The Paradox of Welfare

               A paradox is a statement that seems to contradict itself, yet is true.  My favorite paradox comes from the English writer G.K. Chesterton who took the old adage “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well,” and turned it on its ear with, “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”  I’m reminded of this whenever I make a poor shot on the golf course or hit a clunker on the piano.

               In a recent Wall Street Journal article Congressman Paul Ryan wrote about a paradox in the War on Poverty.  What he said essentially is that the more money we give to the poor, the greater the chance they will remain poor.  He was referring to the multitude of well-intended welfare programs that seek to remedy poverty, but end up having a depressing effect on the upward mobility of the poor.

                Simply put, the poorer you are, the more government assistance you get, but the more you earn, the less assistance you get.  Why is this bad?  Because our means-tested anti-poverty programs work against those who try to earn their way out of poverty.  Why, for instance, have so many unemployed able-bodied people dropped out of the job market altogether?  Because for many of them the net benefit of re-entering the job market is as little of 20% or less of their salary.  That’s not much of an incentive to go back to work.  And it shouldn’t surprise anybody to see a single mother with a passel of kids choosing to stay at home rather than looking for a job that might jeopardize some of her government subsidies for housing, utilities, transportation, health care, and food stamps. 

               Now we have ObamaCare actually encouraging people to cut their hours or drop out of the workforce  so they can qualify for healthcare subsidies.  Incredibly, leftists like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid praise this as a way for low-income workers to break their “job-lock” and gain the liberty to “follow their passion.”  Wonderful.  Now we can have more poets, surfers, and social parasites to support with our tax dollars.

               Lyndon Johnson officially launched the War on Poverty 50 years ago, but trillions of dollars later nothing has changed: we still have 47 million Americans living below the poverty line today.  A myopic Washington thinks it can solve the problem by throwing more and more money at it; but all it has to show for its generosity is a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor.  We have to change the way we take care of the most unfortunate among us without condemning them to a cycle of poverty from which they can never escape.      

               We need to resolve this paradox.  The richest country in the world must do better.