HELP THE POOR BY DUMPING DEMOCRAT SUBSIDIES FOR THE UNPOOR

In nearly half of American households (48.5 percent) there is at least one person who is receiving some form of government help, according to the Census Bureau.

Since President Lyndon Johnson initiated it in 1965, we’ve spent $19.8 trillion (in inflation adjusted dollars) on the War on Poverty, nearly three times as much as on all of America’s wars combined, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation told the House Budget Committee in March.

That’s just the spending for "means-tested" programs to help the people the government considers "poor" — many of whom, by historical standards, aren’t.

"The great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air-conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and own either a car or a truck," notes economist Thomas Sowell.

Mammoth as it’s been, spending for means-tested programs is dwarfed by spending for "entitlements."  Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid account now for 58 percent of the federal budget.  If they keep rising at the present rate, spending on entitlements and interest on the national debt will exceed tax revenues by 2025, the Congressional Budget Office estimated last year.

The economy will collapse before we get there.  With a national debt of more than $15 trillion — to which the Obama administration is adding $1 trillion a year — we’re already teetering on the edge of the fiscal abyss.

Conservatives fret about the moral as well as the fiscal consequences.  We’re becoming "A Nation of Moochers," asserts Charlie Sykes in his book by that name.  As we wait for our check from the government, we lose the initiative needed for innovation in a market economy; the independence and personal responsibility required to preserve liberty.

This problem is serious, but overstated.  There are 2.6 people in the average household, so still well below half of us get a government check.  For many who do, the amount is too small to create dependency.  Those who receive military pensions or veterans benefits are unlikely to change the attitudes of a lifetime because of them.  I must (sigh) sign up for Medicare this summer.  But that won’t change how I think, work, or vote.

What we spend on the poor is a problem chiefly because so little of it goes to them.  The government spends $65,000 a year to "fight poverty" in a country in which average family income is just under $50,000, Kevin Williamson notes in his book, "The Dependency Agenda."

Greater are the consequences of what the government spends on the rich and the comfortable.

Jay Cost describes in his book, "Spoiled Rotten," how Democrats became the party of government, which represents the providers of government "services" rather than the people they are supposed to serve.  The party "of inefficient, expensive, unresponsive, bureaucratic government," adds Prof. Walter Russell Mead, because duplication and waste benefit government employees, who don’t want to be held accountable for results.

We see this most starkly (and heart-breakingly) in how Democrats support teacher unions over children in inner city schools.  It is more important to Democrats that bad teachers keep their jobs and bloated pensions than that children learn.  Lousy, politicized schools sap our nation of human capital.  They do more to create dependency than do generous welfare checks.

The vast expansion of the federal student loan program benefits administrators and faculty, not students, who are the new Helots, "indebted young Americans with little prospect of finding permanent well-paying work, servicing their enormous college debts or reaping commensurate financial returns on their costly educations," says the classicist Victor Davis Hanson.

Reckless behavior on Wall Street is encouraged by the implied promise of bailouts.  Subsidies for "green" energy producers retard development of our immense fossil fuel resources, which could make us energy independent and trigger an economic boom.

Davy Crockett, a poor man himself, was elected to Congress in 1826 to represent what was then the poorest district in the U.S.  But he opposed government aid.  "We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money," he said.

The poor likely would be better off if aid were left in the hands of those who care more for their welfare than for their votes.  But the more urgent need is to eliminate subsidies for decidedly unpoor special interests.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.