Leftists are getting to the end of ideas so they are attempting to redefine a very inconvenient truth – Decades of Liberal entitlements in an attempt to win the war on poverty have failed.
Exhibit A – The Poverty rate has remained unchanged for decades.
Exhibit B – US Welfare spending has skyrocketed for decades.
Case closed, right?
Heck no, NPR has figured out a way to dodge this haymaker of truth – Redefine the incomes of those living on Government assistance.
Here are the pertinent quotes from the story and if click the link on the NPR site to listen to the full story, there is a section that isn’t in the text where Ms. Valdez makes the comment that she and her son are in perfect health so thankfully they don’t have a lot of medical bills. Keep that in mind, Ms. Valdez is in perfect health.
Here’s the quote with emphasis mine:
Consider the case of Ann Valdez. She’s a 47-year-old single mom who lives in an apartment in Brooklyn with her teenage son. She doesn’t have a job. She gets a cash payment of about $130 every two weeks from the government. That’s all that’s counted for her income in the government’s poverty measure.
But Valdez also gets $367 a month in food stamps. The government pays $283 a month for her apartment, which she says would rent for $1,100 or so on the open market. And the government pays for her health care, through Medicaid.
Still, if you include the value of her benefits, Valdez’s income is far higher than the official poverty numbers suggest. This raises a question: If you count all her benefits, is Valdez still living in poverty?
Yes, that is the new Liberal tactic. Let’s include the dollar values of welfare assistance, food stamps, subsidized housed, Medicaid, etc. and then their income is above the poverty level. Problem solved!
And they say this with a straight face.
No! Providing enough Government assistance to bring peoples’ income out of the poverty level was not the goal of Welfare and they know it. Government assistance was supposed to be a ‘helping hand’ to those who needed some time to get back on their feet, get a job and earn a living. Paying perfectly healthy people to stay home and collect checks from the Government shouldn’t be the goal unless we are trying to move the US to Socialism.
Ms. Valdez had a very poignant quote in the NPR story:
“Poverty is like being trapped in a room you can’t get out of, with straps restraining you, tight enough that you feel sometimes you can’t breathe.”
No Ms. Valdez, what you just described is how people feel under Socialism which is exactly where we are heading under current Leftist leadership.
cosmoscon 
Heritage did a wonderful piece: “Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor” (http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understanding-poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor)
As I’ve mentioned to others before, I had a business in the inner city of Pittsburgh. Back in the early 2000’s, there was a young “lady” who frequented our store. She was 25 years old, did not work, and had 4 children to 4 different “donors”. At the time, she was getting $583 per month, per child, from the Social Security Administration. She lived in housing that would have been $800 per month, for which she paid only $160. The cost of her electric and gas utilities was reduced to barely 25% of the cost. In addition, she was getting over $1,200 per month on an “Access” card, which is nothing more than the new-age version of food stamps.
So….(and I know how you love mathematics, Cosmo) NOT counting the utilities assistance, she was receiving $57,060 per year in government benefits. ASSUMING one were in the 25% tax bracket (Fed, State, and City of PGH), that’s the equivalent of having a job where one would earn $76,080.
WHY would ANYONE getting THAT level of assistance EVER think of going out an looking for a JOB???!!!
To make matters worse, her children looked like ragamuffins, with dirty, disheveled clothing, poor body and dental hygiene, and looked like empty souls. Add to that, the “mother” was a MAJOR druggie and was well known on the streets as a prostitute. I called CYS COUNTLESS times, and they did SQUAT.
There was PLENTY of funds for the children to be well fed and cared for, but there’s ZERO accountability for these recipients from our departments of social services. It’s a TRAIN WRECK, and this NPR piece is an INSULT to all who WORK to provide for their families and STILL have relative income and benefits LESS than those on the government tit….
Apologies for the length of the rant, but as you can probably guess, this issue infuriates me. The government is using MY money to build a plantation of welfare slaves who dare not step out of line with what their master tells them to do.
We’ll said and I do love the math! But unfortunately the math isn’t pretty here and you’re right – people are incentivized to stay home and get checks from the government.
Just what the Leftists planned to happen….
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