For the Common Welfare

Consider how organized crime surfaced in this country. Employers refused to hire Irish or Italian immigrants. As a result, many Irish- and Italian-Americans formed gangs. Plenty of hungry people would. So what could we reasonably expect as the consequences of ditching support systems such as welfare?

Many people, most of them well-meaning Republicans, believe that anyone anywhere at any time can find work so long as he or she looks for it. Fifteen years ago, I would’ve stood closer to agreement with these Republicans. However, in today’s world, I see no sanity in the assumption that by removing welfare altogether, everyone currently using the system will simply go out, find a job, and live a productive life.

Many people take advantage of welfare, but many people actually need that systems to survive. If you're on welfare, you either want a job and can't find one (we’ll call this Situation A), or you're unwilling to find one (Situation B). Remove welfare from either of these situations, and the people within them discovers themselves without a source of, let's say, food.

A rumbling stomach makes for a poor conscience. If you find that hard to believe, you’ve never enjoyed honest-to-God hunger. Will the threat of prison prevent criminal activity? No. The threat of prison food holds little weight against someone who’s starving. The threat of a prison cell holds little terror to an evicted person who’s standing in the rain.

While a person in Situation A might’ve gone to college or started a business, they cannot do either once their support system vanishes. True, many people on these systems fall into Situation B, but it’s still better for us all, in the long run, to support them.

Calm down. Hear me out.

If someone becomes desperate for money in an economy that offers few jobs, that person will likely consider crime an option. While such criminal activity provides immediate, bad news for its victims, the situation for the country and its tax-payers sinks to even worse levels after the “criminal’s” apprehension.

It cost far more to imprison a person than to send him or her a welfare check. I know how disheartening, how defeatist, that sounds, but the math doesn’t lie (here’s something else to consider: in most cases, it would prove cheaper to send a person to college than to imprison her).

By removing “entitlement programs,” we risk turning many lazy people, and down-on-their-luck-but-honest-hard-working-people, into criminals. We'll shell out larger sums of money to imprison these people than to just let them continue their existences on welfare.

If we follow the Republicans' line of thinking, we would save money by cutting entitlement programs, but we would create more criminals and spend more money policing and imprisoning them. That equation isn’t even taking into account the consequences of the actual crimes, themselves.

Actually, there's another reason why Republican policies would likely raise crime rates. Remember those “experts” who predicted a massive rise in crime by the early 90s? That increase didn't happen. You know what happened sixteen years before '89? Roe vs. Wade. With that piece of legislation, poor people, who, statistically, would have been more likely to give birth to future criminals (statistically. statistically!) could have abortions. So, if the Republicans ever manage to overturn Roe vs. Wade, it stands to reason that . . .

If the government loosens environmental restrictions on manufacturing corporations (another common, Republican goal), we can assume that said corporations will return to their previous lifestyles of building factories that fail to adhere to those now nonexistent restrictions. Maybe that sounds cynical, but consider the environmental destruction caused in third-world countries, where manufacturing corporations already stand safely out of said restrictions’ reaches.

Such pollution frequently destroys crops and drinking water, resulting in a greater number of hungry people in nations prone to civil violence. That spells political unrest, civil war. Which political party proves more likely to “send in the troops” when civil war erupts in a foreign land? The Republicans, even though war proves monstrously expensive.

It's cheaper to keep the entitlement programs. Let’s use the extra cash to build greater upward mobility through education. Most people want to walk proud and contribute. Many just don't believe, for a variety of reasons, that they can. We need to change that point of view. Fix the sickness, not the symptoms.

This brings us to the subject of domestic jobs. I’ll take another cheap shot at the Republicans here and remind you that they are the party that believes in rewarding corporations, via tax credits, for shipping jobs overseas. Furthermore, the Republicans blocked the Democrats’ “insourcing bill,” which would have provided the opposite effect and helped create jobs here in America.

Republicans blame Obama and his fellow Democrats for our nation’s lack of employment, but we swam in available jobs during Clinton’s lucrative terms. Our current troubles started under Walker Bush’s watch. Yes, we have Obama now, but a Republican legislative branch refuses to cooperate with him, openly preventing Obama from accomplishing anything (“Our goal is to make him a one-term president”).

You could argue (I do) that when Obama first took office, he had a democratic majority, with which he failed to take full advantage. Perhaps Obama wanted to play nice and work with Republicans. (He possesses a habit of surrounding himself with those who don't always agree with him. Lincoln did much the same.)

Clinton placed our country in a fruitful position. Walker Bush reversed that. Obama inherited the aftermath, and the Republicans refuse collaboration in rectifying the mess.

Unemployment leads to increased crime, but whose actions created that unemployment? Whose actions prevent an economic recovery? Perhaps Obama's policies are terrible, but we haven't had much opportunity to discover that on account of Washington infighting. Electing Republicans only rewards them for behaving in such reckless fashion.