PrairiePundit

 Fox News: Millions of dollars in reparation payments are the wrong approach to improving the lives of Black Americans, retired NFL safety Jack Brewer told Fox News on Monday. The California Reparations Task Force formally recommended that the state offer payments of up to $1.2 million to every qualifying Black resident, a move supported by many prominent California leaders. Brewer, who played with the Vikings, Giants, Eagles and Cardinals, said improving literacy rates in places like inner-city Baltimore, where some grades sit around 0%, fixing the fatherlessness crisis and returning spirituality to the home and community are much more productive than allocating massive amounts of taxpayer monies. "As we look at our real issues that we have as Black folks in America, particularly in California, you know, there's one million Blacks in L.A. County alone. And in the last report that I read, 80% of those kids in school can't read and write at proficiency level. So if you...

 NY Post: Most Americans believe, as we do, in a reliable government safety net in America, so that when people fall on tough times or lose their jobs, their families will not go hungry, lose their homes or suffer deprivation. But most Americans also believe that government assistance should be short-term and aimed at quickly getting people back on their feet, into a job and on the road to being financially self-sufficienct and a contributor to our economy. Today’s welfare programs are failing to accomplish that goal. Did you know that families earning half a million dollars a year can receive ObamaCare subsidies? Or that in some states, unemployment insurance benefits can be equivalent to a job with an annual pay of $100,000? It’s shocking but true, and it might explain why so many businesses can’t get workers back on the job almost three years after COVID-19 hit these shores. Today there are still at least 3 million fewer Americans working than there were in 2019. Middle class ...

 Richard Manning: The  Washington Post  inadvertently stumbled across the truth in a Dec 12 th  piece titled:  “In Liberty County, workers who quit feel liberated, but the community discovers a powerful downside.” The story intends to show the community impacts, particularly on small businesses in the small Georgia coastal county of Liberty, which is located just south of Savannah. And the piece does successfully chronicle the effects of people quitting the jobs they held before the pandemic. The net takeaway is that small businesses are most adversely impacted because they neither can pay the money demanded by quitting workers nor do they have the number of employees to allow them to shift their labor costs to jobs that have suddenly become difficult to fill. But this is where the Post gave away the real story.  The article states the following, “Workers who have stepped away from full-time jobs say the pandemic helped them discover they can survive on occ...

Washington Examiner: New study shuts down critics of 1996 welfare reform ... ... government data indicates that poverty fell overall, without any increase in deep poverty, when government benefits and tax credits are taken into account and inflation is properly accounted for, according to new research from the conservative Manhattan Institute . ... The poverty pimps have been cooking the books to make things look worse so that they can push for more government spending on these programs.

Daily Signal: ... In response to the growth in food stamp dependence, Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, recently established work requirements on recipients who are without dependents and able-bodied. In Maine, all able-bodied adults without dependents in the food stamp program are now required to take a job, participate in training, or perform community service. Job openings for lower-skill workers are abundant in Maine, and for those ABAWD recipients who cannot find immediate employment, Maine offers both training and community service slots. But despite vigorous outreach efforts by the government to encourage participation, most childless adult recipients in Maine refused to participate in training or even to perform community service for six hours per week. When ABAWD recipients refused to participate, their food stamp benefits ceased. In the first three months after Maine’s work policy went into effect, its caseload of able-bodied adults without dependents plummeted by 80 perc...

Daily Signal: How Michigan’s Welfare Population Declined by 70% in 4 Years They put rules in place that set strict time limits on the length of time someone can get cash assistance.  Their Republican governor has also managed to improve the economy which has put more people back to work.

Paul Bedard: The helping hand offered by social welfare programs is being utilized by most legal and illegal immigrant families, the latest sign that many immigrants come to America for the taxpayer-funded benefits like Medicaid, subsidized food and cash, according to a new report based on Census data. In analyzing new Census reports, the Center for Immigration Studies found that immigrant families with one or more children use welfare far more than "native" American families. "Welfare use by illegal immigrant households is certainly a concern, but the bigger issue is welfare use by legal immigrants," said Steven Camarota, the Center's director of research and author of the report. "Three-fourths of immigrant households using welfare are headed by legal immigrants. Legal immigration is supposed to benefit the country, yet so many legal immigrants are not able to support themselves or their children. This raises important questions about the selection cr...

Center for Immigration Studies: This study is the first in recent years to examine immigrant (legal and illegal) and native welfare use using the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). While its complexity makes it difficult to use, the survey is widely regarded as providing the most accurate picture of welfare participation. The SIPP shows immigrant households use welfare at significantly higher rates than native households, even higher than indicated by other Census surveys. In 2012, 51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native households. Welfare in this study includes Medicaid and cash, food, and housing programs.  Welfare use is high for both new arrivals and well-established immigrants. Of households headed by immigrants who have been in the country for more than two decades, 48 percent access welfare.  No single p...

Breitbart: In a report entitled “ Immigrants Tend to Live in High Welfare Benefit States ,” published on Jan. 26, 2015, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) determined that “the generous welfare benefits offered by some states have magnetic effects and alter the geographic sorting of immigrants in the United States”–attracting many to California. The report found that “there is a ‘striking and easily observable clustering of immigrants in high-benefit states.” As California rose from offering medium benefit levels in 1970 to “almost the most generous in the nation” by 1990, the benefit levels served as a magnet for less-educated immigrants. ... This is what liberals don't get.  They give people an incentive to come to states with generous welfare benefits instead of to places where there is work.

David Freddoso: We don’t like to buy into shoddy post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc arguments around here. But even worse than post-hoc arguments are the ones based on events that haven’t actually happened. I’m thinking specifically of the lamentations in the pundit class that North Carolina’s economy would implode when unemployment benefits were cut and shortened in length last July. I wrote on this four weeks ago in my Washington Examiner column : In July, North Carolina became the first state to end extended unemployment benefits altogether. As John Hood notes in the Carolina Journal, the number of employed in the state jumped by 39,000 between July 1 and Nov. 30, after standing still for the entire first half of the year. The state’s unemployment rate had taken more than two years to come down by 1.5 points to where it was in June (8.8 percent). Between July 1 and Nov. 30, it declined by roughly that amount (to 7.4 percent). During that same period, about 26 percent fewer workers were ...

Opinion Journal: John Lewis was furious. "They're coming for the children. They're coming for the poor. They're coming for the sick, the elderly and the disabled," said the Georgia Democrat. He was speaking in 1996 during the debate over welfare reform that he predicted would "put one million more children into poverty." The reform passed but none of that happened. The law was an historic success, shrinking the welfare rolls even as its work requirement put more Americans on the road to self-sufficiency. Ron Haskins of the Brooking Institution found that, a decade after the changes, 60% of the adults leaving welfare were employed and child poverty rates fell. It's worth recalling Mr. Lewis's fear and loathing amid this week's debate over a GOP attempt to impose a few modest reforms on America's exploding food-stamp entitlement. Democrats and the media are predicting a moral catastrophe, with the same over-the-top rhetoric, and they are...

Your browser does not support iframes. Glenn Beck talks about the welfare subsidies for terrorist which is an admitted strategy of radical Muslims.

Boston Herald: Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned. State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home. In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state. The news raises questions over whether Tsarnaev financed h...

Jonah Goldberg: The government in Britain recently did something interesting. It asked everyone receiving an "incapacity benefit" — a disability program slowly being phased out under new reforms — to submit to a medical test to confirm they were too disabled to work. A third of recipients (878,000 people) didn't even bother and dropped out of the program rather than be examined. Of those tested, more than half (55%) were found fit for work and a quarter were found fit for some work. But that's Britain, where there's a long tradition of gaming the dole. Americans would never think of taking advantage of the taxpayers or misleading the government. Well, except for the couple dozen people who have pleaded guilty to scamming the Long Island Rail Road's federal disability system in a $1-billion fraud scheme. That would pay for a lot of White House tours. Though hardly isolated, the LIRR scandal is an obvious black-and-white case of criminality. The real problem r...

Raymond Ibraham: As earlier suggested , the wonderful thing about Salafis—those extra “radical” Muslims who seek to emulate as literally as possible prophet Muhammad’s teachings and habits—is that they are so unabashed and frank about what they believe. Such is the degree of brainwashing that they have undergone. Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded much earlier, doublespeak is not second nature to the Salafis. The most recent example comes from Al Hafiz TV, an Egyptian Islamic station. During a roundtable discussion on the U.S. and foreign aid to Egypt, an Islamic cleric, clearly of the Salafi bent—he had their trademark mustache-less-beard—insisted that the U.S. must be treated contemptuously, like a downtrodden dhimmi, or conquered infidel; that Egypt must make the U.S. conform to its own demands; and that, then, all the money the U.S. offers to Egypt in foreign aid can be taken as rightfully earned jizya. Historically, the jizya was money, or tribute, that conquer...

Michael Barone: This is painful for a liberal to admit,” writes liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof , “but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in soul-crushing dependency.” Kristof is writing from Breathitt County, Ky., deep in the Appalachian mountains, about mothers whose Supplemental Security Income benefits will decrease if their children learn to read. Kristof notes that 55% of children qualifying for SSI benefits do so because of “fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation,” far more than four decades ago when SSI was just a new program. Evidently SSI administrators decided to be more generous to parents of such children. But, as Kristof notes, giving parents an incentive to keep children from learning to read works against the children’s long-term interest. Kristof’s column makes a point similar to that in my De. 2 Examinercolumn on the vast rise in people receiving Social Secur...

The Hill: Paul Ryan: ‘In this war on poverty, poverty’s winning’ I have been curious why republicans have not made more of the failure of this war effort and the cost it entails.  Ryan makes an important point.

Washington Times: Welfare spending has grown substantially over the past four years, reaching $746 billion in 2011 — or more than Social Security, basic defense spending or any other single chunk of the federal government — according to a new memo by the Congressional Research Service .  The steady rise in welfare spending, which covers more than 80 programs primarily designed to help low-income Americans, got a big boost from the 2009 stimulus and has grown, albeit somewhat more slowly, in 2010 and 2011. One reason is that more people are qualifying in the weak economy, but the federal government also has broadened eligibility so that more people qualify for programs.  ... This is where liberalism takes us.  Hostility toward business and job creators just creates more welfare dependency.  Getting these people back into jobs is an important twofer for the deficit.  They quit getting money from the government and start sending money to the...

Rep. Allen West: ... Black unemployment hovers around 14 percent, compared to 8 percent unemployment overall. For black teenagers, the number more than doubles, as 38 percent of black teens are unemployed.  It is not just the undereducated black Americans who are suffering — 6.6 percent of black Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree are unemployed, a rate 50 percent higher than the overall unemployment rate for those with a four-year college degree. Since 2007, black median household income has declined by 11 percent — the largest decline of all major racial and ethnic groups. In 2011, the poverty rate among black Americans was 27.5 percent. The poverty rate among blacks living in families headed by women is 41 percent. President Obama’s programs continue to pour billions into black communities across the country in hopes of curing well-documented socioeconomic problems, including failing schools and inadequate housing, rampant crime and drug abuse, black-on-black killi...

Michael Goodwin: Under the prevailing definition of a gaffe — accidentally telling the truth — Mitt Romney is guilty, guilty, guilty. The only surprise is that he knew the truth all along and kept it to himself.  A tape from a May fund-raiser is rocking the campaign because Romney was “caught” accurately outlining our political polarization. As a defining principle, the almost-half the nation backing President Obama wants government to do more. The other half backs Romney because it knows the government already does too much. It is a financial fight, but also a cultural one. The entitlement mentality isn’t limited to those who earned or desperately need their country’s help. We’re sinking because too many politicians like Obama think their job is to “level the playing field” by confiscating wealth from some Americans and giving it to others. First, they take a big cut for themselves and their friends. It is a fact that nearly 47 percent, as Romney said, don’t have any skin in t...