A Nation of Moochers

by Sykes, Charles J.

  The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has estimated that more than one out of every five dollars given to “victims” of Katrina might have been improperly distributed. Post-Katrina stories of waste and fraud are legion: the $10 million paid out to more than a thousand prison inmates for “rental and disaster-relief assistance”; the half billion dollars worth of mobile homes that sat empty because of bureaucratic incompetence; the fiasco of the $2,000 debit cards that were used to buy diamond engagement rings, pornographic movies, football tickets, Caribbean cruises, a $450 tattoo, bottles of champagne at Hooters, and even $300 worth of Girls Gone Wild videos. The debit cards were used to make bail, pay outstanding parking fines, buy a sex change operation, and retain a divorce lawyer. Not surprisingly, many of the debit cards were issued to applicants using duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, false addresses, and fictitious names.2

  A program to provide free hotel rooms run by the Red Cross and paid for by FEMA resulted in what investigators later called “extraordinary abuse and waste.” With good intentions exceeding caution or even basic prudence, the Red Cross didn’t bother to keep track of hundreds of thousands of recipients. The GAO later found that because they asked only for zip codes—and no other documentation—the government cut rental assistance checks to people who were also getting free hotel rooms.3

  Still, this only scratched the surface. Evacuees were put up in $438-per-night hotel rooms in New York and $375-per-night condos in Panama City, Florida, courtesy of the taxpayer. When the bills came due, taxpayers shelled out more than $62 million for hotel rooms at an average cost of $2,400 a month. Critics pointed out that this was at least three times what a two-bedroom apartment would have cost. Even this paled next to the $249 million paid out for 8,136 cruise-ship cabins to house hurricane victims for six months. Department of Homeland Security inspector general Richard L. Skinner estimated the cost of the luxury cabins to taxpayers at $5,100 a month per passenger.4

  The tsunami of free cash also turned the heads of government employees, who did not pass up the opportunity to snag some of the bulging stash of OPM for themselves. Before officials realized this was a colossally bad idea, bureaucrats had run up millions of dollars of charges, including $150,000 worth of Jockey underwear. In most cases the government employees paid retail, apparently unaware of the concept of buying in bulk or wholesale, as most consumers using their own money would have done.5

  Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco also chose the occasion to spend $564,000 to remodel her staff’s office. As Citizens Against Government Waste reported: “The newly refurbished office space on the sixth floor of the State Capitol includes hookups and mounts for two flat screen televisions, Swedish granite countertops, walnut paneling and frosted laminated glass. The floor, which will not be accessible to the public, was redesigned to add three new offices, a conference room and file storage areas.”6

  Learned Helplessness

  But this is not a book about waste or fraud or even greedy politicians. It is about mooching; and the aftermath of Katrina is relevant here primarily as a microcosm of the addictive power of dependency, which is manifested in the learned helplessness of dependency.

  “Learned helplessness” is a psychological term that describes someone who gives up striving because their actions have no effect on their environment or because they have been led to believe they have no control over circumstances or events. The term, developed by psychologist Martin Seligman, applies to both animals and humans who learn that effort is futile and therefore behave in a passive or helpless manner.

  But the same concept can be borrowed to describe the sense of futility engendered by the dependency culture. The Assumption of Incompetence that pervades the welfare culture leads ineluctably to the Learned Helplessness of Dependency.

  When victims are responsible for nothing, then nothing they can do will appreciably change or improve their lives. That is up to someone else, someone who pays for their housing, food, and transportation, and to whom they look to solve their problems and plan for their future. The tragedy of the cycle of poverty is that it passes this helplessness of dependency from generation to generation.

  In the face of adversity, people accustomed to the lack of responsibility or independence are unlikely to respond either by taking control of the situation or by taking the initiative to extricate themselves or others from it. More likely, they will wait on others to act.

  This, of course, was a scene repeated again and again in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Along with bureaucratic incompetence and political ineptness, the aftermath of the disaster also exposed the soft underbelly of the learned helplessness begotten by decades of dependency.

  After All These Years …

  Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005; but nearly a year and a half later, The New York Times was reporting that “life is still precarious and unpredictable for many evacuees, especially those who have depended on the government for a modicum of stability.” A key measure of that dependency: More than seventeen months after the disaster, 102,000 families were still living in FEMA trailers and “an additional 33,000 [were] living in apartments paid for by FEMA.”7

  Throughout 2006 and beyond, there were stories of Katrina evacuees who had settled into their subsidized digs, reluctant to make any move. In May 2006, New York magazine profiled “victim” Theon Johnson, who had spent the winter after Katrina as a guest of the federal taxpayer at the JFK Holiday Inn in New York. As the magazine noted, most evacuees had gotten on with their lives, but because of the city’s generous “squatters law,” a judge’s order was required to evict the remaining evacuees like Johnson.8

  Johnson, forty-nine, had settled easily into his dependency. According to the account, he was usually up all night, but occasionally he would go outside and beg for change. “When Johnson’s caseworker, Sharon, comes around,” the magazine reported, “she gives him some bus passes and maybe a few bucks, but she’s getting frustrated. ‘They sit around on their butts watching TV. There’s only but so much I can do if they’re not willing to help themselves.’”

  Johnson was given $9,000 in housing aid by FEMA, but “he spent it all on booze, cigarettes, some clothes, and food—partying, mostly.” So, naturally, he waited around for the government to give him more. “I spent my money just the way I wanted, and I think [FEMA] should send me some more,” he told the magazine. But that trough was closed to Johnson. His FEMA caseworkers offered to buy him a free ticket home to New Orleans, but he turned it down, instead choosing to wait until the Holiday Inn offered him a “buyout” deal, which he was hoping would be about $1,200.

  A few months earlier, self-appointed “representatives of Hurricane Katrina evacuees” holed up in New York hotels demanded that the hotel’s management pay families $2,500 in return for leaving.9 What began as a public service had morphed into a shakedown that took various forms over the next few years.

  In mid-2010, the Associated Press profiled residents of state-owned cottages who complained they were under pressure to move out of the free homes they had lived in since Katrina left them homeless—five years earlier. Even half a decade after the disaster, taxpayers were still paying for eight hundred state-owned cottages, in addition to two hundred federally supplied FEMA trailers.

  One resident, Pete Yarborough, had spent years living in a four-hundred-square-foot cottage that sat on cinder blocks, but he was one of the squatters who refused to buy the tiny homes for as little as $351 and move them to higher ground.10

  In fairness, Yarborough said he was put out of work by the BP oil spill in mid-2010 and complained that he was having a hard time paying his car, light, and phone bills. “Everything,” he explained, “is past due.” This, of course, was meant to induce sympathy. But it is worth asking: Was he unemployed for the entire five years since Katrina? According to the story, he had been hauling seafood until the BP spill, which suggests he was gainfully employed while living in the free cottage and that he stayed in the cott
age as a matter of choice rather than move on with his life. And why not? For five years he lived rent free with no incentive for him to seek out better accommodations that would have required him to contribute. Far easier to stay put.

  Liberal critics were quick to see the Katrina disaster as an indictment of the gap between haves and have nots and a black mark on small-government conservatism. Intoned the late senator Edward Kennedy: “What the American people have seen is this incredible disparity in which those people who had cars and money got out, and those people who were impoverished died.”

  But isn’t it more appropriate to see Katrina as the fallout from a culture that had for decades encouraged dependency, while failing to eradicate poverty? Despite billions of dollars spent on antipoverty programs, a quarter of New Orleans residents lived in poverty, many of them in public housing even before the disaster. Dependency was already a way of life long before Katrina. As The Wall Street Journal’s Brendan Miniter said in the days after the flood: “These are the people who were left behind in the flood and who have long been left behind by failing schools, lack of economic opportunity, and crime well above the national average.”11 Those who could do so on their own had gotten away before the flooding. But, Miniter wrote, “those who depended on the government (and public transportation) were left for days to the mercy of armed thugs at the Superdome and Convention Center.”

  Even as the political class was rushing to assemble new programs, Miniter saw the disaster as a symbol of the welfare state: “Use the promise of food, shelter and other necessities to lure most of the poor to a few central points and then leave them stranded and nearly helpless.”

  Many of them were still stranded five years later.

  Want → Need → Right

  (Suitable for laminating and keeping in your wallet.)

  While the principle applies equally to housing, health care, cell phones, new windows, child care, and hybrids, the explosion of subsidized eats perhaps best illustrates the transformation of wants into needs and then into obligations in a moocher society.

  Here’s how it works:

  I want you to buy me lunch.

  Therefore, I need lunch.

  If I need something, I have a right to it.

  You therefore have an obligation to pay for my lunch, food stamps, and free tater tots for my kid.

  All of these steps can be simplified thus:

  Want → need → right → obligation (food stamps, mortgage bailout, health care, free cell phones, etc.)

  I can also convince you that you also have a right to lunch, and we can join together to make someone else pay to feed us, preferably someone who is 1) unpopular, 2) far away, 3) not yet born.

  My appeal is also enhanced if I can insert a claim of victimization in my bid for sympathy and free hamburgers. Victims are, by definition, innocent, while their status of victimization also implies guilt on the part of others. It works this way:

  Want → victim card (innocent and not responsible) → need → entitled as a matter of right → your guilt → obligation to pay → freebie

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  FEED ME

  * * *

  We start them young and at the breakfast table. So many children now eat on the public dime, either at school or through food stamps, that dependence on government for food has become as much a rite of passage as puberty or acne. The habit of dependency is inculcated early.

  In a move described as “locally unprecedented” by The Philadelphia Inquirer, that city’s school district announced that henceforth the number of children eating breakfast at school would be a factor in evaluating the job performance of principals.1 No longer would principals be judged solely on the basis of reading and math scores, disciplinary control, graduation rates, or even budget management—they now also must ensure that as many children as possible eat free breakfasts at school rather than at home.

  Few forms of dependency have been pushed as aggressively or celebrated as enthusiastically as the free meal, especially in schools, where states and districts across the country have embarked on a free-food-for-all campaign.

  In Pueblo, Colorado, for instance, the schools offer free breakfast to every child regardless of need or family income “so no one is embarrassed to be eating it.” USA Today celebrated the rise of the universal freebie in a story headlined: “Breakfast in Class: Fight Against Kids’ Hunger Starts at School.”2 Noto bene: According to the newspaper, the fight against hunger doesn’t start at home with mothers and fathers, or even with children who can pour their own bowls of cereal or butter their own toast … but at school. “Like it or not,” reported USA Today, “making sure children get fed has become central to schools’ mission.”

  So zealous are the Pueblo schools to push the taxpayer-funded breakfasts that at Centennial High School Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, doughnuts, burritos, and juice are served in classrooms, thus eliminating any possible inconvenience along with the stigma. The push is already on in schools across the country to emulate the eat-at-school programs, paid for by federal taxpayers. Not surprisingly, a 2001 pilot program at seventy-nine schools found that offering free breakfast to every child actually increased participation; serving it in class boosted participation to 65 percent. Explained USA Today: “Feeding free breakfast to students who can afford to pay avoids the stigma for students who can’t but don’t want everyone to know. Serving breakfast in class means kids don’t have to get there early to be fed.… Bus schedules, parents’ work schedules, and, for high school students, the desire to sleep as late as possible make getting to school early for breakfast difficult.”3 (Emphasis added.)

  In Case You Hadn’t Noticed, the Kids Are Fat

  As urgent as the problem of letting teenagers sleep late may be, there are other more awkward issues with the crusade for free breakfasts: It is a dependency program in search of a problem. The push for more meals at schools comes at a time when it is increasingly obvious that the real problem with America’s youth is not, in fact, their lack of food. If America’s children were actually in the throes of famine or the landscape were littered with victims of deprivation, even an expensive program might be justified. In fact, however, there is scant evidence that young people are experiencing anything like an epidemic of hunger.

  Indeed, the growing epidemic of childhood obesity poses a real problem for the Hunger Lobby: While the scrawny, undernourished child with large, pleading eyes is compelling, the child with multiple chins elicits a different reaction—generally not a desire to buy him a free meal. A generation of youngsters with generous posteriors requires a whole new terminology.

  The Hunger Lobby’s response? A new euphemism: The kids may not be hungry or even undernourished; instead, they are “food insecure.”

  “Food insecurity” is useful for advocates in that it is both alarming and nebulous. It is worrisome enough to inspire concern for deprived urchins, but elastic enough to cover children who are not by any reasonable measure either actually hungry or underfed—who might, in fact, be quite fat.

  Lexuses and Free Breakfast

  In Philadelphia, every student—all 165,000—is eligible for free, taxpayer-funded breakfasts, regardless of their income. For reasons that baffled and frustrated officials, only 54,000 students actually took advantage of the district’s generosity—thus the new pressure on principals to make sure that children do not eat at home with their parents.

  Pennsylvania officials, in fact, were so eager to increase participation in the free breakfasts that they declared that if students ate in their first class period, it would be counted as “instructional time,” as long as a teacher was present.

  Of course, Philadelphia is a high-poverty area, and advocates can claim that many of the children would otherwise go hungry if not fed by the public schools. But how to explain Mequon-Thiensville, Wisconsin?

  The affluent Milwaukee suburb was named the winner of the “Wisconsin School Breakfast Challenge” by the state’s Department of
Public Instruction for increasing in-school breakfast participation by 110 percent over the 2007–08 school year. “A value meal option was also marketed,” the state education department explained, “to attract more students to take a reimbursable meal.”4

  Mequon-Thiensville posted the largest one-year growth in in-school breakfast of any large district, despite the fact that the community had a median family income of more than $107,000 (more than twice the state and national averages). The mean value of a house in Mequon-Thiensville in 2010 was $471,353, but heaven forbid schoolchildren would partake of their morning meals at any of those homes.

  Parents who routinely sign up their children for hockey, tennis, and cello lessons; provide them with smartphones, Internet access, and Xbox 360s; drive them to school in late-model Lexus SUVs; or give their 16-years-olds new cars to drive themselves—apparently cannot be expected to toss an Eggo into the toaster in the morning. On the contrary, they are actively discouraged from doing so as a matter of public policy.

  The contest won by the Mequon-Thiensville schools was part of a much larger effort by the state education bureaucracy to increase school breakfasts throughout Wisconsin by 50 percent. By 2010, 1,690 schools served breakfast (still short of the 2,598 serving lunch) and state officials boasted that they served more than 125,000 school breakfasts each day—with 74 percent of the students eligible for free or reduced-price meals.

  Zealous education officials even held workshops at Ramada Inns to “show attendees new ways to attract students to their breakfast programs.”