[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Surely, including all this wouldpush up the annual benefit close to $50,000.This also presumes that themother is not cheating by getting more welfare than she is entitled to,which is often the case.Not only is this far above any job available to our hypothetical teen-aged single mother, it is even far higher than a typical entry level job inthe New York City government.Thus, The New York Post, (Aug.2) notedthe following starting salaries at various municipal jobs: $18,000 for anoffice aid; $23,000 for a sanitation worker; $27,000 for a teacher; $27,000for a police officer or firefighter; $18,000 for a word processor all ofthese with far more work skills than possessed by your typical welfareclient.And all of these salaries, of course, are fully taxable.Given this enormous disparity in benefits, is it any wonder that 1.3million mothers and children in New York are on welfare, and that welfaredependence is happily passed on from one generation of girls to the next?As Change-NY puts it, why accept a job that requires 40 hours of work aweek when you can remain at home and make the equivalent of $45,000a year?Economists, then, are particularly alert to the fact that, the more anyproduct, service, or condition is subsidized, the more of it we are going toget.We can have as many people on welfare as we are willing to pay for.If the state of being a single mother with kids is the fastest route to gettingon welfare, that social condition is going to multiply.Not, of course, that every woman will fall for the blandishments ofwelfare, but the more intense those subsidies and the greater the benefit 52 Murray N.Rothbard: Making Economic Sensecompared to working, the more women and illegitimate children onwelfare we are going to be stuck with.Moreover, the longer this system remains in place, the worse will bethe erosion in society of the work ethic and of the reluctance to be on thedole that used to be dominant in the United States.Once that ethical shifttakes place, the welfare system will only snowball.Change-NY wryly points out that it would be cheaper for the taxpayerto send welfare recipients to Harvard than to maintain the current system.In view of the decline of educational standards generally and Harvard sPolitical Correctness in particular, Harvard would probably be happy toenroll them.14Welfare As We Don t Know ItThe welfare system has become an open scandal, and has given rise tojustified indignation throughout the middle and working classes.Unfortunately, as too often happens when the public has no articulateleadership, the focus of its wrath against welfare has become misplaced.The public s rage focuses on having to pay taxes to keep welfarereceivers in idleness; but what people should zero in on is their having topay these people taxes, period.The concentration on idleness vs.the work ethic, however, has given the trickster Bill Clinton the loopholehe always covets: seeming to pursue conservative goals while actuallydoing just the opposite.Unfortunately, the welfare reform scam seemsto be working.The President s pledge to end welfare as we know it, therefore, turnsout not to be dumping welfare parasites off the backs of the taxpayers.Onthe contrary, the plan is to load even more taxpayer subsidies andprivileges into their eager pockets.The welfarees will become even moreparasitic and just as unproductive as before, but at least they will not be idle. Big deal.The outline of the Clintonian plan is as follows: Welfarees will begiven two years to find a job. Since nothing prevents them from finding a job now except their own lack of interest, there is no reasonfor expecting much from job-finding.At that point, reform kicks in.The The Socialism of Welfare 53federal government will either pay private emplo yers to hire these peopleor, if no employers can be found, will itself employ the welfarees invarious community service jobs.The latter, of course, are unproductiveboondoggles, jobs which no one will pay for in the private sector, whatused to be called leaf-raking in the Federal Works ProgressAdministration of the 1930s New Deal.Welfarees will now be paid at minimum wage scale by taxpayers toshuffle papers from one desk to another or to engage in some otherunproductive or counter-productive activity.As for subsidizing privatejobs, the employers businesses will be hampered by unproductive or surlyor incompetent workers.In the private jobs, furthermore, the taxpayerswill wholly subsidize wages not only at minimum wage scale (which wecan expect to keep rising), but also at whatever pay may be set betweenemployer and government.The taxpayer picks up the full tab.But this is scarcely all.In addition to the actual job subsidies, Clintonproposes that the federal government also pay the following to the welfareparasites: free medical care for all (courtesy the Clinton health reform );plenty of food stamps for free food; free child care for the myriad ofwelfare children; free public housing; free transportation to and from theirjobs; free child nutrition programs; and lavish training programs totrain these people for productive labor.If these training programs are anything like current models, they will belengthy and worthless, including training in conversational skills. If afree and lavishly funded public school system can t seem to manageteaching these characters to read, why should anyone think governmentqualified to train them in any other skills? In addition to the huge cost ofdirect payments to the welfarees, an expensive government bureaucracywill have to be developed to supervise the training, job finding, and jobsupervision.In addition, welfare mothers with young children will beexempt from the workfare requirements altogether.Even the supporters of the Clinton welfare plan concede that the planwill greatly increase the welfare cost to the taxpayers.The Clintonians ofcourse, as usual with government, try to underestimate the cost to get afoot in the door, but even moderate observers estimate the annual extracost to be no less than $20 billion.And that s probably a grossunderestimate.And while the White House claims that only 600,000people will need the workfare, internal Health and Human Services 54 Murray N.Rothbard: Making Economic Sensememoranda estimate the number at no less than 2.3 million, and that sfrom Clintonian sources.Of course, the Clintonian claim is that these huge increases are only inthe short-run ; in the long run, the alleged improvement in the moralclimate is supposed to lower costs to the taxpayers.Sure.Forcing taxpayers to subsidize employers or to provide busy-work forunproductive jobs is worse than keeping welfare recipients idle.There isno point to activity or work unless it is productive, and enacting a taxpayersubsidy is a sure way to keep the welfarees unproductive.Subsidizing theidle is immoral and counterproductive; paying people to work and creatingjobs for them is also crazy, as well as being more expensive.But paying people to work is worse than that.For it removes low-income recipients of subsidy from the status of an exotic, marginal, andgenerally despised group, and brings the subsidized into the mainstream ofthe workforce
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
