Welfare. The utterance of that very word connotes poor urban dwellers; often single parent minority families living a subsistence life in abundant America.
Welfare, the word, takes us back to the Lyndon Johnson 1960s, his War on Poverty and The Great Society.
Welfare also reminds us of how too much charity gave us too much crime, not enough fathers and a permanent American underclass.
What does that have to do with 2025 America? Plenty.
It won’t surprise regular readers of this column readers to find out that "welfare" became one of this writer's most recent epiphanies.
As soon as it hit my brain, I had to share it.
Our problem is that we use the word welfare very narrowly, to describe one type of a social condition. The truth is, we have many forms of welfare.
For right now, I'm focusing on at least two of these.
Imagine this writer's shock when he read that many of our federal government employees are still telecommuting.
That’s right, "telecommuting" by government workers is another word for welfare.
If we accused the telecommuters of being "on welfare," they would have shown up years ago. But, no. Some federal agencies had a 90% rate of telecommuting.
Seemingly, everyone was "working from home;" some working harder than others.
"Telecommuting" managed to morphed into welfare when President Donald Trump ordered everyone back to the office. The decibel level of the complaints is inversely correlated to the real work that was being accomplished out of the office.
Let's hold that thought.
Then we hit the mother lode. A group of welfare recipients, so vast and so wealthy, remained hidden in plain sight for 80 years. Let's refer to them as "trading partners."
I now call them global welfare recipients.
This goes back to the end of World War II. In 1945, the United States was the only major Western country to have an intact industrial base.
All of the others had been bombed back to a pre-industrial era.
First, we had the Marshall Plan, a way to seed the reindustrialization of Europe.
The Marshall plan led to a flurry of trade treaties which all had one thing in common; America imposed little or no tariffs on our trading partners, while they imposed high tariffs on us.
As many of us learned recently, that meant that we would buy their products but they wouldn’t buy ours. After all, how many Toyotas do you see in America?
Now, try Chevy’s in London, or Berlin or Rome or Tokyo.
Case closed.
The scariest number I heard recently is that in the last two generations the United States lost 90,000 factories.
This is beyond mind-blowing!
Factories totalling 90,000?!
These 90,000 factories are now spread across the planet, from our neighbors in Canada and Mexico to our newer trading partners in Vietnam and on to our enemies in China.
So, that’s my thesis.
The welfare recipients in the Bronx are not very different from the telecommuters in Washington and the trading partners globally.
All of these welfare programs came out of do-good intentions; a helping hand in the Bronx, avoiding COVID-19 in Washington and reindustrialization globally.
The other similarity is that no welfare recipients ever say "Thank You" to America’s taxpayers, their sponsors.
Indeed, welfare recipients in the Bronx never offered to go it alone after years (or generations) on welfare.
The telecommuters never said that the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant mass hysteria would bring them back to the office.
And our trading partners are incapable of understanding reciprocity or fairness, as daily news cycles constantly remind us.
Indeed, ingratitude among welfare recipients knows no bounds.
Welfare is not a victimless crime.
The first piece of evidence is our 36 trillion-dollar debt.
It comes from too few makers and too many takers.
If you go to work and pay your taxes, you're a welfare victim.
And, the reason we now run two trillion dollars-per-year annual deficits is because we won’t tolerate the level of taxes we would have to pay to balance the budget, if that were possible.
Or, we can just leave it for our children and grandchildren.
President Trump is fighting back. This writer salutes, and supports him.
Inaction is no longer on the table.
Sid Dinerstein is a former chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party. Read Sid Dinerstein's Reports — More Here.
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