You Are On Welfare
You'll need to subscribe to read the rest of this, but if you're anything like me, you won't get through the first (free) paragraph. From Time's cover story, "One Nation on Welfare":
The sun is shining on Miami Beach, and I wake up in subsidized housing. I throw on a T-shirt made of subsidized cotton, brush my teeth with subsidized water and eat cereal made of subsidized grain. Soon the chaos begins, two hours of pillow forts, dance parties and other craziness with two hyper kids and two hyper Boston terriers, until our subsidized nanny arrives to watch our 2-year-old. My wife Cristina then drives to her subsidized job while listening to the subsidized news on public radio. I bike our 4-year-old to school on public roads, play tennis on a public court...
The Founders, among others, are spinning with curses in their graves. This is the world the left has created and boasts about, proudly.
Everything "important" is paid for by the government. And what you're left to spend and choose? The little things. The insignificant things.
It's not a salary you earn and keep. It's an allowance that the government lets you have and spend.
And they're not even squeamish about it.
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Re: You Are On Welfare
It's not a salary you earn and keep. It's an allowance that the government lets you have and spend.
Those are sentences that should be framed and placed on the wall.
Mar '11
Re: You Are On Welfare
Wasn't this pretty much the plan all along, going all the way back to the Great Society, with roots in the New Deal itself (and in Woodrow Wilson's omnipresent state even before that)?
I forget who it was, but a prominent American socialist once said that Americans will never accept anything with "socialist" on the label, so you had to slip it past them by giving such programs with names and descriptions that oozed of mom, the flag, and apple pie. THEN they'd accept socialism, as long as it was re-branded as something else. When Americans were horrified at the Soviet Union, our own socialists knew they could never use the same language or labels, and that they'd have to find a way to do an end-around the traditional American system of individual responsibility and liberty. And they've been stunningly successful using those methods.
Jul '12
Re: You Are On Welfare
Pure sophistry. I didn't go down to an office and apply for those subsidies. I would rather they were not there, as they usually only serve to prop-up the price. Being force-fed "welfare", as Time puts it, is not the same as asking for it. The whole piece is intellectually dishonest.
Edited on September 6, 2012 at 7:35pmOct '10
Re: You Are On Welfare
Of course, if you call Obama a socialist then they get up in arms about it. I think the point you're making applies when we hear Obama and other Democrats justify tax increases by pointing out that the "rich" can afford it. Not only are you given an allowance but they'll try to minimize to the extent that it's politically feasible when they want more money for various subsidies and welfare programs.
Jun '12
Re: You Are On Welfare
What happened? All my life, we foreigners look to America as the Beacon of Freedom and Enterprise. America was always the big brother who was there to do the right thing. Creative Technology, among many other successful enterprises, was rejected by every investor in Asia until the founder came to America. I cannot believe I am witnessing a time when the American Constitution is fighting for its life and how Capitalism is besieged by the same ideas that are destroying Europe. Where does the far Left come from? They cannot all be stoned and lazy.
Dec '10
Re: You Are On Welfare
That opening 'graph is meant to celebrate the subsidies?
I could have sword I was reading something that had the kicker of "Isn't this nuts?"
Just goes to show you how out of touch I can be, sometimes.
Jul '10
Re: You Are On Welfare
Perhaps the worst part is that it destroys any sense of the wonderful gift of charity - to both sides of the giving.
Mar '11
Re: You Are On Welfare
It's too bad we don't know what a US without endless subsidies would be like. After all, we'd need a leader willing to slash government to the bone. I wonder how that would change things...
Oh wait. Isn't Amity Schlaes' new book on Coolidge due out soon?
Now, how will Time's review of the book go?
Edited on September 6, 2012 at 8:53pmJun '10
Re: You Are On Welfare
One can only hope the ghosts of Henry Luce and Whittaker Chambers will go poltergeist at Time's offices.
Thanks for the reminder that, after subscribing to Time for the best part of four decades (I started with a student subscription in high school), I gave it up about four years ago. It was like watching an old friend sink into the depths of dementia.
Joan: In addition to "stoned and lazy," perhaps we can add "deluded" and "practitioners of cognitive dissonance." Trying to find a rational thread in liberalism is a fool's errand.
Dec '10
Re: You Are On Welfare
@ Joan: Some were here, all along. They took over our educational systems and our cultural institutions (areas many productive people avoided), and insinuatied themselves into most aspects of our society. Recall, for example, Poltical Correctness was once considered a bad thing; it was a phrase borrowed from the communists. Now, it's a bad thing to be politcally incorrect.
Mar '11
Re: You Are On Welfare
Doesn't this also more or less confirm Paul Ryan's fears about America? "A country where everything is free but its people".
Sep '10
Re: You Are On Welfare
Sounds like life in Orwell's 1984 or I once met a woman who grew up in communist Poland and she described a similar state of existence.
Dec '10
Re: You Are On Welfare
He forgot to preface that with "city".
Subsidized city water, subsidized city tennis courts, subsidized city housing, etc.
Right now, I am inside a house built miles outside of anything even resembling a town (many many miles to something that could be called a city) with money borrowed at 19% interest in the mid-1970's, using electricity generated by a privately owned and operated power company, drinking water pumped by us from a well we drilled, and here shortly I will go back to a job I created.
Out here in the sticks, we don't live the subsidized life (like that city feller), which is just one of the reasons why we dislike city folk so much.
Guys like him like to think of themselves as more enlightened and connected because of the way they live.
While guys like me think that his lifestyle too closely resembles that of a pet lizard inside a terrarium.
He eats when he's given food, drinks when he's given water, suns himself under the fake sun lamp when his owner switches it on, and goes to sleep when his owner switches the fake sun off.
Edited on September 6, 2012 at 9:53pmJun '12
Re: You Are On Welfare
"This is the world the left has created and boasts about, proudly.
Everything "important" is paid for by the government. And what you're left to spend and choose? The little things. The insignificant things.
And they're not even squeamish about it." - Rob Long
Liberals are never squeamish about lying, and Conservatives are never squeamish about caving when Liberals steal the language.
Lie number 1. "This is the world the left has created." The Left has never created anything. They only steal, and twist what they cannot steal. They steal taxpayers money, then pay inflated money to their cronies and union employers to build something, like the Interstate Highway system, then have the gall to say look what we created!
Lie number 2. It is a lie to tell someone you are living at the expense of Government when you fund Government. Liberals want it repeated and repeated until they drown out the truth.
I don't think Conservatives have the guts to fight back in any meaningful way.
Oct '10
Re: You Are On Welfare
Or a toad in hot water with the burner on.
Oct '10
Re: You Are On Welfare
I feel a limerick coming on!
When a squish is squeamish about squandering
The Republic; it gets me to pondering
If we're so far gone that it frightens Rob Long
It's all over but Obama's maundering
Re: You Are On Welfare
Worse, even: I think a lot of conservatives have become used to this kind of subsidized life. It's impossible, for some of us, to even imagine a world in which the government didn't provide all of the necessary items, even if they're shoddy and poor quality, like education and health care.
Mar '11
Re: You Are On Welfare
But 47% of Americans don't fund [federal] Government (other than their contributions to Social Security and Medicare, which just go to other people and don't build anything).
Feb '11
Re: You Are On Welfare
Spot on. Along the same lines I also think the oft-repeated prophecy of doom about the 50%+1 event horizon when more people are collecting from government than are paying taxes is overblown.
Just because the government is force-feeding you a subsidy doesn't mean they've bought your loyalty and obeisance, and just because you take it doesn't mean you think it's a good idea.
I loathe the welfare state but I'd take every nickel I can squeeze out of it simply because of the enormous amount of taxes I've been forced to pay since I started working. But I'd prefer it just went away and stopped stealing from me.
Plus- city supplied water is part of the welfare state? Nope, I don't accept that.
Dec '11
Re: You Are On Welfare
I would also like for the author to define their terms.