Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   3/04/2014

The dependency state—here to stay?

The Tea Party Patriots will have as guest speaker tonight Charlene Reid, Director of the Tehama County Social Services. On a related note, “Tehama County is losing out on $6.9 million in additional economic activity because not all individuals eligible for Cal Fresh assistance enroll in the program, according to a report released Thursday (from California Food Policy Advocates).” I get that advocates for ever-greater government transfer payment programs—income-qualified or means tested benefits—consider it a success, or “progress” if you will, to expand the reach of such programs to all who qualify.

However, if the intended recipients are the “poor,” why is 125 percent of the poverty level the cutoff? Doesn’t the higher cutoff for any benefit program make it harder for people to rationalize earning more if it means losing government handouts? Such perverse logic is inherent in, for instance, Obamacare. Shouldn’t people aspire to provide for themselves at some point? When a single mom must earn as much as $65,000 in some states to fully replace all federal and state benefits, aren’t we providing a disincentive to the traditional American principle of self-sufficiency? Depending on the government is, by definition, depending on other people’s forcibly coerced tax “contributions.”

Then, doesn’t the whole concept of $7 million of “additional economic activity” in Tehama County become economically counterproductive? It had to be taken from taxpayers, now deprived of their “additional economic activity,” or borrowed against future wage-earners, also depriving them of same. We’ve been assured by liberal politicians and big-government advocates that a dollar spent by government multiplies, apparently by economic magic, as it gets spent locally. That, however, is fallacious logic and defies common sense. That dollar, whether taken from a taxpayer or borrowed from future earners, loses the value it would have created. Benefit programs have administrative costs, or the interest cost of debt. The director and staff of any social services agency reduce—not increase—the “economic activity” produced by those programs.

Such are the quandaries I pose, writing and offering through a labor of love, my insights, facts and studied opinions. When a critic issues a broad-brush, nonspecific harangue and never actually uses anything I’ve written, I can only dismiss, with prejudice, such criticism as being irrelevant to my presenting the truth, as I see it. I could itemize dozens of topics covered over the last year, which would contain few, if any, of the items a writer says I supposedly obsessed over in this column. Another writer, were he deprived of topics such as marijuana, homelessness, global warming and never-ending broadsides at Republicans and the Tea Party, would be left with rather thin gruel for material. To each their own.

Broadcast, cable (Fox News excepted) and major print news media coverage resembles, as I see it, rather repetitive “dog bites man,” conventional, liberal-left approaches to stories. This column diverges and looks for, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.” This is the only weekly column written by a local conservative in all of Northern California.

For instance, the reporting on President Obama’s “brother’s keeper” initiative contained repetitive phrases and perspectives: Obama’s “deeply personal” and “heartfelt” cause to reach out to minority men in dire circumstances received praise and warm emotional coverage. I heard not a word of curiosity over his documented indifference to his own impoverished brother in Africa living in squalor in a hut with but a few dollars of income. In an interview by filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, his brother did not share Obama’s leftist political perspective and receives not one whit of financial support from his wealthy American sibling.

In a book by Obama’s half-brother, he recounted his one visit from his rising community-organizer relative. Barack acted overly black, and dismissed the half-brother’s appreciation of classical music, like Chopin, as being too white an interest. He also receives no support from the “1 percent” president.

Then there is the larger, “elephant in the room” perspective—avoided by mainstream news media and analysts—that, through a half a century of welfare programs and policies that undermine the nuclear family, tens of millions of young black boys and men have no father in their lives. One of the single greatest predictors of any young man growing to be crime-and-drug-free, educated and gainfully employed is having a father in the home and in his life. Does no one else see, and have the willingness to point out, that Barack Obama was abandoned by both his mother and all father figures, replacing them with reported communist Frank Marshal Davis in Hawaii. Obama, unsurprisingly, now sees the government, through taxpayer-funded initiatives, as the logical replacement for the absent fathers of young, minority men.

Regarding the crisis in Ukraine, I don’t see any of the liberal, media elite rushing to apologize to either Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney, whom they ridiculed roundly for having the foresight and temerity to point to an invasion of Ukraine (Palin) by our biggest global adversary, Russia (Romney), during their national campaigns in 2008 and 2012. As I’ve said before, being a liberal means, to the left, never having to admit error, much less apologize for said errors.