When our present social welfare system was created back in the 1960’s, it was originally devised and imagined as a good thing that helped people in need, including single mothers, and was touted as being part of a “war on poverty.”
Think about the implications of what those two things mean. Helping people who are in a place in their lives in which they truly need help, if done right, helps them get back on their financial feet, and puts them on their way with a “go get ’em” attitude – it shouldn’t work to keep people in poverty. And a “war on poverty” denotes that they think poverty, being poor, is a bad thing, so they’re going to work against it and fight it – it denotes that they’re going to try to reduce, and possibly even eliminate, poverty in our country. Do our social welfare programs truly help those in a place of need get back on their feet? Do they help to reduce or eliminate poverty in our country? The answer, if you lean politically to the left, may surprise you. And you really need to pay attention if you are from a minority group – particularly those of you who are African Americans.
To answer these questions, I want you to think about how our social welfare system was set up – it was designed to help the unemployed, who weren’t making an income, or single mothers, who were struggling to survive, and with a child to boot. But the way the system was set up, it stipulates that, as a single mother, you must stay unemployed, and not get married, especially to an employed male, to continue to receive welfare benefits. In other words, it’s set up to work against what it’s supposed to be doing. It gave a strong financial incentive for those taking advantage of these social welfare programs to stay single and unemployed.
In fact, if you were a single mother who had a second child, or even a third, you would receive even more welfare benefits from the government, which incentivized you to have even more children as a single mother. In other words, the way the rules were set up was, in reality, a perverse incentive program that effected society in seriously and notoriously negative ways, if you consider the criminal, psychological, and economic statistics I gave you in the article “The Argument for the Nuclear Family Improving One’s Level of Advantage.” These financial incentives to these single mothers hindered the creation of intact nuclear husband-and-wife family structures, which was bad for their young, kept them chronically dependent on the system, and, over time, changed the ratio, that is, the percentage of the population that came from intact families, which shrank, and the percentage that were raised by single mothers, which increased.
Over time, you had more and more people who became dependent on these programs, and never learned the things they truly needed to flourish and prosper, such as having a proper work ethic, nor did their young. And that was just the tip of the iceberg about all the problems wrought on society by these programs.
By creating unintended incentives that propagated the conditions that correlate with increased crime, decreased psychological health, and decreased economic well-being, the state was actually facilitating the long term rise in the rate of crime, a rise in psychological health issues, more poverty, and the destruction of the traditional family. The state was helping to slowly transform society from one where most youth had a distinct advantage, based on coming from traditional family structures, to one where more and more youth are disadvantaged and underprivileged.
Many of the problems we have today spring from the long term effects and consequences to our society caused by our social welfare programs, and the negative real effects those programs have had on us as a nation. That includes today’s poverty issues and includes issues of crime and poverty in the minority and black communities. Whether you like this answer or not, all of the disparities that the political left likes to refer to as “systemic racism” were created by the effects that our social welfare programs have had on the black community. Our social welfare programs, and crime and poverty issues we have in our country today, whether you like it or not, are inextricably linked.
In one study, during the first two decades after our social welfare programs were put in place, at a time when our economy was growing (for the most part), and people had employment options that could help them get on their financial feet, and be on the right road to prosperity, the level of latent poverty was actually increasing across the country. Now why was this? Because our welfare system was set up, not to nudge and encourage people to go in the right direction with their financial and employment and social behaviors, but to lure people into dependency on the government, and once they became dependent, to keep them there in a chronic state of dependence. Let’s call it a “bait and trap” type of system.
People were encouraged to get government help, were told that they were entitled to that help, and that they had a “basic human right” to receive that help. Black people were told that these programs were a form of “racial justice.” So, over time, more and more people became dependent on the government. And the government would then write those people off in their statistical manuals as poor; thus the statistical manuals showed latent poverty increasing over time, at a time when it should have been decreasing, especially if these programs were part of a “war on poverty” like its proponents claimed, and because the economy was growing and providing avenues to prosperity.
In the end, these programs weren’t designed to truly help people get out of poverty and onto the road to prosperity; these programs were really only designed to garner political votes for those pushing these programs – namely the political left, the progressives, the Democrats. They were designed to keep people in power. And in the end, this system hurt all Americans, but hurt minorities more. And which minority was hurt the most? The blacks. Doesn’t that make such a setup racist?
