We have a problem in this country. We have jobs and no one wants to work.
We can create millions of jobs, but if people won’t get off their lazy buts and go to work as opposed to sitting home and letting the government support them, why create jobs?
If I can sit at home and get a free phone and cable tv, free housing, and free food, why work?
I have the answer, and most people are not going to like it.
Make all federal and state benefits contingent on working.
No work, no pay. Simple as that.
American Heritage web site:
Poverty and Welfare in the American Founding
By Thomas West
Jefferson and Franklin on Welfare
From the earliest colonial days, local governments took responsibility for their poor. However, able-bodied men and women generally were not supported by the taxpayers unless they worked. They would sometimes be placed in group homes that provided them with food and shelter in exchange for labor. Only those who were too young, old, weak, or sick and who had no friends or family to help them were taken care of in idleness.
The Founders had little to say about the topic of poor relief. Like the family, welfare was not a controversial topic. Two of their rare statements on the subject occur in writings provoked by foreigners: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, written in answer to questions posed by a Frenchman, and an article criticizing the British welfare system written by Benjamin Franklin for the British press.
Jefferson explained the Virginia poor laws at the time of the Revolution:
The poor, unable to support themselves, are maintained by an assessment on the tithable persons in their parish. This assessment is levied and administered by twelve persons in each parish, called vestrymen, originally chosen by the housekeepers of the parish…. These are usually the most discreet farmers, so distributed through their parish, that every part of it may be under the immediate eye of some one of them. They are well acquainted with the details and economy of private life, and they find sufficient inducements to execute their charge well, in their philanthropy, in the approbation of their neighbors, and the distinction which that gives them. The poor who have neither property, friends, nor strength to labor, are boarded in the houses of good farmers, to whom a stipulated sum is annually paid. To those who are able to help themselves a little, or have friends from whom they derive some support, inadequate however to their full maintenance, supplementary aids are given, which enable them to live comfortably in their own houses, or in the houses of their friends. Vagabonds, without visible property or vocation, are placed in workhouses, where they are well clothed, fed, lodged, and made to labor. Nearly the same method of providing for the poor prevails through all our states; and from Savannah to Portsmouth you will seldom meet a beggar.
In his proposed Virginia “Bill for Support of the Poor,” Jefferson explained that “vagabonds” are:
able-bodied persons not having wherewithal to maintain themselves, who shall waste their time in idle and dissolute courses, or shall loiter or wander abroad, refusing to work for reasonable wages, or to betake themselves to some honest and lawful calling, or who shall desert wives or children, without so providing for them as that they shall not become chargeable to a county.
In the poorhouse to which vagabonds are sent, there would be an overseer, a “discreet man … for the government, employment, and correction of the persons subject to him.”
In the Notes on the State of Virginia passage just quoted, Jefferson referred to “those without strength to labor.” In his proposed bill, they were more precisely described as the “poor, lame, impotent [i.e., weak], blind and other inhabitants of the county as are not able to maintain themselves.”
The terms “tithable,” “parish,” and “vestrymen” in the passage above refer to the pre-Revolutionary Southern practice of assigning care of the poor to the local Anglican church. In keeping with the spirit of the Revolution, which separated church from state, Virginia transferred this task from church to county government in 1785, as Jefferson had proposed.
Poor children whose families could not provide for them, including orphans, were put out to suitable persons as apprentices so that they would learn “some art, trade, or business” while being of use to those who were training them. However, this was not to be done, in Jefferson’s plan, until they had attended public school for three years, if necessary, at public expense.
All the typical features of early American welfare policy can be seen in Jefferson’s descriptions and proposals:
- The government of the community, not just private charity, assumes responsibility for its poor. This is far from the “throw them in the snow” attitude that is so often attributed to pre-1900 America.
- Welfare is kept local so that the administrators of the program will know the actual situations of the persons who ask for help. This will prevent abuses and freeloading. The normal human ties of friendship and neighborliness will partly animate the relationship of givers and recipients.
- A distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor is carefully observed. Able-bodied vagabonds get help, but they are required to work in institutions where they will be disciplined. Children and the disabled, on the other hand, are provided for, not lavishly but without public shame. The homeless and beggars will not be abandoned, but neither will they populate the streets. They will be treated with toughness or mercy according to their circumstances.
- Jefferson’s idea of self-reliance was in fact family reliance, based on the traditional division of labor between husband and wife. Husbands were legally required to be their families’ providers; wives were not. Nonsupporting husbands were shamed and punished by being sent to the poorhouse.
- Poor laws to support individual cases of urgent need were not intended to go beyond a minimal safety net. Benefit levels were low. The main remedy for poverty in a land of opportunity was marriage and work.
When Benjamin Franklin lived in England in the 1760s, he observed that the poverty problem was much worse in that country than in America. Britain did not limit its support of the poor to a safety net provided under conditions that prevented abuse.
There, the poor were given enough that they could live in idleness. The result was to increase poverty by giving the poor a powerful incentive not to become self-supporting.
Franklin wrote:
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. (sound familiar?) And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them [as in England] … with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor…. [Yet] there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent. The day you [Englishmen] passed that act, you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependence on somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health, for support in age and sickness.
In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty. (Is that not what we are seeing today?)
We see in Franklin’s diagnosis a striking anticipation of today’s welfare state, in which, poverty has remained stagnant as the welfare system has swelled since the 1960s.
Franklin’s understanding of the welfare paradox—that aid to the poor must be managed carefully lest it promote laziness and therefore poverty—was shared by most Americans who wrote about and administered poverty programs until the end of the 19th century.
These were the Founders’ practical proposals and views on poor relief. Their policies were intended to help the poor in ways that did not violate the rights of taxpayers or promote irresponsible behavior.
From Jefferson’s standpoint, poverty programs that help people who choose not to work are unjust. Far from being compassionate, compelling workers to support shirkers makes some men masters and other men slaves: Workers are enslaved to nonworkers. That violates a fundamental principle of the Declaration of Independence.
The incentive structure of the modern welfare state today is similar to the one that Franklin condemned in old England, except that ours is more generous and more tolerant of single motherhood.
Since 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson inaugurated the modern War on Poverty, total annual government welfare spending has grown from less than $9 billion in 1965 to $2.4 trillion 2021.
In 2013, there were roughly 80 different federal means-tested welfare programs. Just counting seven large federal programs (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance; public housing; Medicaid; utilities; Women, Infants, and Children assistance; and emergency food assistance) Minimum-wage jobs do not even come close to competing with welfare in most states.
According to a current Heritage Foundation report by Authors:Robert Rector and Jamie Hall, the average poor family with children currently receives $65,200 in cash, food, housing, medical care, and educational support from the taxpayer each year.
From the point of view of the usefulness of marriage, the choice of the poor to forgo work is “the behavior of people responding to the reality of the world around them and making the decisions—the legal, approved, and even encouraged decisions—that maximize their quality of life.” As Robert Rector and William Lauber have explained:
The current welfare system may be conceptualized best as a system which offers each single mother … a “paycheck.”… She will continue to receive her “paycheck” as long as she fulfills two conditions: (1) she must not work; and (2) she must not marry an employed male…. [Welfare] has converted the low-income working husband from a necessary breadwinner into a net financial handicap. It has transformed marriage from a legal institution designed to protect and nurture children into an institution that financially penalizes nearly all low-income parents who enter into it.
So, there you have it folks. In our effort to help people, we have actually done them great harm.
Should we go back to the methods of Jefferson and Franklin, or simply pour more money on the problem and hope it fixes itself?
There is a solution, again from our past. Bring back the programs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt following the Great Depression.
If we are going to pay people not to work, why not pay them to work?
That was the idea of the FDR’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. Those programs didn’t jump-start employment, but they did provide work as well as income.
They also reversed years of despair that itself was impeding society.
So why not get started? Doing this would be revenue neutral. We are spending the money on government benefits anyway.
It would satisfy the right with the emphasis on work and the left with the emphasis on taking care of the poor.
It would also serve the need for rebuilding our infrastructure.
So exactly what were these programs?
The Civilian Conservation Corps was a domestic work relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942.
Unemployed, unmarried men were put to work in conservation and natural resource development efforts on federal, state, and local lands.
That the program provided much-needed work to the scores of unemployed young men during the dark days of the Depression while implementing these conservation efforts made it one of the most universally supported of New Deal programs.
Think about that folks. You want to solve crime and break up the gangs in inner cities? Here is your answer. What’s that you say? They won’t join up? Making too much money selling drugs? Well, that is where the second part of the program sets in.
We imposed a draft during the world wars. Those kids did not have a choice. They had to join up and fight.
Right now, we are in an economic world war for our survival. I say institute a draft for work. If we can draft kids to fight, why can we not draft kids to work? Sound crazy? Think about this.
The CCC operated under the army’s control. Camp commanders had disciplinary powers and corpsmen were required to address superiors as “sir.”
The program was aimed at over two million unemployed unmarried men between the ages of 17 and 25. CCC participants left their homes and lived in camps in the countryside. By September 1935 over 500,000 young men had lived in CCC camps, most staying from six months to a year.
Over the nine year lifespan of the program, 3 million kids participated and were provided with food, clothing, shelter, and a small wage of $30 a month, $25 dollars of which was required to be sent back to their families!
In addition to promoting environmental conservation it took those kids and built good citizens through vigorous, disciplined outdoor labor.
Close to the heart of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the CCC combined his interests in conservation and universal service for youth.
He believed that this civilian “tree army” would relieve the rural unemployed and keep youth “off the city street corners.”
The work focused on soil conservation and reforestation. Most important, the men planted millions of trees on land made barren from fires, natural erosion, or lumbering—in fact, the CCC was responsible for over half the reforestation, public and private, done in the nation’s history.
Corpsmen also dug canals and ditches, built over thirty thousand wildlife shelters, stocked rivers and lakes with nearly a billion fish, restored historic battlefields, and cleared beaches and campgrounds.
In less than 10 years, the Civilian Conservation Corps built more than 800 parks (Lake of the Ozarks State Park being one of them) and planted nearly 3 billion trees nationwide.
The army’s experience in managing large numbers of young men and the paramilitary discipline learned by corpsmen provided the added benefit of teaching these kids skills they could use throughout their lives.
That is one reason why we were able to gear up so quickly for WWII production.
Now it worked so well with the kids, someone asked, “How about the parents?”
Thus, was born The Works Progress Administration. This agency put millions of unemployed people to work on projects large and small, including parks, roads, bridges, and public buildings.
The infrastructure built by the WPA still stands in nearly every community in America, where it’s not uncommon to find a “Built by the WPA” plaque or stamp on a sidewalk, building, or bridge.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1933.
The WPA, employed nearly 9 million Americans before its expiration.
Americans of all skill levels were given jobs to match their talents. Most of the resources were spent on public works programs such as roads and bridges, but WPA projects spread to other projects as well.
The Federal Theater Project hired actors to perform plays across the land. Musicians gave free concerts. Artists beautified cities by painting larger-than-life murals.
Even such noteworthy authors as John Steinbeck and Richard Wright were hired to write regional histories.
WPA workers took traveling libraries to rural areas. Some were assigned the task of transcribing documents from colonial history; others were assigned to assist the blind or babysit for mothers working in other jobs.
Critics called the WPA “We Piddle Around” or “We Poke Along,” labeling it the worst waste of taxpayer money in American history.
But most every county in America received some service by the newly employed workforce, and although the average monthly salary was barely above subsistence level, millions of Americans earned desperately needed cash, skills, and self-respect.
While FDR believed in the elementary principles of justice and fairness, he also expressed his hatred for doling out welfare to otherwise able workers.
So, in return for a government check, WPA workers built highways, schools, hospitals, airports and playgrounds.
They restored theaters–such as the Dock Street Theater in Charleston, S.C.–and built the ski lodge at Oregon’s Mt. Hood.
FDR safeguarded private enterprise from competition with WPA projects by including a provision in the act that placed wage and price controls on federally funded products or services.
Just like today, out of work Americans needed jobs. To the unemployed, many of whom had no money left in the bank, a decent job that put food on the dinner table was a matter of survival.
Unlike Herbert Hoover, who refused to offer direct assistance to individuals, Franklin Roosevelt knew that the nation’s unemployed could last only so long.
FDR saw government handouts as killing the initiative of the American people to step up, work for a living, and make a future for themselves and their families.
FDR saw the answer was to stop the handouts and put people to work. So, his efforts soon shifted to “work-relief” programs. FDR’s government agencies paid individuals to perform jobs, unlike our current government that simply hands them money to sit at home.
Yes folks, you heard me right, I am agreeing with a program implemented by a Democrat.