Welfare's ultimate destination

02.14.2014

The Congressional Budget Office didn't exactly say ObamaCare would cost the nation 2.5 million jobs.

What it did say is vindication of what conservatives have preached since Barry Goldwater stood in the pulpit 50 years ago: The more liberal the welfare state, the greater the disincentive to work and the more ruinous the impact upon a nation's work ethic.

According to the CBO, the ObamaCare subsidies will cause some to quit work, others to cut back on the hours they work, and others to hold off going to work, so as not to lose the benefits.

The cumulative impact will be equal to the loss of 2.5 million jobs by 2024.

The CBO has put a number to what everyone knows to be true: If people don't have to work to provide the needs of their daily lives, some will drop out and become permanent charges on the public purse.

The father of modern liberalism, FDR, never disputed this. As he warned in 1935, welfare is “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

But a related and larger question is raised by the CBO: If ObamaCare alone will cost the equivalent of 2.5 million lost jobs to the U.S. economy, what is the impact of our entire welfare state on the vitality and dynamism of the U.S. labor force?

Scores of millions of Americans today are less able to achieve self-sufficiency through work than were their grandparents.

And by providing for all the needs that the father used to provide for his family, the Great Society has helped make fathers superfluous. We have created a system where a teenage girl who becomes pregnant can have all her basic needs met by government.

This is a primary cause of the rise in illegitimacy in America from 6 percent of all births in 1963 to 41 percent today, and to 53 percent among Hispanics and 73 percent among blacks.

If the goal of the Great Society was to turn America's tax consumers into taxpayers, it has been a total failure. We have now a vast underclass of people who are dependent upon government for most or all of their basic needs, a class among whom many, if not most, have lost the ability to survive without government money, food and shelter.

Monday's New York Times revealed a relevant and startling fact: Only 8 percent of the cab and rental-car drivers in New York City are native-born Americans.

What is happening in America is that the vast cohort of working men and women, immigrants, illegal and legal, who have come in recent decades, 30 million to 40 million, have displaced the native-born.

But we may be coming to the end of the line. From Detroit to Greece to Puerto Rico, government's ability to expand the benefits of the welfare class by taxing the working and middle class is reaching its limit.

Taxpayers are rebelling, budgets are falling dangerously out of balance, and the welfare state is beginning to buckle under the load.

Perhaps T.S. Eliot was right: “This is how the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

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