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Americans Forced to Work Job Just to Put Food on Table
A husband and father to three children, Dan Allen has been receiving a vast array of city, state, and federal unemployment benefits since being furloughed from his job when the COVID-19 crisis struck last March. Nevertheless, Mr. Allen and millions of Americans just like him are learning the hard way that government largesse just isn’t enough. Shortly after the initial lockdown last spring, Allen decided to swallow his pride and return to work.
“I’m not proud of it. But my wife and I sat down and crunched the numbers and there was no way around it: I was going to have to begin earning again,” he said.
Policymakers in Washington are struggling to deal with a problem that has perplexed public officials since the New Deal: how to keep people from relying on work to support themselves?
True, some Americans do better than others on social welfare programs. Some, particularly in America’s most progressive cities and states, even seem to thrive on them. Others, however, have difficulty escaping an endless cycle of dependency on hard work, saving, and investment. And it is these Americans whom policymakers are most concerned about.
“Our studies suggest that there’s a cultural component,” said Theodore M. Stanley, a research fellow at the Center For The Emerging Majority, a progressive think tank. “It’s breaking that cycle of work-paycheck-work-paycheck which gets passed down through generations which presents the greatest challenge to policymakers.” Mr. Stanley advocates, among other things, a gradual reduction in the retirement age.
While total dependency on government may be the ideal, some planners look to compromises made in countries such as Greece, where those who insist on working are given largely harmless positions in government.
Published in Humor
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to achieve.
– William Fakespeare
Your tax dollars at work.
Pretty sure that Faulkner.
Fauxkner, I believe.
You would think a national museum might get the hanging of the flag right. But, then, everything else is bass-ackwards, so why not the flag?
Somebody ask Andrea Mitchell. She’ll know.
Oh, what a tangled web We weave,
When We first practice to conceive.
– Kelly Bundy
Outstanding post. That’s awesome.
“No one who rises before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.” – Chinese Proverb
Yeah, but the Chinese Communists define family as the Communist party elite.
And aren’t they being made rich?
I know you think you’re doing satire……
I really like this description of White People. What was all the fuss about it?
Except, of course, for the average Chinese peasant. And there are still millions of them in the Communist Chinese countryside.
When I first met my now-wife a little over 40 years ago, her sister had recently married into a family that was on second and third generation dependence on government handouts. Government handouts versus working is definitely a learned behavior transmitted through family and social expectations.
The horror, the horror!
I first heard this proverb with the conclusion, “will fail to feed his family.” I like that one better, but didn’t find anything I could pretend was a valid source.
Just imagine if this had been published by Storm Front instead of the Smithsonian. The SJW’s would be all up in arms about it as racist.
I’d say it’s racist regardless of who says it.
You should submit this to the Babylon Bee.
I dunno. Rugged individualism, nuclear family, objective rational linear thinking, delayed gratification, plan for future, hard work as key to success. I kind of like this racism!
When I read that a few months ago I realized I was whiter than rice, in a cup of milk, on a paper plate, in a snowstorm…..
addendum-OK I must admit, I stole the line from Major Payne. But I don’t think it qualifies as cultural appropriation.
“White Culture” appears to be a racialized version of bourgeois culture, which is not confined to any particular race. Not all whites have bourgeois values, and we see many young white people sitting at home, drawing disability payments, drinking beer, and playing video games these days and increasing numbers of out of wedlock births. Nor are the ideas that people should stay in school, make good grades, wait until matrimony to have children, etc. confined to the white race. Government systems like the Great Society that encouraged a departure from such values have contributed to the dissipation of poor peoples of all races.
That is a good point. And it ties the current movement to the long history of leftwing opposition to bourgeois culture.
There has also been a long tradition of homosexual opposition to bourgeois culture, which is why I’ve long been suspicious of the “marriage equality” movement. On the other hand, some homosexual people I have known seem to want to make their relationships a part of bourgeois culture. I don’t detect any fakery or self-delusion about it, so maybe it isn’t so simple. But self-delusion is hard to detect, as we saw with the hysteria surrounding the Russia-collusion hoax. So I’m really not sure what to make of it, and probably won’t be sure for a long time.
But bourgeois culture is definitely a barrier to leftwing aspirations.
Women and children hardest hit.
The need to knock every American value will put us on the fastest sled-ride to Socialism.