"Welfare Babies Bother You? Drown 'Em
"A modest proposal to keep our corporate plazas clear of children
begging for food"
by Robert Scheer, LA Times, Jan. 15, 1995 ("column left")
"They're not so tough, these Republican welfare bashers like Gov.
Pete Wilson and the Newtonians in Congress. What good is all this
talk about kicking mothers and their children off welfare?
You just end up with 9.2 million raggedy kids begging all over
the place.
"If the conservatives had the guts to be consistent with their
ideology, they would just drown the newborn issue of any welfare
mother. That way you get a twofer: the fetus is kept alive to
birth, but the kid doesn't cost you anything to raise. It's
both pro-life and fiscally conservative.
"Instead they pussyfoot around with cutting welfare levels to
just above starvation levels, which misses the point. Isn't
the basic idea to get rid of these kids because conservative
think tanks have proven that they'll never amount to anything?
With their schools and neighborhoods, how many are going to
make it in the information economy? Lately, people with IQs
high on the bell curve have come to understand that nothing
will help kids in poverty anyway, so why not just throw out
the baby with the bathwater? I know it sounds a little
'master racy,' but we are competing with Germany and Japan...
"Welfare's pretty cheap, less than 3% of the federal budget.
Total AFDC expenditures are the same now as in 1975. It's
not about money, it's about kids: 70% of the people on
AFDC are children, and we just don't like them.
"Why be ashamed? It's not a racial thing. True, the media make
it seem like all welfare kids are black inner-city carjackers,
but the largest group is white and non-urban. We want to
cut their payments all the same, irrespective of color;
that's what makes this country great...."
[I like the application of revealed preference theory in the
fourth paragraph.]
in pen-l solidarity,
Jim Devine
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA
310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950
"Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti."
(Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing
Dante.
