Clinton Policy: Hard Work No Solution to Poverty

Would you like to earn $25 for attending your child’s parent teacher conference? Could you use $25 per month for each of your children who achieve 95% school attendance? For your trouble, would $400 for each child who graduates from high school come in handy? How about $100 for each child who visits a dentist every six months as recommended? Would you be interested in $150 per month just for holding a full time job? If you live in New York City under Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s care, you could earn cash rewards for each of these behaviors and many others if you are poor enough to qualify. Experimental cash reward programs are the new cause celebre of wealthy philanthropists like Bloomberg, and giving more money and benefits to the poor regardless of behavior has long been the desired panacea for societal ills advocated by socialist leaning liberals such as Hillary Clinton. Where do the groups diverge? They differ over the issue of hard work. Bloomberg's plan rewards work and better behavioral decisions, while the Clinton socialist vision considers hard work anathema to maintaining a poverty-stricken class of voters perpetually in need of government to "solve" their poverty problems. The difference between how the two groups would "solve" poverty is striking: Bloomberg raised $43 million in private donations to fund the experimental programs in order to avoid using government funds; Hillary and her fellow socialists intend to place the burden for all efforts to offer more benefits and free health care on American taxpayers through government funding.

Fox News reported Bloomberg’s participation in the cash reward program, and the contrast between the philanthropic approach (private donations) and Clintonesque socialist government spending is striking:

The theory behind cash rewards is that poor people are trapped in a cycle of repeated setbacks that keep them from climbing out of poverty. A person who doesn't keep up with his vaccinations and doctor's visits, for example, may get sick more often and struggle to stay employed.

Bloomberg, a billionaire Republican, said he believes paying people in such circumstances to make good decisions could help break those patterns. The program "gives New Yorkers in poverty a financial incentive to look ahead and make decisions that will improve their prospects for the future," he said in a statement.

The idea of paying people, regardless of their income level, to make good common-sense decisions is the epitome of government run amok. It does not matter whether the funding of such a program comes from philanthropy or taxation; the theory behind the program is morally bankrupt and dangerous to the survival of American ideals such as individualism and personal responsibility. Paying someone in cash to make the same logical decisions everyone else makes with no expectation of government reward is socialism in its purest and most personally debilitating form. The Republican Bloomberg’s experiment with such a program demonstrates how far America has fallen from the nation that tamed a continent and outpaced the world in industry and science for generations. We have now gone from “You can feed a man with fish, but it is better to teach him how to fish” to “Let’s pay the man $100 per month for having a fishing pole.”

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the cash rewards for good behavior programs was not that former Clinton administration officials oppose the program in New York, but the reason why they oppose it. While I dislike the cash reward idea on moral and out of control government reasons, Clintonesque socialists are outraged because the programs teach people that hard work is rewarding. Here is how one former Clinton administration official evaluated the cash program:

But some critics have raised questions about cash reward programs, saying they promote the misguided idea that poor people could be successful if they just made better choices.

"It just reinforces the impression that if everybody would just work hard enough and change their personal behavior we could solve poverty in this country, and that's not reflected in the facts," said Margy Waller, co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group in Washington.

Waller, who served as a domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration, said it would be more effective to focus on labor issues, such as making sure wage laws are enforced and improving benefits for working people.

If you were looking for a single, crystallized statement of how Clinton socialists view poverty and the government's role in solving it, you need look no further than Waller’s remarks. According to the Clinton worldview, personal responsibility, hard work, and changes in behavioral choices are irrelevant to solving poverty in America. What is the solution under Clinton’s “compassionate” watchful eye? Not surprisingly, the answer, as it always is when Democrats promise services they cannot deliver, more benefits, whether they be forcibly extracted from employers or from the government through increased taxes on the “wealthy.”

What happens to a society when one of only two major political parties believes that better personal choices, responsibility, and hard work cannot solve problems? Hasn’t that always been the recipe for success in America, the land of opportunity? Opportunities are taken and capitalized upon through good and wise decisions, such as staying in school, earning a degree, gaining specialized training, developing a marketable skill in a field that can support a family, investing a modest amount in world markets, starting one’s own entrepreneurial enterprise, avoiding a criminal record, staying away from drugs, being a better parent, studying harder rather than playing more video games or watching TV. Opportunities begin at a young age, and the only sure way to break out of a cycle of poor decisions is to stop making poor decisions and correct the course one’s life is taking.

All Americans, but particularly those who are in poverty, should examine closely the question of why liberal socialists want to keep them in poverty by teaching them that their choices don’t matter and they are poor because they are victims of societal greed or uncontrollable misfortune. It is fascinating that on one hand there is an intense debate raging over illegal aliens flooding America allegedly because of the opportunity to find employment and share that income with their families in other nations, while on the other hand Clintonesque socialists insist that hard work and responsible common-sense behavioral choices are no solution to poverty. Many illegal aliens, through their long hard work find employment in respectable industries such as construction and manage, albeit illegally, to eke out a modest lifestyle for themselves and their families. Socialists like Wallen, however, refuse to encourage America’s poor to do likewise rather than subsist entirely on government welfare or charitable donations such as Bloomberg’s well meaning but completely misguided cash rewards for behavior program.

America is indeed in grave danger of losing its competitive place among the world’s elite nations if its populace is continually taught that personal behavior and hard work do not overcome problems, setbacks, or obstacles. America’s poor should be taught that there is no magic path to success that avoids hard work and decisions based on life priorities. Both Bloomberg and liberal welfare socialists do a disservice to those in poverty; Bloomberg by paying them to make good decisions they should make simply because they want to get out of poverty; and liberals welfare socialists by brainwashing the poor to believe that nothing they do for themselves will make a difference, thus sapping their natural human spirit of self-respect.

Technorati:
Michael Bloomberg Cash Rewards for Good Behavior Poverty New York Philanthropy,Margy Waller Hillary Clinton Socialism Personal Responsibility