my teeth fixed.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/14-of-new-york-citys-homeless-people-are-outsiders/nyt2008121517162289c/" rel="attachment wp-att-184279"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-184279" title="NYT2008121517162289C" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/16vets3_650.jpg" alt="" width="650" height="434" /></a></p>
<p>Social welfare is a magnet. Extend it, and they will come. Extend it carelessly<a href="http://moonbattery.com/?p=27883"> and they will really come</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>“People pay $3,000 for an apartment here, and I get to live here for free!” said Michal Jablonowski, 25, who moved back to the city from his native Poland three years ago and is now staying in a Bowery shelter.</p>
<p>“I have food. I have health care. It’s great,’’ Jablonowski said. “Here, the city supports you. The city helps you with everything.’’</p>
<p>Nearly one in four of the city’s single homeless people who entered the system in December 2012 listed their last address as outside the city.</p>
<p>“We get breakfast, lunch and dinner. We have a microwave and TV. They do the laundry for free,” noted Jablonowski, who lived in New York for years before going back to his homeland, only to return here to a freebie life.</p>
<p>Jablonowski said he even gets a prepaid cellphone — allowing 1,000 texts and 300 minutes a month — through Medicaid and boasted, “I’m going to get my teeth fixed.”</p>
<p>“I love New York because you cannot starve in New York, you can always find food and clothes,” he said.</p>
<p>“The shelters are really nice. You have clean sheets. You get to watch TV and stay in the warm. Homeless people have it so good, they don’t want to look for a job.’’</p></blockquote>
<p>This isn&#8217;t unique to New York City. The problem is ubiquitous to most major cities in developed nations. Social welfare acts as a magnet for parasites who aren&#8217;t part of a social safety net, but are exploiting it.</p>
<p>As a New Yorker, I&#8217;ve seen a shift away from the classic urban homeless person to young white men who are from out of state or even out of the country soliciting for cash. Some of this increased with the Occupy Wall Street influx, but it predated it. I never had a very good explanation for the gentrification of homelessness, <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/thank_you_very_mooch_nyc_Pkq1Mu9t1Svh7u9jZDAf5N">but this just might be it</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Taxpayers shell out $3,000 a month to feed, house and provide other services to each homeless person. The average stay in a city shelter is as long as nine months — although there’s no limit.</p>
<p>“Some people in here have it better than people working 9 to 5, because they’re not paying rent. I’ve stayed in hostels worse. I call this four stars,” said William Sullivan, who came to the city from LA for a job that fell through.</p>
<p>“Everyone in this place has a silver spoon in their mouth. You get fed three to four meals a day, and the food here is great.”</p>
<p>A Michigan woman who arrived in December said she was drawn to New York for the “adventure.”</p>
<p>“New York is New York! That’s why people come here,” said Amy Kaufman, 41, who is staying in a city-funded Chelsea shelter. “I go to the library, and I go sightseeing a lot in Times Square and Chelsea. I like it here.  I’m staying here for a while because the housing options are better. Michigan is in a recession right now.”</p></blockquote>
<p>New York City. Come for the adventure. Stay for the deluxe homeless shelters.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/14-of-new-york-citys-homeless-people-are-outsiders/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>10</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Freeloaders or Free Country?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/freeloaders-or-free-country-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=freeloaders-or-free-country-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/freeloaders-or-free-country-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Feb 2013 04:58:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[messaging]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reason]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[takers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=176701</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The current debate about how Republicans can stop losing and start winning.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/freeloaders-or-free-country-2/emotionreason_790x300_eng_rev2-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-176712"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-176712" title="EmotionReason_790x300_Eng_rev2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/EmotionReason_790x300_Eng_rev21.jpg" alt="" width="271" height="206" /></a>Defeats are never easy to take and yet every defeat is a necessary learning experience. Reading the memoirs of the greatest athletes and generals, you discover that they learned more from their defeats than from their victories because their victories only taught them their strengths while their defeats forced them to confront their weaknesses.</p>
<p>The Republican defeat in 2012 was a difficult blow, especially coming after the victories of 2010, and its lessons are still being argued and absorbed. Different schools of thought have emerged and different conclusions are being drawn from what took place several months ago. These necessary debates confront us with our weaknesses and prepare us to claim the victories to come.</p>
<p>Last month, Bruce Thornton wrote an article for Front Page Magazine containing his diagnosis of the defeat. That article, “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/its-not-the-message-its-not-the-messenger-its-the-voter/">It’s Not the Message, It’s Not the Messenger, It’s the Voter</a>,” argued that the conservative message had been properly polished and had reached its intended audience, but that the average voter was not receptive to that message because he was unwilling to give up the comforts of the social safety net and the welfare state.</p>
<p>“Only the stupid or willfully inattentive haven’t heard that we face a financial abyss waiting at the end of our entitlement road, that entitlements need to be reformed, that we have an exploding debt and deficit crisis, that a &#8216;tax the rich&#8217; policy only produces chump-change for solving that problem, that Obama’s economic policies have bloated the federal government at the expense of jobs and growth, and that Obama himself is the most left-wing, duplicitous, partisan, and incompetent president in modern history,” Thornton wrote.</p>
<p>In a Front Page follow-up article to that, “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/messengers-messages-and-voters-part-2/">Messengers, Messages, and Voters, Part 2</a>,” Thornton expanded his theme using historical references to Ancient Greece and the Founding Fathers to depict the universal franchise as an aberration that would always lead people to place their own private good above that of the national good.</p>
<p>“So unless one believes that human nature has evolved beyond passion and self-interest so that today a critical mass of voters will consider principle and the good of the whole even at the cost of their own interests,” Thornton wrote, “we still face the same problem that troubled earlier critics of democracy.”</p>
<p>In response to that first piece, David Horowitz took a different position. In his article, “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/its-the-message-and-yes-the-messengers/">It’s the Message and Yes the Messengers — NOT the Voters</a>,” he argued that there was indeed a messaging problem at the heart of the defeat. He linked this problem to a continuing underestimation of the left and their tactics, as well as a lack of sufficient aggressiveness on the part of conservative campaigners.</p>
<p>Horowitz contrasts the Democratic Party’s willingness to play the heroes protecting minority groups from the ravages of the Republican Party with the lack of moral outrage and offensive momentum from the Republican Party in pushing back against these dishonest slanders.</p>
<p>“Republicans didn’t lay a finger on Obama and the Democrats for their wars against women, minorities and the middle class. They hardly mentioned the suffering of these groups under Obama’s policies,” he wrote.</p>
<p>This theme is further elaborated on in his new pamphlet in an article that appeared on <a href="http://powerlineblog.com/">powerlineblog.com</a> called “<a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/02/david-horowitz-how-republicans-can-win.php">Go For the Heart: How Republicans Can Win</a>.” There he writes, “The only way to confront the emotional campaign that Democrats wage in every election is through an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys.”</p>
<p>Horowitz argues that the primary organ is not the head, but the heart, and that rational arguments go nowhere unless they connect to emotional narratives. While the reasoning person may be expected to rationally process and accept a message of small government, low taxes and personal freedom, this message will not connect unless it goes for the heart, rather than the head.</p>
<p>Americans are not a nation of takers, Horowitz says, they are coping with uncertain and difficult times without a clear sense of direction. They have been misled by the left’s false narratives and the ineptness of the right in challenging those narratives.</p>
<p>“When Democrats tell their underdog story it is not an abstraction but a powerful, polarizing, emotionally charged attack on their Republican adversaries. In the Democratic narrative, Republicans are cast as oppressors,” Horowitz warns. “How can you win a war when the other side is using bazookas and your side is using fly swatters?”</p>
<p>Both Horowitz and Thornton agree that the people are not perfect or ideal, but Horowitz argues that this requires a change of tactics. Rather than dismissing the possibility of winning the argument, the Republican Party must instead learn how to make the arguments that bypass the head and go for the heart.</p>
<p>While Thornton focuses on the head as the primary aspect of man, a reasoning creature who thinks and only then acts, and whose actions spring from rational or rationalized motives, Horowitz argues that man should be viewed as less rational and more emotional, as a heart rather than a head. Man thinks less and feels more. It is these feelings that drive him and move him, activating his moral senses and his sense of self-interest.</p>
<p>&#8220;The weapons of political campaigns are hope and fear,&#8221; Horowitz writes. &#8220;Obama won the presidency in 2008 on a campaign of hope; he won re-election in 2012 on a campaign of fear.&#8221;</p>
<p>2012 was not an election of thinkers or takers, in Horowitz’s view, but an election that was won on the ability of the left to manipulate emotions, to banish hope and inspire fear. And his advice to conservatives who want to win is to focus less on the rational argument and more on the emotional argument. To tell the story, rather than display the pie chart. To worry less about the head and more about the heart.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/freeloaders-or-free-country-2/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>176</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>What to Expect in the Next Four Years</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/what-to-expect-in-the-next-four-years/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-to-expect-in-the-next-four-years</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/what-to-expect-in-the-next-four-years/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Nov 2012 04:50:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Boehner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[entitlement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mitt romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[re-election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[taxation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=164596</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Prepared for the worst -- and to fight back. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/what-to-expect-in-the-next-four-years/obama-61/" rel="attachment wp-att-164606"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-164606" title="Obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Obama-433x350.gif" alt="" width="303" height="245" /></a>Americans have narrowly voted to reelect a president who will continue policies that will &#8212; not may &#8212; eventually lead to the downfall of the American republic.</p>
<p>The Tuesday election was a crushing defeat for the Tea Party-energized conservative movement but as a wise person once said, all defeats in politics are temporary. It is unfathomable to many Americans that a man they see as a wrongheaded, arrogant, corrupt Chief Executive could be reelected in a harsh economic climate, but as we saw with Franklin Roosevelt&#8217;s 1936 win during the Great Depression, it can happen.</p>
<p>For the time being I&#8217;ll leave it to others to hold forth on how best to take on the still-expanding Leviathan that President Obama is piloting but now that some of the initial pain and shock from Tuesday evening is beginning to wear off, let&#8217;s take a look at the grim future America faces if it fails to correct its course.</p>
<p>The economy is a shambles and thanks to the news-suppressing Obama-worshipping media, a huge chunk of the populace seems unaware of just how rotten things are. A quick recap: More than 23 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up seeking work. The workforce participation rate is the lowest in 30 years. Annual household income is down $4,000. A record 47 million people are on food stamps. The national debt is now an astonishing $16.4 trillion and it&#8217;s probably going to shoot up even more.</p>
<p>This is just a smattering of the deeply depressing economic statistics that define the age of Obama.</p>
<p>In light of the election results, House Speaker John Boehner has demonstrated that he may be flexible on what has been the GOP&#8217;s signature issue: tax cuts. However, his public pronouncements on tax cuts since the election haven&#8217;t exactly been easy to interpret. During a Wednesday press event, he said he may be amenable to raising government revenues then during an interview with ABC&#8217;s Diane Sawyer the next day he said he didn&#8217;t want to raise taxes.</p>
<p>It is far from clear if such increases would prevent the day of fiscal reckoning. More likely tax hikes would simply delay it a bit by propping up America&#8217;s unsustainable welfare state, a redistributionist infrastructure that President Obama and Democrats are determined to further expand.</p>
<p>Boehner also struck the colors on the issue of Obamacare repeal. He told Diane Sawyer that he has no plans to fight President Obama&#8217;s unpopular health care legislation further. Asked if he intended to pursue a complete repeal of the law, Boehner said, &#8220;the election changes that,&#8221; and &#8220;Obamacare is the law of the land.&#8221;</p>
<p>Although these matters are worth worrying about, they are short-term concerns. Many Americans viewed this past election as America&#8217;s last, best chance to at least try to right the ship of state.</p>
<p>What may happen to the country over the long-term is terrifying.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s second term may give the Left undisputed control of the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>Although erstwhile conservative John Roberts is quite young (57) and likely to remain on the high court bench for decades to come, two of the court&#8217;s non-leftists are elderly. Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are both 76. (Clarence Thomas is 64 and Samuel Alito is 62.) President Obama is entitled to nominate replacements if any vacancies occur.</p>
<p>The First and Second Amendments would be likely targets for a radicalized Supreme Court. Leftists abhor the 2008 ruling in <em>District of Columbia v. Heller </em>which recognized the individual right to bear arms. They also froth at the mouth over <em>Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</em>, the 2010 opinion that struck down restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations and unions on free speech grounds. The administration is likely to seek out test cases to use to reverse these existing precedents.</p>
<p>President Obama will also likely continue to attack free speech protections using executive orders and bureaucratic skulduggery. He has already issued 140 executive orders and is fond of making recess appointments for key federal posts &#8212; even when Congress is not technically in recess.</p>
<p>After a ridiculous Ed Wood-style video attacking the Muslim prophet Mohammed surfaced in the fall, the Obama administration saw to it that the filmmaker, Mark Basseley Youssef, was promptly arrested. The administration falsely blamed riots in the Muslim world and the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on U.S. missions on the video even though hardly anyone in the world had seen the video at that time.</p>
<p>Youssef has been ordered imprisoned for a year by a court, ostensibly for breaching probation terms related to another conviction of his. But conservatives aren&#8217;t buying that excuse. Many on the Right are beginning to view Youssef as a real, live political prisoner of the Obama regime, locked up because he committed the politically incorrect crime of offending Muslims. So far the ACLU and Amnesty International have been silent about this injustice. More political prisoners may follow as the administration looks for scapegoats to distract the public from the weak economy.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s appeasement of Islamists will continue and their strength both abroad and within the United States will continue to grow. Islamofascist front groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) will continue to operate unhindered. More Fort Hood massacres may occur and the FBI and military won&#8217;t be allowed to identify them as acts of Islamic terrorism because to do so would be an admission that Obama&#8217;s policy toward the Muslim world is a farce. We now know that al-Qaeda is, far from dead as Obama claimed, in fact resurgent and working with the Muslim Brotherhood to rebuild the old Islamic Caliphate that collapsed with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.</p>
<p>It wouldn&#8217;t be all that surprising if the administration embraced anti-blasphemy laws because this administration believes that not causing offense trumps free speech. Obama may release the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The government that Obama helped to create in Egypt by abandoning our old ally Hosni Mubarak has asked the U.S. to return Abdel-Rahman to his homeland and sources within our government have confirmed that negotiations are underway.</p>
<p>Over Obama&#8217;s second term, deep cuts to the military are expected. The president is on record as pledging to eliminate or reduce to a bare minimum the nation&#8217;s inventory of nuclear weapons. Troop strength will continue to fall because like all good American Marxists, Obama doesn&#8217;t like using American soldiers to fight wars and defend the country. He prefers using soldiers as social workers to deliver foreign aid to the needy nations of the world.</p>
<p>With the Obama campaign&#8217;s constant race-baiting and class warfare, a sour mood has descended on the land. Exit polls from the election suggest that voters have succumbed to the siren song of envy and really do want to make the so-called rich pay higher taxes.  Yet they still stubbornly cling to conservative beliefs, a dislike of big government, and a distrust of both major political parties. America today bears little resemblance to the America of the Reagan era in which taxes and government were cuss words. We may not be a center-right nation anymore.</p>
<p>As more and more companies collapse, taking jobs with them, more super-rich people will renounce their U.S. citizenship in order to be spared the nation&#8217;s increasingly oppressive tax rates. Others will move their money abroad. Cheating on taxes will become commonplace as it is in countries with large welfare states such as Britain, France, and Canada. People will become poorer and meaner. Some companies will go Galt, to borrow Ayn Rand&#8217;s phrase from her prophetic novel, &#8220;Atlas Shrugged.&#8221; In other words, they will shut down because their owners resent being targeted for their success.</p>
<p>Welfare burdens will continue to grow but poverty will not disappear. Throwing money at poverty doesn&#8217;t work. As Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has noted, an astounding $16 trillion has been spent on the War on Poverty since it was launched in 1965, which, adjusted for inflation, is more than double the sum the U.S. has spent on every non-metaphorical war since Independence. Obama&#8217;s plan is to increase welfare spending by another $10 trillion and right now it is hard to imagine anyone trying to stop him.</p>
<p>Bob Dole may have been right when he poignantly observed in the 1990s, &#8220;We have lost shame as a motivating factor in our society.&#8221; It may be impossible to stop Obama from escalating spending on the nonproductive in part because the stigma associated with welfare is rapidly disappearing as government gets involved in nearly every aspect of our lives. Americans like handouts more than ever before. The work ethic is being rapidly overshadowed by the entitlement mentality as Americans grow accustomed to being poked and prodded by Big Brother.</p>
<p>If present trends continue, racial and ethnic balkanization will grow in Obama&#8217;s second term. The president himself has encouraged it. For example, during the long campaign he urged Latinos to &#8220;punish&#8221; their &#8220;enemies.&#8221; While the tragic Trayvon Martin saga unfolded, Obama played to his base, deliberately fanning racial tensions. He supports multiculturalism and has said he doesn&#8217;t believe there&#8217;s anything particularly exceptional about America. If the president won&#8217;t stand up for America, racial grievance mongers will tear it apart from the inside.</p>
<p>Eventually strife and unrest will take over America. Federal, state, and local governments will suffer credit rating downgrades, lose their ability to borrow money, and be unable to meet their continuing obligations.</p>
<p>When members of the public, by this point accustomed to feeding at the public teat, stop receiving the government checks they rely on, there will be an explosion that will rock society to its core. Americans will panic. The same thing has happened all over the world again and again.</p>
<p>Secession, revolution, foreign invasion, all these things that look mysterious and crazy and impossible right now could happen in America. We are not immune just because traditionally we&#8217;ve thought we&#8217;re special. Our ideas at that point won&#8217;t matter as we are overtaken by events and outside influences.</p>
<p>Not one of these things has to happen. The future is not carved in stone.</p>
<p>In order for the America we know and love to survive, a belief in freedom, individual rights, and self-reliance will have to resurface throughout the land.</p>
<p>Another four years of Obama may do just that. Americans will have to fight for their country.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/what-to-expect-in-the-next-four-years/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>139</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Showdown in America: Workers vs. the Welfare State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/showdown-in-american-workers-vs-the-welfare-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=showdown-in-american-workers-vs-the-welfare-state</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/showdown-in-american-workers-vs-the-welfare-state/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Nov 2012 04:55:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food stamps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[free enterprise c]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oligarchy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163985</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What happens to a country when more benefit from its economic decline than from its success?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/showdown-in-american-workers-vs-the-welfare-state/article-earlyvoting2-1102/" rel="attachment wp-att-163991"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163991" title="article-earlyvoting2-1102" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/article-earlyvoting2-1102.gif" alt="" width="315" height="232" /></a>The 2012 presidential election is coming down to a contest between those who want the economy to succeed and those who want it to go on failing. Hope and Change is dead, at least the brand that depended on oratorical inspiration injected via teleprompter from between Greek columns taken out on loan before they were due back for an arena rock show. Anyone capable of balancing a checkbook has done the math, and come reluctantly to the conclusion that it’s a choice between Romney and ruin.</p>
<p>No one seriously believes that another four years of Obama will fix the economy, mend race relations or restore international relations. Those things didn’t happen in four years and they won’t happen in eight. But even with lowered expectations, few of those voters who walk into the booth and go for the zero even expect any of these three areas to stay at their current level after another four years. Most of them know that the economy will be worse, the racial pool will be more poisoned than ever and the world will be a more dangerous place. They aren’t stupid. What they are is selfish.</p>
<p>We assume that it is in everyone’s interest for the economy to rebound, for the jobs to come back, for the factories to hum and the cash registers to sing their song. But what if it’s not?</p>
<p>The election is no longer a race between Democrats and Republicans; it’s a race between those who hope to benefit from an economic recovery and those who benefit more from the lack of an economic recovery. It’s a race between the entrenched interests of failure and the revolutionary surge of success. It’s a death match between the state of free enterprise and the welfare state.</p>
<p>Forget your traditional image of the welfare queen. Sure she’s out there, but she isn’t buying lobster with food stamps. She’s serving as a consultant to the State of Michigan on how to improve the dietary balance of the diverse populations of SNAP food aid recipients in compliance with a federal directive that her partners had a hand in drafting. The take home pay on her end is in the six figures and it’s all rolled into the cost of the welfare state, toted up as cost-savings measures for preventing heart attacks in the children growing up on food stamps and fated to live on them for the next 60 years.</p>
<p>Barack and Michelle Obama are the perfect power couple of the welfare state, not because they would ever touch it, but because they are a testament to how much money there is to be made feeding off the infrastructure of the welfare state, filing lawsuits, managing patients and organizing the hell out of every living dead voter in the State of Illinois.</p>
<p>Parasites like Barry and Michelle used to be a dirty little secret, vital links in the chain stretching from the vast treasuries of the national budget down the favor network over to the urban neighborhood and the people who get rich helping the poor. They were there for a long time, but they rarely got past the House of Representatives. Mostly they were satisfied grabbing their chunks of the aid pie and living a cheerfully upper-middle class life on the dirty trade in souls of the welfare state.</p>
<p>Barack Obama is a trailblazer, not on account of race, but on account of his profession. This isn’t a racial or class conflict, but a power struggle between those who work and those who work them over. It’s a power play by the professional organizers, activists, trainers, representatives and all the other players in the machinery of the welfare state who used an economic crisis to move one of their own into a position of ultimate power.</p>
<p>The welfare staters aren’t interested in an economic recovery. Like every company, they want to expand their sales territory, and what they are selling is dependency and false promises. Their stock in trade is promising their clients freebies which they get through agitation, activism, protests, lawsuits and deals that all end with the clients voting Democratic while the middlemen and middlewomen pocket 9/10<sup>ths</sup> of the take while their clients get the other 1/10<sup>th</sup>.</p>
<p>This scam is no different than the one practiced by every ambulance chasing lawyer. The difference is that the welfare staters make their scam seem benevolent. And their clients are often willing to accept the tenth, because while it may only be 10 percent of the total being spent on their freebies, it’s still free. And those clients will vote for the welfare staters and fight to the death to preserve their hold on power, because it’s the only form of economic participation that they know.</p>
<p>This is the living dead vote and it won’t be easy to beat. Its constituents are quite satisfied to see that the economy is a shambles and that race relations are in the toilet. They have no aspirations beyond making things worse and these two sets of conditions are the ones that favor their agenda the most.</p>
<p>The worse the economy becomes, the more clients turn up and the more violent the opposition becomes to enacting any financial reforms. The economic failures of the last four years are not a disappointment to them, but an encouragement. If they can move a majority of the population onto the welfare rolls and make it impossible for them to leave, then they will have won.</p>
<p>Their victory is defined by creating a political climate in which their economic position cannot be challenged and an economic climate in which their political positions cannot be challenged. Once the linkages are in place, then there will still be elections, but they won’t mean anything because the only purpose of such elections will be to reaffirm the political bosses who negotiate the payouts of the welfare state. America will become Chicago and Chicago will finally become the sum of America.</p>
<p>Even left-leaning Democrats are starting to pull away from the prospect of living under such a system, and as invested as they are in the networks of non-profits, many of them are none too enthusiastic about instituting economic failure and reducing the political and economic potential of the United States to the same system of bureaucratic collectivism and political patronage that has taken over its cities.</p>
<p>In a few short days we will see a critical clash between those who want to turn the United States of America into another Cuba or Venezuela, a corrupt dysfunctional oligarchy masquerading behind socialist ideals and rent-a-mobs, and those who want to see the restoration of a functional country of free people. It is a contest between those who still hope that individuals can use their creative abilities to fulfill their destinies and those who believe that reform requires investing total power into unaccountable institutions.</p>
<p>This election is nothing less than a showdown between the vitality of a living America and the living dead vote of the welfare state.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/showdown-in-american-workers-vs-the-welfare-state/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>81</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>$61,194 in Welfare Spending for Every Poor Household</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/61194-in-welfare-spending-for-every-poor-household/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=61194-in-welfare-spending-for-every-poor-household</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/61194-in-welfare-spending-for-every-poor-household/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 28 Oct 2012 01:02:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=162983</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real welfare queens aren't the ones shouting about voting for Obama because they're getting free phones. They're the ones who administer the free phone programs]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/61194-in-welfare-spending-for-every-poor-household/200245473-001/" rel="attachment wp-att-162984"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-162984" title="200245473-001" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Thinkstock_B_07012012_Giving-Money-450x252.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="252" /></a></p>
<p>What the class warriors know and their critics often don&#8217;t understand is that the real welfare queens aren&#8217;t the ones shouting about voting for Obama because they&#8217;re getting free phones. They&#8217;re the ones who administer the free phone programs.</p>
<p>The welfare state isn&#8217;t run for the benefit of welfare recipients, it&#8217;s run for the bureaucracy that dispenses welfare and their contractors, with the welfare recipients as the pretext for the whole scam.</p>
<p>Imagine a doctor who makes up phony bills for Medicaid patients and splits a tenth of it with them. Now imagine that the doctor is Medicaid and<a href="http://weaselzippers.us/2012/10/26/study-federal-government-spent-61194-on-welfare-programs-for-each-household-in-poverty/"> you get some sense of where we are here</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>“According to the Census’s American Community Survey, the number of households with incomes below the poverty line in 2011 was 16,807,795,” the Senate Budget Committee notes. “If you divide total federal and state spending by the number of households with incomes below the poverty line, the average spending per household in poverty was $61,194 in 2011.”</p>
<p>This dollar figure is almost three times the amount the average household on poverty lives on per year. “If the spending on these programs were converted into cash, and distributed exclusively to the nation’s households below the poverty line, this cash amount would be over 2.5 times the federal poverty threshold for a family of four, which in 2011 was $22,350 (see table in this link),” the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course the actual recipients get a fraction of the spending intended for them. We are not spending money to help the poor. We are spending money on a bureaucracy that claims to advocate on behalf of the poor.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/61194-in-welfare-spending-for-every-poor-household/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Is This the Year We Recognize the Failure of Progressivism?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/is-this-the-year-we-recognize-the-failure-of-progressivism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=is-this-the-year-we-recognize-the-failure-of-progressivism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/is-this-the-year-we-recognize-the-failure-of-progressivism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Jun 2012 04:37:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election 2012]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[european union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=135679</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the demise of the EU really means.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/1eu-flag.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-135682" title="1eu-flag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/1eu-flag.gif" alt="" width="375" height="261" /></a>This year is looking more and more like one of those “years of decision” that have marked profound crises and changes in American history. I’m speaking not just about the presidential election, or whether or not Barack Obama gets a second term. Obama is merely a symptom of our educational, social, economic, and political dysfunctions that in turn reflect the failing core ideology of modernity expressed by progressive politics. The “decision” that has to be made this year is whether we finally abandon that nexus of ideas that has led us to our current economic troubles.</p>
<p>That ideology is predicated on the belief that advances in scientific knowledge have revealed the truth of human nature and society, and that such knowledge can lead to technical interventions that in turn will substantially improve human life. “The behaviour of human beings,” Isaiah Berlin describes this belief, “both individually and in the aggregate, is in principle intelligible, if the facts are observed patiently and intelligently, hypotheses formulated and verified, laws established” as was occurring in the sciences such as physics, astronomy, or chemistry. With time the “human sciences” such as psychology and sociology, along with new advances in biology and physiology, would achieve knowledge of human beings and their actions equally reliable and certain. “Once appropriate social laws were discovered,” Berlin continues, “rational organization would take the place of blind improvisation, and men’s wishes, within the limits of the uniformities of nature, could in principle all be made to come true.” Contrary to the past, when irrational superstitions, religious beliefs, and traditions limited man’s progress and left him mired in fear, poverty, and violence, the new techno-elites armed with this scientific knowledge and the techniques it has created will shape and transform human nature and thus help the human race progress beyond these miseries.</p>
<p>That, in a nutshell, describes the major political and social movements of the last two centuries, including some of the bloodiest in history. This idea is also the foundation of progressivism, which strives to give power to self-proclaimed “experts” in order to create policies for the centralized, increasingly powerful and intrusive state. Armed with that coercive power and new technologies, the state can impose laws and policies that supposedly will achieve “social justice,” a utopia of economic equality, perpetual happiness, and material comfort. The price? The erosion of political freedom, personal autonomy, and personal responsibility, all sold for a mess of nanny-state pottage.</p>
<p>The current economic crises here and abroad are manifestations of the shipwreck of progressive ideas on the rocks of human nature, the unpredictability of the future, and the complexity of social reality. In Europe, the transnational, top-down-managed E.U. was created to knit traditional enemies together by trade and economic integration, which required a single currency and anti-democratic regulations imposed from above by Brussels and Strasbourg. Ignored were the very real national, ethnic, and cultural differences that give people their identities and partly accounted for their historical conflicts with one another. It is these same differences that are now dividing the monetary union, differences expressed politically by the voters whom the Eurocrats have brushed aside for decades. There are no “Europeans” sharing a common identity after all, but only Germans, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Englishmen, with conflicting national interests, mores, and ethics.</p>
<p>But the economic crisis was created in part by another, equally dangerous delusion: that each state, abetted by the regulatory coercive powers of the E.U. super-state, would direct and guide its economy in order to finance a network of social welfare entitlements insulating people from the costs, trade-offs, and failures that always have characterized human existence. A revealing letter published in 2003 by two European philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, expressed this vision that underlay the E.U. project. Especially revealing was the philosophers’ emphasis on the need to minimize the “sociopathological consequences of capitalist modernization,” and on a “preference for the protective guarantees of the welfare state and solidaristic solutions” as opposed to “an individualistic performance ethos which accepts crass social inequalities.” The lavish social welfare entitlements designed and controlled by government functionaries and monitored by Eurocrats are the means for achieving these utopian boons.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/is-this-the-year-we-recognize-the-failure-of-progressivism/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>50</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1339/1508 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 13:49:42 by W3 Total Cache -->