The Welfare State and the Selfish Society

Dennis Prager

April 26, 2011 12:00 A.M.

The Welfare State and the Selfish Society
Capitalism teaches people to work harder; the welfare state teaches people to want harder. Which is better?

In the contemporary world, where left-wing attitudes are regarded as normative, it is a given that capitalism, with its free market and profit motive, emanates from and creates selfishness, while socialism, the welfare state, and the “social compact” as it is increasingly referred to, emanate from and produce selflessness.

The opposite is the truth.

Whatever its intentions, the entitlement state produces far more selfish people — and therefore a far more selfish society — than a free-market economy. And we have little evidence that this widespread selfishness can be undone once it catches on.

Here’s an illustration: Last year, President Obama addressed a large audience of college students on the subject of health care. At one point in his speech, he announced that the students will now be able to remain on their parents’ health-insurance plan until age 26. I do not ever recall hearing a louder, more thunderous, and more sustained applause than I did then. I do not believe that if the president had announced that a cure for cancer had been discovered that the applause would have been louder or longer.

It is depressing to listen to that applause. To be told that one can be dependent on one’s parents until age 26 should strike a young person who wants to grow up as demeaning, not as something to celebrate.

Throughout American history, the natural — or at least hoped-for — inclination of a young person was to become a mature adult, independent of Mom and Dad, and to become a grown-up. But in the welfare state, this is no longer the case.

In various European countries, it is increasingly common for young men to live with their parents into their 30s and even longer. Why not? In the welfare state, there is no shame in doing so.

The welfare state enables — and thereby produces — people whose preoccupations become more and more self-centered as time goes on:

How many benefits will I receive from the state?

How much will the state pay for my education?

How much will the state pay for my health care and retirement?

What is the youngest age at which I can retire?

How much vacation time can I get each year?

How many days can I call in sick and get paid?

How many months can I claim paternity- or maternity-care money?

The list gets longer with each election of a left-wing party. And each entitlement becomes a “right,” as the Left transforms entitlements into the language of “rights” as quickly as possible.

What handouts do, and what the transformation of handouts into rights does, is create a citizenry that increasingly lacks the most important character trait — gratitude. Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent. That is why we teach our children to say “thank you.” But the welfare state undoes that. One does not express thanks for a right. So, instead of “thank you,” the citizen of the welfare state is taught to say, “What more can I get?”

Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.

They succeed in part because demonizing conservatives and their values is a left-wing art. But the truth is that capitalism and the free market produce less selfish people. Teaching people to work hard and take care of themselves (and others) produces a less, not a more, selfish citizen.

Capitalism teaches people to work harder; the welfare state teaches people to want harder. Which is better?

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

Taxing Our Way Out of This Mess

Bernie Sanders

By Neal Boortz

I can understand why this "tax the rich" rhetoric works. Look at the polls. A huge percentage of Americans believe we could balance our budget if we would simply eliminate foreign aid? Sorry … that's less than 1% of the federal budget. But if that many people believe you can balance the budget by simply eliminating foreign aid, then it is easy to understand why they would think that you could balance the budget by just raising taxes on the rich. I'll show you in a second why that just won't work.

This brings up a question: Is self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders from Vermont an idiot or a demagogue? Sanders is out there with the Democrats saying that he doesn't believe the rich are paying enough in taxes, even though the top earning 1% is paying nearly 40% of all individual income taxes collected by the IRS! Bernie Sanders told MSNBC, "… the richest people are getting richer. They have not contributed one nickel to deficit reduction." It's hard to take this guy seriously for a few reasons. Number one, he believes that taxing the rich is a viable solution to solving our deficit problems; secondly, it's hard to believe that anyone in Washington, particularly liberals, are concerned about deficit reduction. Look, just last month (March 2011) our federal government spent 8.3 times more than it took in in revenue. No amount of taxing the rich is going to make up this gap. The problem is clearly spending, NOT revenue and not revenue from the uber productive.

So now for some painful truth that I'm sure will never grace the desk of one Bernie Sanders. But you can arm yourself with this information from the Amerian Thinker when your lib and prog friends claim that all we need to do is "tax the rich, tax the rich!"

The tax year of 2008 was the last to date that the IRS has done this kind of analysis. In 2008 the highest marginal tax rate of 35% applied to all AGI above $357,700.00. In that year the total amount of AGI subject to the highest rate was $622.8 Billion. The government collected in taxes $218.0 Billion (35%).

In 2011 the annual budget deficit will be nearly $1.665 trillion and in 2012: $1.1 trillion. If the Liberal Democrats in league with the Socialists, the Unions and the Communists, succeed in raising the highest marginal rate, how much more would Washington D.C. receive, assuming no change in behavior and a general eagerness to pay more?

If the highest rate of 35% were raised by a factor of 20% to 42%, then the additional tax revenue would be $43.5 Billion, not much of a dent in $1.665 trillion. So, let's raise the rate by a factor of 50% to 52.5%; the additional revenue would be $108.9 Billion. Still nowhere near enough, so let's just tax it at a rate of 100%, bringing in an additional $404.8 Billion. Unfortunately the country is still $1.26 trillion in the hole for the year.

But wealth envy is a lot easier a campaign platform to run on than facts and figures and the painful truth.

Nancy Pelosi’s absurd math on senior citizens losing their meals

By Glenn Kessler

(Justin Sullivan - GETTY IMAGES)

“In one of the bills before us, 6 million seniors are deprived of meals — homebound seniors are deprived of meals. People ask us to find our common ground, the middle ground. Is middle ground 3 million seniors not receiving meals? I don't think so. We've got to take this conversation from a debate about numbers and dollar figures and finding middle ground there to the higher ground of national values. I don't think the American people want any one of those 6 million people to lose their meals or the children who are being thrown off of Head Start and the rest of it.”

— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), April 4, 2011

The day before House Republicans unveiled their long-term budget plan, one-time House Speaker Pelosi held an event with the Hunger Fast Coalition to draw attention to the budget cuts envisioned in the fiscal 2011 budget bill that passed the House earlier this year. The White House and the Senate have been engaged in tense discussions with House leaders over a compromise deal in an effort to avoid a government shutdown later this week.

Pelosi’s impassioned plea signifies her discomfort at even the thought of compromise. But several readers wondered about the figures she used. Are 6 million poor seniors really at risk of losing their meals — or even 3 million under the compromise plan being negotiated by President Obama?

The Facts

The meal programs, which cost about $818 million a year, are managed by the Administration on Aging (AOA), an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services. The House bill would cut $65 million from the approximately $2.4 billion budget of the agency — a figure derived from GOP estimates of the savings in the agency from repealing the health care law — as well as eliminate $6 million in earmarks.

The first problem with Pelosi’s statistic is that, according to the agency’s budget documents, only about 2.6 million seniors receive such meals. That’s even less than what she decried as the mushy middle ground of compromise.

After we pointed out that fact, Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said “she means meals for seniors — 6 million meals.” In 2011, the agency is expected to deliver a little over 200 million meals, so that’s a cut of about three percent.

That’s a pretty big “oops.” She referred to “6 million seniors,” “3 million seniors” and “6 million people.” We understand slips of a tongue, but three times in a row, so emphatically, is hard to fathom.

But Hammill tried to defend the number of 6 million, though he acknowledged that “that pot of money I mentioned is not exclusively dedicated to this program.”

According to Hammill, the agency has “informally indicated” to Pelosi’s staff that if they had to cut $71 million in the last seven months of the fiscal year, the two programs where services could be cut quickly to achieve quick savings would be the senior nutrition programs and senior centers. So Pelosi’s staff assumed a $30 million cut from the overall budget for senior meals, or 3.6 percent, resulting in 6 million fewer meals.

Marta Dehmlow, a spokeswoman for the House Appropriations Committee, says the $65 million figure came from estimates on savings the administration provided regarding a provision of the new health care law that would be administered by the agency. “The Committee did not specify where this cut would come from and also does not know how AOA will spread that cut within their operations,” she said. “The Committee has received no official word on impact.”

A spokeswoman for the Administration on Aging referred a question to the White House budget office, which did not respond to our query. Hammill later acknowledged: “The Obama Administration had not made any determination of how they would implement a $71 million cut at the Administration on Aging if HR 1 was signed into law.”

So, in other words, Pelosi’s staff took a wild guess at where the cuts would fall in the agency.

But there are other problems with Pelosi’s 6 million number.

First, the administration requested the elimination of $6 million in earmarks, so it seems strange for Pelosi to call that a Republican cut. That should not be included, leaving us with $65 million in possible cuts.

Second, in the administration’s 2012 budget request, President Obama identified $150 million in cuts to the agency’s budget. It seems that those already-identified targets would be a more logical place to start looking for trims than meals for senior citizens, most of whom have incomes of less than $20,000.

Finally, the agency’s budget justification notes on page 55 that it has kept spending on senior meals essentially flat from 2010 to 2012, resulting in 36 million fewer meals for senior citizens. That’s six times higher than the figure that Pelosi has decried as an affront to “national values.” The administration’s budget, in fact, has earned the ire of some advocates for hungry seniors. Perhaps 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would be a more appropriate place for Pelosi to direct her outrage.

The Pinocchio Test

In a city with overheated rhetoric, Pelosi’s statement ranks high on this year’s list of bloviated bluster. It’s bad enough that she repeatedly mixed up 6 million meals and 6 million people — and made no effort to correct the record after her statement was reported in the media. But the figure she used appears to have been invented itself, with little basis in fact.

The budget cuts being contemplated by Republican and Democratic lawmakers will result in some painful sacrifices, especially as the end of the fiscal year draws near. Respected analysts such as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have identified the potential impact. There was no need for Pelosi to hype the potential pain.

Four Pinocchios

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MoveOn.org Fundraises Off of Kloppenburg’s “Victory”

Hah! MoveOn.org celebrated Wisconsin State Supreme Court candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg’s victory on in Tuesday’s election.

Yesterday they the far left group decided to raise funds from the big win in Wisconsin.
Here’s their letter:

A message from Wisconsin MoveOn volunteer and Regional Organizer Steve Hughes:

Dear fellow MoveOn member,

I’m writing to you from Wisconsin, ground zero in the fight between Republicans and the middle class, where we just had a HUGE win!

I’m literally breathless. I’m witnessing history. Incumbent candidates for the Wisconsin Supreme Court generally get re-elected in a landslide. But in the general election on Tuesday, progressive JoAnne Kloppenburg closed the gap and won by a razor thin margin against conservative justice David Prosser!

The result was extremely close, and there’s still a recount to grapple with, but this is a HUGE change from the primary where she lost 25% to 55% to conservative Justice David Prosser before Walker’s attacks on workers began. And it’s proof that the grassroots army that formed to battle Governor Scott Walker is a force to be reckoned with.

Tuesday night, all of us volunteers sat around the Kloppenburg office, right next to the Wisconsin 14, and watched these historic returns come in together.

And I knew it was happening because thousands of us MoveOn members, along with our friends and allies, voted, volunteered, knocked doors, hit the phones, and got out the vote through our emails, posts and tweets. We’re a part of this, but now we need to make sure what happened in Wisconsin doesn’t stay in Wisconsin.

The Republicans in Washington are copying Walker’s radical “my way or the highway” tactics, threatening to shutdown the government in order to force the Democrats to cave on the budget. They’re willing to harm countless Americans in order to impose their agenda on the rest of us.

But MoveOn is fighting back, just like we are in Wisconsin. They’re planning a huge nationwide campaign, capturing the energy from our victory to win this massive battle for our nation’s future against the Republicans’ plans to destroy decades of progressive legislation, including our entire social safety net.

Can you help stop the Republicans by chipping in $5 right now?

I read a quote the other day from the Tea Party Express, and while I wouldn’t normally agree with them, they could not be more right about the stakes in this election:

“If…liberal Joanne Kloppenburg wins, then Barack Obama and his union…allies will have won…If conservative Justice David Prosser wins, then Gov. Scott Walker and the tea party movement will have won in Wisconsin. The stakes could not be higher.”1

The result of this election will have an important impact right here in Wisconsin on the battle to protect workers’ rights. But a Kloppenburg victory is also sending a message nationally that Americans are rejecting the radical right-wing Republican agenda sweeping across other states and our federal government.

I need your help to keep the momentum going. We’re doing great here in Wisconsin, but MoveOn needs your support to make sure the growing grassroots movement to protect the American Dream doesn’t stall at our state’s border.

They need to raise $215,000 today to do it—for ads, field mobilizations, and polling. Can you help?

Click below to chip in $5:

https://pol.moveon.org/donate/wicourtwin.html?bg_id=hpc5&id=26839-10132788-pccNH2x&t=5

Thank you for all that you’re doing.

Hat Tip Ross

It’s just too bad Kloppenburg lost, huh?

Apoplectic Dem. Congresswoman: Gov‘t Shut Down is ’Like Bombing Innocent Civilians’

“It’s time that the District of Columbia told the Congress to go straight to hell,” a fiery Eleanor Holmes Norton (D -DC) told MyFoxDC.

Norton represents the District of Columbia in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D -DC) was on fire when she spoke to FOX 5 Morning News Thursday about how Washington, D.C. residents are being treated as work to avoid a government shutdown continues.

“We are absolutely outraged. This is the functional equivalent of bombing innocent civilians,” she said.

Are College Students Losing Their Religion?

Conservative talk radio personality Dennis Prager thinks that God is not doing so well in our society. Why? The chief reason he cites is that college students are losing their religion.

Students at Notre Dame, a Catholic University

Over at National Review Online, he writes:

Increasingly large numbers of men and women attend university, and Western universities have become essentially secular (and leftist) seminaries. Just as the agenda of traditional Christian and Jewish seminaries is to produce religious Christians and religious Jews, the agenda of Western universities is to produce (left-wing) secularists. The difference is that Christian and Jewish seminaries are honest about their agenda, while the universities still claim they have neither a secularist nor a political agenda.

The more university education a person receives, the more likely he is to hold secular and left-wing views. The secular Left argues that this correlation is due to the fact that a college graduate knows more and thinks more clearly and therefore gravitates leftward and toward secularism.

But if you believe that the average college graduate is a clear and knowledgeable thinker as a result of his or her time at university, I have more than one bridge to sell you. A radio talk-show host for 29 years, I long ago began asking callers who made foolish comments what graduate school they had attended. It takes higher education to learn that America and Israel are villains, that men and women have essentially the same natures, that human nature is good, that ever-larger governments create wealth, etc.

Conor Friedersdorf, a writer who attended Catholic school for 14 years, is skeptical of Prager’s argument.

Writing in The Atlantic, Friedersdorf thinks:

To me, there are better explanations for the fact that “the more university education a person receives, the more likely he is to hold secular and left-wing views.” One is that people who attend college leave home.

That is to say, they leave their church, the community incentives to attend it, and the watchful eye of parents who get angry or make them feel guilty when they don’t go to services or stray in their faith. Suddenly they’re surrounded by dorm mates of different faiths or no faith at all.

For many of these students, it turns out that their religious behavior was driven more by desire for community, or social and parental pressure, than by deeply held beliefs. Another reason education correlates with secularism is that secularists are more likely to seek advanced degrees, partly because they’re more focused than their religious counterparts on career.

Maybe it’s a little bit of both: maybe many students abandon religion at college both because they are away from home and because they are in an environment that does not value religious belief. That, at least, is what I observed when I was a college student.

Fundamental Transformation? Andy Stern Speaks Out Against Checks and Balances

Editor’s note: this opinion piece would usually appear on the blog. We have decided to feature it on our story side.

Is this what fundamental transformation looks like?

In an op-ed on the Huffington Post, former SEIU president Andy Stern decided to get all “Founding Fathers” with his audience. He went back, way back, to the time of male, powdered wigs and the Federalist Papers. His thesis: you know those checks and balances the old guys put in place? Yeah, they’re just kind of getting in the way of change.

“American democracy has layers of power and responsibility, which James Madison rationalized in Federalist, no. 51 as a check against possible tyrannical rule,” Stern writes. “Our Founding Fathers saw fit to divide power between two strata — state and federal. Then, within the federal structure, they codified a trifurcation of power to ensure that no single branch came to dominate government; and while power has ebbed and flowed between branches, the system of checks and balances has provided stability, and kept tyrannical rule at bay.”

But today, he goes on to say, that system is just so, well, old:

Now, however, in the midst of the transformative change of globalization and this third economic revolution, those layers have become an impediment to making the changes necessary to keep America competitive in the world economy. Today, America crawls along at a snail’s pace. [Emphasis added]

I think he just said that our system of government, as laid out in the Constitution, is hampering his vision of a global economy. That would make sense, since Stern in the past has been all about the world coming together, so to speak. Remember, he’s the one who trumpeted the old Marxist phrase, “Workers of the world, unite!”

Stern goes on to name the problem “demosclerosis,” a term he once read in a book. That term means the “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt, credited as a side-effect of the postwar pluralist political system.”

See, it seems in Andy’s world America is outdated: It’s a 1776 runner trying to compete in a 2011 race. All we need to do is update a little. Give it some new legs. Hint hint. Wink wink. Nudge.

“Our democracy is frozen, calcified like arteries beset by arteriosclerosis,” Stern writes near the end. His remedy is to “recommit ourselves to both the common good, and common sense, rather than self-interest.”

Sure, that may sound nice, but it’s anti-capitalist. Anyone who’s taken an economics class knows that our system is based on self-interest rightly understood (SIRU). Marxists and communists have destroyed countries trying to get rid of self-interest. What Stern and the communists don’t understand is that self-interest in and of itself isn’t evil. It can be used for much good. And yes, selflessness is important, too — and we see it all over the place. But you can’t base an economic system on men being good and generous, because we’re naturally not.

Side note: doesn’t a lesson in selflessness from a former union boss, whose underling (Stephen Lerner) is now trying to collapse the economy, seem out of place? Just a thought.

Stern never returns to his earlier comments on checks and balances. It’s more like a seed, planted early in hopes that one day it will spring up. I’m sure we can expect some watering later. But it seems the more and more we uncover this whole hope and change thing, the more foreign it appears.

Foreign, now that’s a funny word. In Stern’s future, once we’re all “united” and together, it probably won’t exist. Just like the wisdom of those old powdered wigs.

Irony? Rep. Louise Slaughter Says GOP in Washington ‘to Kill Women’

I can’t write this story without pointing out the irony: Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) — yes, Slaughter — has accused the GOP of coming to Washington “to kill women.” Oh, and she equated them to Nazis, too. Now to the story.

CNS News reports:

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) said [Thursday] that the new Republicans elected to the House of Representatives last November came to Congress “to kill women.” She also likened Republican efforts to prohibit federal funding of abortion except in cases of rape, incest or where the life of the mother is endangered to actions taken by Nazis.

“This is probably one of the worst times we’ve seen because the numbers of people elected to Congress. I went through this as co-chair of the arts caucus,” Slaughter said. ”In ’94 people were elected simply to come here to kill the National Endowment for the Arts. Now they’re here to kill women.”

Slaughter was speaking out against H.R. 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.” That bill, CNS explains, “would make permanent the Hyde Amendment restrictions on federal funding of abortion except in cases of rape or incest or a threat to the life of the mother, and that would also prohibit people from taking tax deductions for payments made for abortions except in those circumstances.”

That’s when the Nazi reference came:

“You are allowed to have an abortion if you have been raped or it’s a matter of incest. However, you have to keep a receipt. Did you know that? It’s sort of like an old German Nazi movie. Show me your papers!”

As CNS points out, the text of the bill does not say anything about receipts.

Nonviolence Is Not Always the Answer; American Socialist Leader Calling for Revolution Says ‘We Are Not Pacifists, Violence Sometimes Is Necessary’