by Donald Trump
Our Founding Fathers understood that self-reliance is the axis on which freedom spins. The American work ethic is what led generations of Americans to create our once prosperous nation. The idea that working hard was a spiritual act of doing one’s work “as unto the Lord” spurred us to give our very best day in and day out. And because we believed that work was a virtue, we produced massive wealth, plentiful jobs, and a self-sufficient society.
That’s what I find so morally offensive about welfare dependency: it robs people of the chance to improve. Work gives every day a sense of purpose. A job well done provides a sense of pride and accomplishment. I love to work. In fact, I like working so much that I seldom take vacations. Because I work so hard, I’ve been privileged to create jobs for tens of thousands of people. And on my hit show The Apprentice, I get to work with people from all walks of life. I’m known for my famous line, “You’re fired!” But the truth is, I don’t like firing people. Sometimes you have to do it, but it’s never fun or easy. One of my favorite parts of business is seeing how work transforms people into better, more confident, more competent individuals. It’s inspiring and beautiful to watch.
America became a powerhouse because of our deep belief in the virtue of self-reliance. As Thomas Jefferson said, “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” Government wasn’t created to take care of us. Generations of Americans believed they should be responsible for themselves. When hard times hit, churches and neighbors pitched in and pulled together to help. But in the end, the Founders believed that government should only do those few things individuals couldn’t do for themselves. We are rapidly losing that self-reliant spirit that made America great.
Proper Perspective on Poverty
Real economic pain exists in America. No doubt about that. And we need pro-growth, pro-jobs policies. But it’s also important for us not to lose sight of the bigger picture. Obama tries to justify his massive spending programs in part based on the idea that they’re needed to eradicate poverty in America, but as Dinesh D’Souza, author of the bestselling book What’s So Great about America, points out, America is one of the few places in the world where a “poor” person can still be obese.6 “Poor” is a relative term. By global standards, poor people in America are rich. And even by American standards, poor people today are better off than average people were in our parents’ lifetimes. According to a Heritage Foundation study, “Today, poor boys at ages 18 and 19 are actually taller and heavier than boys of similar age in the general U.S. population in the late 1950s. They are one inch taller and some 10 pounds heavier than GIs of similar age during World War II.”7 Poor people in America have comforts most of the world’s poor have never seen, as the Heritage Foundation reports:• 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. In 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• 92 percent of poor households have a microwave.
• Nearly three-fourths have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.
• Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite TV.
• Two-thirds have at least one DVD player, and 70 percent have a VCR.
• Half have a personal computer, and one in seven have two or more computers.
• More than half of poor families with children have a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.
• 43 percent have Internet access.
• One-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.
• One-fourth have a digital video recorder system, such as a TiVo.8
Does this mean that poor Americans aren’t in need of help, most especially a job? No, of course not. But it does mean that Americans should never lose sight of the fact that we are incredibly blessed to live in a nation where 97 percent of those considered poor own a color television and have the electricity to power it.9
Childhood Poverty Is a Tragedy
The innocent bystanders of American poverty are kids. Yet two-thirds of childhood poverty in America is absolutely preventable if individuals did just one thing: get married before they have children. As someone once put it, “Marriage is the greatest ‘anti-poverty’ program God ever created.”
An out-of-wedlock child is six times more likely to live in poverty than a child born in a two-parent home. The reason for this is painfully obvious: two paychecks are twice as much as one. This isn’t brain surgery. Two people working full-time at Walmart puts a family above the federal poverty line (defined as a family of four earning less than $22,314, not including in-kind benefits). The key thing is for the father to stick around, which is what marriage is meant to ensure. Both parents don’t necessarily have to hold down a job. One paycheck from a gainfully employed dad, with mom at home taking care of the kids, is better than a single mother living off welfare.
The explosion of out-of-wedlock births in America is staggering. This is a total departure from American history—one that is reshaping our country, and not for the better. Back when LBJ began engineering his “Great Society” and declaring his “War on Poverty,” only 7 percent of kids were born out of wedlock. Today, 40 percent of all births in America are to unwed mothers. Government is now the “father” in far too many homes. But here’s the thing: kids don’t just need a wallet—they need a dad who will teach boys how to be responsible men and show daughters what it means to be respected and protected.
Out-of-wedlock birth rates are not only one of the greatest generators of poverty but of inequality in America. Twenty-nine percent of white children are born to a single mother (a figure that’s far too high), but 72 percent of black children are born out of wedlock. Beyond the economic consequences, we know that kids without a dad are also exponentially more likely to abuse drugs, drop out of school, commit crime, and be incarcerated.10 Kids who grow up in homes where a magic check appears each month from the government believe there’s nothing wrong with sitting at home doing nothing while taxpayers bust their humps working to fund them. For an entire generation, government welfare programs are eradicating the virtues of responsibility, hard work, and self-reliance that built America.
Luis Lopez is a Democrat and youth counselor in Florida. He tells the story of an exchange he had with a 13-year-old pregnant girl he met in an inner-city, low-income housing project. He asked who was going to pay for her baby. Smiling, she said, “Medicaid and Social Security will pay for it.” “What about the father?” “We broke up,” she said. The girl went on to explain that her grandmother would raise her child. Then Lopez asked the pregnant teen what her mom thought about the fact that she was so young and pregnant. “My mom had me when she was 14,” the girl replied. “So what’s the problem?”11
It wasn’t always this way. A lot of us remember a time when there was a social stigma and sense of shame against living on the public dole. There’s a great scene in the movie Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe that illustrates how radically our entitlement culture has changed America. The movie is based on the true story of boxer James J. Braddock, a fighter during the Great Depression who goes on to become heavyweight champion of the world. As Braddock struggles to establish his boxing career, he eventually has to turn to public assistance to feed his wife and kids. He’s deeply embarrassed and ashamed, but he has no other options, so he accepts the money. Later, as his boxing career takes off and the prize money starts rolling in, Braddock returns to the welfare office and stands in line patiently. When he reaches the front of the line, he hands the welfare worker a stack of cash to pay back the government the money he had received to support his kids. That really happened. But today, given our entitlement culture, we can hardly imagine something like that except in the movies.
We have to combat the welfare mentality that says individuals are entitled to live off taxpayers. We need to reaffirm that mothers and fathers have a responsibility to their children—and that it starts with getting married before they
have them. But unfortunately our welfare system has created monetary incentives to avoid marriage and to have more out-of-wedlock children in order to get bigger welfare benefits. Each year, taxpayers shell out $300 billion to unmarried parents.12 That’s almost a third of a trillion dollars that could easily be saved if we could restore personal responsibility and the importance of marriage before childbearing. Your tax dollars in the form of Medicaid also pick up the delivery costs for 40 percent of all children born in America, most of those children being born to never-married mothers.13
For too many of these mothers and their children, living off welfare becomes a way of life. Consider these numbers: since becoming president, Obama has added 8 million more Americans to the rolls,14 and food stamp spending has more than doubled since 2007, going from $33 billion to $77 billion.15 But even more shocking than these figures is that half of food stamps go to people who have been on public assistance for eight and a half years or more.16 The only good thing about this for Obama, and he knows it . . . they will all be voting for him.
Obama’s “Food Stamp Crime Wave”
The food stamp program was originally created as temporary assistance for families with momentary times of need. And it shouldn’t be needed often. Thankfully, 96 percent of America’s poor parents say their children never suffer even a day of hunger.17 But when half of food stamp recipients have been on the dole for nearly a decade, something is clearly wrong, and some of it has to do with fraud.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Obama’s food stamp policies are ushering in a massive “food stamp crime wave.”18 That’s been matched by fewer prosecutions of illegal food stamp transactions involving alcohol or other non-eligible items.19 And “millionaires are now legally entitled to collect food stamps as long as they have little or no monthly income.”20
As the Wall Street Journal notes, “The Obama administration is far more enthusiastic about boosting food-stamp enrollment than about preventing fraud.” Under Obama’s rapid expansion of food stamps, recipients are selling welfare benefit cards on Facebook and Craigslist and using the money to buy drugs,21 food stamp checks are going to prison inmates,22 a $2 million lottery winner qualified for food stamps (and complained that he still deserved food stamps because the government took half his winnings in taxes),23 and the program is rife with incredibly costly scams including one enterprising crook who created more than 1,000 fraudulent food stamp claims and pocketed $8 million.24 And that’s just scratching the surface of the program’s waste, fraud, and abuse. The really infuriating thing is that the Obama administration doesn’t seem to care about how taxpayers are being shaken down by this outrageously mismanaged government program.
The blatant waste of taxpayers’ dollars doesn’t bother Obama, because it’s all part of his broader nanny-state agenda. It seems he believes the more voters he gives welfare goodies to, the more votes he’ll rack up for reelection. Perhaps that’s why his administration doesn’t give a rip about policing fraud or administering responsible oversight—he’s buying votes! And like any good leftist knows, the bigger you grow the welfare state, the bigger you grow your electoral army. It’s an outrageous betrayal of the American taxpayer and of the twin pillars of hard work and self-reliance that support the American Dream of freedom, progress, and bettering oneself and one’s family.
We see the same trend in public housing, where since Barack Obama’s election, massive crowds have been lining up to get Section 8 housing. In Atlanta, for example, 30,000 people showed up in the hopes of getting government housing applications or vouchers.25 There’s no doubt that some of those individuals are truly in need, whether due to age or disability, but the fact is that we know that able-bodied, non-elderly individuals without children routinely enter the program and spend on average nearly eight years in public housing.26 That’s outrageous.
People who have the ability to work should. But with the government happy to send checks, too many of them don’t. On average, able-bodied welfare recipients work just sixteen hours a week. How can anyone expect to climb out of poverty working just over three hours a day in a five-day work week?27 More hours at work equals more income. But our government’s welfare trap has built a system that creates a disincentive for work. The more hours you work the fewer welfare goodies you get. So what do you think people are going to do? They keep their work hours artificially low to keep their welfare checks artificially high. And once again, America’s twin virtues of hard work and self-reliance take a beating.
When you realize that every seventh person you pass on the sidewalk now receives food stamps, and that Obama has upped welfare spending to just under $1 trillion a year, it becomes painfully clear that this president’s rapid expansion of the welfare industry is part of a much broader effort to “fundamentally transform America,” as Obama put it early in his presidency.
I’ve got a newsflash for you, Mr. President: America likes America the way the Founding Fathers built her—as a nation that deeply values hard work and self-reliance. The next president America elects must be committed to serious welfare reforms that overhaul the system and roll back Obama’s disastrous public assistance policies.
We know how to reform welfare because we’ve done it before. In 1996, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans passed and pushed President Clinton to sign the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. In the wake of the bill’s passage, the liberal New York Times ran a breathless op-ed with the headline: “A Sad Day for Poor Children.” “This is not reform, it is punishment,” read the article. “The effect on cities will be devastating.”28 As usual, the New York Times could not have been more wrong. The results were as dramatic as they were hopeful: welfare caseloads went down 60 percent, 2.8 million families transitioned from welfare to work, and 1.6 million kids climbed out of poverty.29
Welfare to Work
The secret to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act’s success was that it tied welfare to work. To get your check, you had to prove that you were enrolled in job-training or trying to find work. But here’s the rub: the 1996 Welfare Reform Act only dealt with one program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), not the other seventy-six welfare programs which, today, cost taxpayers more than $900 billion annually.30 We need to take a page from the 1996 reform and do the same for other welfare programs. Benefits should have strings attached to them. After all, if it’s our money recipients are getting, we the people should have a say in how it’s spent.
The way forward is to do what we did with AFDC and attach welfare benefits to work. The Welfare Reform Act of 2011—proposed by Republican Congressmen Jim Jordan of Ohio, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Scott Garrett of New Jersey—does just that.31 Their bill, if enacted, would make sure that welfare programs would serve only those who truly need them, place a cap on welfare expenditures to prevent bureaucrats from endlessly expanding the programs, give more authority to the states over welfare spending, prevent federal funding of abortions through welfare programs, and enforce work requirements, among other reforms.32 It’s a serious plan that deserves to be passed and signed into law.
Of course, just as with the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, liberals will cry, kick, scream, and throw temper tantrums. But let them. It’s far more important that we help poor people to become independent, self-sufficient individuals who gain the benefits of work. Let’s get it done.
Next, I believe that the state of Florida made a smart move when in 2011 it became the only state to require drug testing of all recipients of the welfare program Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). As Florida Governor Rick Scott said, “While there are certainly legitimate needs for public assistance, it is unfair for Florida taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction. This new law will encourage personal accountability and will help to prevent the misuse of tax dollars.”33 The governor is right. It’s common sense. By the way, Rick Scott is doing a great job and not getting the credit he deserves.
Look, millions of employees have to get drug tested for their job
s. Do they make a big stink about it? No. It’s only smart. But leave it to the know-nothings at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to whine and cry about a requirement that millions of hard-working taxpayers go through year in and year out. “The wasteful program created by this law subjects Floridians who are impacted by the economic downturn, as well as their families, to a humiliating search of their urine and body fluids,” said a foolish Howard Simon, executive director of ACLU Florida.34 Humiliating? Excuse me? How is it “humiliating” to make sure that taxpayers aren’t funding a drug addict’s next hit? And how is it “humiliating” to take a drug screen that millions of working people take with no problem? It’s not. It’s just one more example of liberals’ attempting to erode personal responsibility and waste taxpayers’ money.
The bill requires that TANF recipients take and pass a drug test. If it’s a two-parent household, both individuals get tested. Anyone who tests positive for drugs is ineligible for benefits for a year. If they fail it a second time they are ineligible for three years. Recipients cover the cost of the screening, which they later recoup through benefits.35 If parents fail the drug test, benefits for children can be awarded to a third-party recipient acting as a guardian provided he or she passes a drug test.36
This common sense approach should be a no-brainer. It’s insane to ask taxpayers to foot the bill for some junkie’s drug habit when America is already $15 trillion in the hole and many Americans are fighting to survive in the Obama economy. Bottom line: you do drugs, no welfare check. End of story.
Finally, it’s time to get tough on those who cheat and defraud taxpayers. The Obama-fueled welfare “crime wave” must end fast. Otherwise, it will further spread the mindset that says, “Who cares if I cheat the system, it’s not my money. I deserve free stuff.” That means punishing violators, not turning a blind eye like the Obama administration has done. And that includes punishing corrupt bureaucrats who run scams and leave taxpayers holding the bill. Also, no more millionaires getting welfare checks. That’s outrageous and must be stopped immediately.