‘Tis the season for giving.
For me, that mostly means supporting charities.
One organization I donate to is SSP, Student Sponsor Partners, a nonprofit that gives scholarships to kids from low-income families. SSP helps children escape bad public schools by providing grants to students so they can pay the cheaper tuition at mostly Catholic schools.
I’m not Catholic, but I give to SSP because their schools are better than the dreary ones run by the bureaucratic unionized government monopoly. They do better for half the cost.
It feels good to give.
But wait.
Government already gives out more than a trillion dollars in welfare programs.
State governments add another $744 billion.
In total, we’ve spent $25 trillion on poverty programs since America declared “War on Poverty.”
Yet 1 in 10 Americans still live in poverty.
Some say the solution is simple: Spend more! Throw more money at the problem, and surely it’ll go away.
The World Institute for Development Economics says, “Welfare policies, such as cash transfers to the poor, unemployment benefits, child subsidies and universal health care … can break cycles of poverty.”
But $25 trillion later, why haven’t they?!
Because government handouts erode self-reliance.
Government programs push the message: “You need a handout. You deserve a handout. It is no longer up to you to support your families, neighbors or even yourself. It’s up to government.”
As a result, welfare programs are no longer a bridge to independence but a ball and chain that weighs recipients down. Welfare doesn’t equip people with tools to become self-sufficient. It rewards dependency.
For the first time in history, America has a near-permanent “underclass” — generation after generation that lives off government. Welfare discouraged self-improvement.
People avoid marriage lest they lose benefits. Able-bodied people avoid work so monthly checks from Uncle Sam remain untouched. Fathers are often kept out of the home, especially when welfare workers visit, to avoid cuts to benefits.
The solution? Giving … but not by government. By people like you and me.
This holiday season, I will also support the Doe Fund, an organization that helps former addicts and prisoners rebuild their lives through meaningful work.
Unlike government welfare, their approach isn’t built around handouts. They say, “Work works.” They encourage self-sufficiency.
Most Doe Fund recipients don’t go back to jail.
Charities aren’t a perfect solution, but they’re better than government welfare.
Charities get to choose whom they help. They can focus resources on those who genuinely need a hand while saying no to those who just need “a kick in the butt.”
Government doesn’t. Its one-size-fits-all approach means money flows out, regardless of whether it helps or not.
It’s important to remember that in both cases, it’s your money being spent.
But when you give to charities, you have the power to decide where your dollars go. You can support causes where your donations make a real impact.
Government, on the other hand, forcibly takes your money and routinely wastes it on people who don’t deserve it.
In America’s welfare system, 70% of the money doesn’t even reach the people it’s supposed to help; it goes to bureaucrats who run the programs.
Charities actually deliver most of their money to those in need. If they don’t, donors stop giving.
Charity handouts also come with expiration dates, which is a good thing. Since recipients know handouts are not guaranteed forever, they have an incentive to take responsibility for their own lives, sooner rather than later.
Government handouts have no such urgency. The checks keep coming.
Charities do a better job.
Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The welfare system destroyed family units and it is not only black families. I live in Michigan and at one time I went to Physical Therapy. One of the physical therapists was from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. She indicated to me that only one third of the girls in her class, graduated from High School. I asked her why the graduation rate was so low among the girls. The Physical Therapist told me that two thirds of the girls who didn’t graduate, got pregnant and went on welfare. These girls were all white. The people that live on welfare, who are not disabled, are parasites on society.
These days, charity should begin at home, in paying the sacrificial closeup and personal cost to raise self-governing self-sustaining quality human beings. It’s the greatest gift THE PEOPLE can give to themselves and to the nation. Stopping this current American socialist bred generation of selfish, not self-sustaining, social entitlement dependency dupes, reliant not upon their own powers to create wealth and a real life, but only upon the redistribution of American life force from the productive to the unproductive, is the only way we can save the nation. Giving is an art form, and most times when giving is emotional we just get in the way of God and nature’s way of correcting people to just do the right thing. Dollars wasted have not won this war on poverty, which begins with poverty of ideas and poverty of the soul.
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” C.S. Lewis
Covering failed behavior with blankets of money without assurance the bad behavior will stop just gets in God’s way of correcting and saving the individual soul, and the collective soul of nations. He does not give us the pain but allows the pain of our own transgressions against his immaculate design for us to become, so that we will awaken from our Biden-like comas and return to the greatness he planned for us to achieve.
Also, since govt got involved, what defines as “Living in poverty” has changed its meaning a LOT.
While working in the navy, i did a lot of charity work on/off base, and SAW folks in poverty, we helped.. YET IN SOME cases, they had MORE net income/stuff, than some folks ON base who HELPED them did.
Case and point, one of our 2nd year E3’s, could barely afford a clunker car, insurance and a one bedroom appt off base.. BUT a gal, who had 4 kids (all from different fathers), had a BRAND NEW 6 pax van (on top of a 2nd car), a TV IN EVERY Room, cell phones for ALL involved, AND ate better than he did..
YET HE WAS never ‘seen as being in poverty’ by the govt, but SHE WAS?!?!?