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THE DEMOCRATIC DIALOG ODE TO THE WELFARE STATE a 1949 poem Father, Must I go to work? No, my lucky son. We’re living now on East Street. On dough from Washington. We’ve left it up to Uncle Sam So don’t get exercised. Nobody has to give a damn – We’ve all been subsidized. But if Sam treats us all so well And feeds us milk and honey, Please, daddy tell me what the hell He’s going to use for money. Don’t worry, bub, there’s not a hitch In this here noble plan – He simply soaks the filthy rich And...

Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming) needs to get his facts straight about social security. You pay 6.5% as an employee, Your employer pays 6.5%. You pay 1.5% to Medicare, Total 14.5%. If you are self-employed you must pay the 14.5% yourself. How could he say, because senior citizens expect their social security and medicare benefits when they retire, they are greedy? “Alan Simpson, Senator from Wyoming, Co-Chair of Obama’s deficit commission, calls senior citizens the Greediest Generation as he compared “Social Security” to a Milk Cow with 310 million teats.”

There's only one "program" that will make a difference. PBS NewsHour aired a story last year about Milwaukee, saying many residents call the city "the worst place to be a black man in America." It talked about last year's riots in the city after a cop shot a black man. One black Milwaukee resident explained that this is "what happens when you inflict poverty" on poor black residents. "Inflict poverty"? In the 50 years following President Lyndon Johnson's launch of the "war on poverty" in 1964, government spent over $22 trillion on welfare and various anti-poverty programs. The problem in...

A plan by President Donald Trump to ban immigrants who have only been living in the U.S. for less than five years from receiving welfare services has widespread support. In a new Rasmussen poll, 62 percent of likely voters said they support barring new immigrants to the U.S. from receiving welfare benefits for at least five years, as Trump recently proposed during a speech to supporters. Middle-class Americans making $30,000 to $50,000 a year are the most likely to support the ban on welfare for immigrants, with 72 percent in favor. Those who describe themselves as “moderates” are also on-board...

Ronald Reagan often said that he did not leave the Democratic party, the party left him. That statement is usually considered to be mere political fluff, a ruse to make himself politically palatable to the voters who revered FDR and the New Deal. Yet, that view is both condescending and wrong. A close reading of Reagan’s thought shows that he was always more concerned with what government sought to do than the fact that government was used to do it. Reagan’s preferences always matched those of working-class Americans. Like him, these men and women voted for the Republican Dwight Eisenhower...

Eric Grant is a disabled Air Force vet. The fighting in Iraq - mortar shelling, breathing the smoke from burn pits - left him with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and post traumatic stress disorder. Food stamps help him and his family get through some rough times. But he’s among many Georgians who’ve been able to drop that government assistance. Georgia is seeing a huge decrease in the number of people receiving food stamps, due in large part to the improving economy. But there’s also a brewing national debate on whether some people still on food stamps are taking advantage...

President Donald Trump proposed Wednesday night reforming the welfare system by putting into law a statute that has been the law of the land since 1996. "I believe the time has come for new immigration rules which say those seeking admission into our country must be able to support themselves financially and should not use welfare for a period of at least five years," Trump said to raucous applause from the roughly 6,000 supporters who flocked to his Iowa rally. clip With a few exceptions, new immigrants already cannot access welfare programs during their first five years in the US,...

Foreigners with non-immigrant visas and those who don't have legal status are generally prohibited from those benefits altogether. Trump's proposal would also prevent the admission of people who are likely to become so-called "public charges" within five years of their arrival. The concept of "public charge" has been part of U.S. immigration law for over a century. It allows the government to bar entry to individuals who are likely to seek public assistance. Trump is expected to propose toughening up the rules regarding “public charge” and ensuring that they are enforced.

CEOs receive $38 million to $70 million per year and more, plus benefits. (We don’t know, of course, what President Trump “earns.”) Then, these CEOs fire thousands of their employees. Companies are closing. People continue losing jobs. Others remain unemployed. Nearly one out of four children in the U.S. are homeless and/or hungry. This extreme wealth is truly obscene. How many cars, houses, boats and $50,000 coats do the 1 percent need to maintain their status and rip off everyone else, as Trump has? A mean-spirited Trump and Congress now propose a budget that would sharply reduce health care for...

San Diego Unified will kick off its Summer Fun Café lunch program with a barbecue for parents, guardians and children to eat for free at Skyline Hills Community Park on Wednesday. The barbecue is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and will include a community resource fair, activities for children, live music, free health screenings, a performance by the Fern Street Circus, fresh fruits and vegetables for families to take home, as well as prize drawings for children, according to a statement from SD Unified. The Summer Fun Café is an annual summer meal program partnered by the City...

Several people in Pennsylvania were charged with allegedly stealing a total of $287,000 worth of welfare benefits in April, with some of the benefits being used to buy heroin, according to Pennsylvania’s Office of the Inspector General. The Office of the Inspector General expects to recover a total of $287,659 from the charges filed, mostly from food stamp fraud, Lehigh Valley Live reported. The alleged fraudsters stole $187,241 in Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program benefits, $46,494 in subsidized day care, $37,052 in government-funded benefits such as Medicaid, $11,348 in monetary assistance, and $5,523 in the Low Income Energy Assistance Program.

The Alabama Department of Human Resources reports that since reinstating the work requirement for able-bodied recipients in 13 counties, the number of people requesting aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has declined by 85%. The steep decline in program participation was decried as "horrific" by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif). "The idea that any level of government would be permitted to resort to such an extortionate scheme is as clear a demonstration of the local government tyranny inspired by the illegitimate Bush Administration. Forcing a person to choose between two evils—work or starve—is not the America I...

Puerto Rico's governor announced that the U.S. territory has overwhelmingly chosen statehood in a nonbinding referendum Sunday held amid a deep economic crisis that has sparked an exodus of islanders to the U.S. mainland. Nearly half a million votes were cast for statehood, more than 7,600 for free association/independence and nearly 6,700 for the current territorial status, according to preliminary results. The participation rate was just 23 percent with roughly 2.26 million registered voters, leading opponents to question the validity of a vote that several parties had boycotted. Gov. Ricardo Rossello shows his ballot at the San Jose Academy during...

NEW YORK (AP) — A crackdown on illegal immigration under President Donald Trump has driven some poor people to take a drastic step: opt out of federal food assistance because they are fearful of deportation, activists and immigrants say. People who are not legal residents of the U.S. are not eligible to take part in what is formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But many poor families include a mix of non-legal residents and legal ones, such as children who have citizenship because they were born in the U.S. In those cases, it is often an adult...

From our file named "Duh." The Alabama Department of Human Resources says 13 counties that reinitiated a work requirement for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the food stamp program, saw an 85% drop in recipients. The counties had been exempt from the work requirement due to high levels of unemployment. But with the economy recovering, the state of Alabama restarted the work requirement on January 1 this year, which resulted in the massive drop in SNAP participants. ... Nationwide, there are about 44 million people receiving SNAP benefits at a cost of about $71 billion. The...

Operation Food Search is launching an expanded summer program this week, providing free meals to children under the age of 18 who would normally eat breakfast and lunch at school. Some of the meals will come from food truck-like vans. Starting Monday and continuing through Aug. 11, program leaders plan to distribute more than 100,000 meals to hungry children in St. Louis and St. Louis County, exceeding last year’s record. The summer program, now in its sixth year, has grown from providing 5,000 meals in 2012, Executive Director Sunny Schaefer said....

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high Oh your daddy’s rich and your ma is good-lookin’ So hush, little baby, don’t you cry. — Lyrics to “Summertime,” sung by Ella Fitzgerald Ella Fitzgerald knew a lot about the haves and have-nots. She grew up poor and at 17 had been homeless and hungry for a year before she was “discovered” at The Apollo in Harlem in 1934. Think of the millions of hungry children in rich America today who might never be “discovered” or are kept from realizing their talents. And for them...

A feature of Trump’s proposed federal budget that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton labeled “unimaginably cruel” is a requirement that able-bodied persons receiving food stamps do a small amount of work in exchange for the benefit. “Making people work in order to eat is slavery, pure and simple,” Clinton declared. “People shouldn’t be punished for being poor and hungry. The choice of whether to work or not is one that should freely made without economic duress.” Let’s face it,” she said, “for most of those on food stamps the work alternatives available are dead-end drudgery. No one dreams of...

Who better than a 33 year old multi-billionaire college dropout - who stole his multi-billion dollar anti-social network ideafrom various Harvard classmate - to tell us how to “modernize democracy?” All you need do is create a universal basic income (spun out of the gold threads in the air). And isn’t that just the kind of magical thinking we need? The utopian kind, that defies human nature and ignores history. Mark Zuckerface, Harvard Dufus LaureateFeel free to read the entire address, unremarkable in any way other than its naiveté and mediocrity.  Which leaves me wondering this about Mark Zuckerberg: if...

Initiate a discussion about welfare, and inevitably the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt pops up. Often times FDR comes up in the first sentence. Problem is, this simply is not historically accurate. It is true to say that FDR supercharged welfare, but anything else is fake history. Not only did welfare in America exist prior to FDR, but the first welfare program for citizens was repealed in 1929. The interesting story, however, is that it was not people who were first at being put on welfare by the federal government. That's what makes the issue of the first 48 welfare...