Before writing this, I’ve been asking myself: Is there a time to be politically incorrect in order to state a needed truth? What if you pass over known truths, and thus care is not considered nor firewalls set against harms that are almost guaranteed to occur in a plan of good intents?
With regard to governmental benefit programs of every kind for the poor… as a former welfare mother, I’ve known utterly heroic parents who have given everything including literally, their own blood as often as the blood bank will pay for it, just to piece together money enough from various sources to simply be able to give a breakfast, a lunch and a modest dinner to their children each day, in order to pay for needed school supplies, and for bus transfers to get to work.
Movies, vacations, a day trip, a car, a choice about which of several jobs to take? To most of us back then, those were reserved to the dream of ‘Someday.’ Once we’d worked ourselves out of the muck mire we were in as welfare parents, most of us dreamed of the ‘Someday’ when we’d own a home no one could take from us by arbitrary order.
But, is it too politically incorrect to say I have also seen how some people can and have abused and misused government programs of many kinds?
With regard to qualifying for government benefit, matters like SCHIP included, I hope it is not considered too politically incorrect for me to say that some in our world keep themselves ‘poor’ or below a certain income line on purpose, despite other opportunities to not be poor, despite other opportunities to earn more money… and their reasons can be many, including availing themselves to government programs so they can have ‘leisure time’ instead of working butt to belly hours day after day.
Others make choices to keep their income low, essentially manipulating the benefits from government programs to supplement their incomes… so they don’t have to stress themselves unduly with work that is not their exact cup of tea, or hours they don’t prefer. Or to evade paying money they owe. Or because they see it as a game to out-sugar Uncle Sugar.
(It is true that some government programs are set up in such torturous ways that even the justified recipients of those programs must manipulate how much money they bring in monthly, in order to gain their much deserved governmental pittance. )
However, I’d find it hard to pretend I didn’t see all the beasts of sloth not willing to lift a finger in their children’s behalf, the smooth talkers, the distorters, the bloodsuckers, the hiders of assets, the self-indulgent, the frauds, the embezzlers, the greedy, the ‘you owe me,s because I’m x, y, or z,’ the criminal grifters, the predators, the arrogant, the selfish, the judgmental, the pre-emptory, ‘the nobody owes you anything even though you’re nearly dead and dying fast’… I believe I’ve seen it all from each of the many sides. On every side, there are those who act the absolute least of what any of us are as human beings.
I hope it isn’t politically incorrect to just mention that anytime there is any kind of ‘food’ laid out for the truly poor, some object to the starving being fed. Those often shrill and acid objectors then truly try to throw their best body blocks in order to quash programs that give aid to the helpless and deeply vulnerable.
I hope it isn’t politically incorrect to just mention that it seems true also, that anytime there is any kind of ‘food’ laid out for the truly poor, those who are far better fed, and far often more wily, arrive too... often shouldering to the front, taking the sorely needed food away from those who have the least.
Blocking available aid for people who are on their last legs and making them perform like moneys in order to get it, is insensible and off the charts cruel. But also, allowing those who have far more resources to deplete a finite primae materia away from those who are far less educated, far less knowledgeable, far less able, and often, far more honest… surely, this is not what government programs were meant to serve.
Has A New Definition of What Constitutes Being ‘Poor’ Been Created, and By Whom?
Yet how does one evaluate eligibility regarding programs amongst those able persons who have better earning choices, but choose not to take them, and want/ let government fill the breach instead?
‘The poor’ used to be defined as persons who were money-less, or very low of income, needy, destitute even, without resource to sell or trade or pawn.
Has someone created a new definition of ‘poor?’ If so, which individuals or groups created a new way of seeing luck, error, choice, poverty?
Is ‘poor’ now considered to be only one well-working car instead of two… when it used to be no car at all, or else one of those belching black smoke factories on wheels?
Is ‘poor’ now considered having only one house owned instead of two… or is being poor still defined as it used to be, owning no house at all, and often enough having to beat it out of rental dives ahead of the landlord’s evictor?
Is ‘poor’ used to now define able and healthy wage earners who have other choices, but ‘choose’ only whatever job doesn’t stress them to the maximum?
If I as a former welfare mother who knows the mean streets, is asking politically incorrect questions, I just ask, please, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just asking because if this issue of SCHIP is another one of those moments in time, where those far better off come in to scoop up the lion’s share of the limited resources that were meant for the truly poor, then it’s back to the drawing board for those who govern. It’s got to be.
A government program for the poor is not supposed to be part of a portfolio, is it? Maybe I am wrong, but a government program for the poor is not supposed to be an ‘additional’ asset, income, benefit, for those with substantial resources. I hope those who know far more than me, and those who have farther vision and power, will not let SCHIP become one more government program whose resource and aid are meant to feed the starving birds of winter, but are taken by the squirrels instead.
And whether you were ever on welfare or not, if you know the habits of squirrels, you know everything about the ways and means of abuses and misuses of government programs that were meant only to cover the most vulnerable: the truly poor.
If there is a new class of ‘poor,’ then those of influence ought say so clearly, loudly, and define that group well and defend a program for that new class, a program all of its own, based on its far higher income and assets levels.
But regarding the SCHIP program, let it be so that the utterly poor don’t have to, one more time, share finite resources with those who are living at the exact level that the poorest among us all, ironically, are aspiring to reach themselves.