Trump's Welfare Reduction Plans

President Trump's new reduction in welfare programs, announced in the news today (May 23, 2017), might turn out to be the best incentive in the past fifty years to encourage people to start to work for a living again.

In physics, every action usually induces a reaction. Satisfying the altruistic instincts of social workers can become an albatross around the necks of other citizens--such as the business owners on Lubbock’s 34th Street (in the news today).  34^th Street merchants told us that the homeless are no longer just panhandling there; they are demanding handouts. Some merchants interviewed by local TV reporters claim the indigents are even breaking into the businesses. Maybe they figure they are just as entitled to a free ride as those at Lubbock’s Grace Campus, a free housing community for the homeless. In Depression days, we would have called these, collectively, a “poor house.”  Unlike the erstwhile Depression era poor houses, this one occupies a large block adjacent to an industrial area and comprises a large number of wooden mini-houses. Originally, the social workers housed these occupants in box-like tents.

In the 1930s, FDR, under a federal program called FERA, essentially re-named the former poor farms to the more politically correct, “resettlement communities.” The Government pumped a lot more money into them and assigned a federal bureaucrat called, a Home Economist, to oversee the local leader, called a Community Manager. See: 

https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/ropesville-resettlement-community-ropesville-tx/

The original “community house” of the Ropesville, TX Resettlement Community has been moved a short distance, but it is still in Ropesville, near the original, Resettlement Community. A plaque commemorates it as one of FDR’s New Deal Programs. It sits adjacent to the large, once Government-owned, Poor Farm that juts deep into the center of the small town of Ropesville, TX.

Erskine Caldwell was one of the few Depression Era novelists bold enough to highlight the fears that the once proud farmers had of “ending up on the poor farm." They feared living with what they considered deadbeats abusing the welfare system in Government housing. Some literally preferred death to going to the poor farm, as in Caldwell’s "Tobacco Road."  The novel is much better and more realistic than the movie.

Nowadays, major publications, such as the NYT, snub novels that update welfare abuse, but make “best sellers” of authors that stick to the politically correct viewpoint of glorifying social workers and depicting all recipients as "unfortunate."These publications are in bed with the liberals who are not about to admit the failure of most of our mushrooming social welfare programs since WWII.  More than half of federal spending now goes to welfare, or so-called “safety net” programs that include Social Security (initiated during the FDR Administration) and its concomitant welfare programs.

Thanks to the advent of POD publishing, and such politically incorrect novels as my own “Undercover Hobo,” the public can now share a few esoteric, updated glimpses into the enormity of current welfare abuse. You might say I was “blessed” (from a writer’s viewpoint) with several years as a border guard checking boxcars, beating the bushes of hobo jungles, dislodging illegal aliens from unimaginable nooks, crannies and crevasses--and, most importantly, interacting with real hobos. I learned that accident-appearing, decapitations are often cover-ups for murders. I worked mostly nights so I could attend daytime college classes and study creative writing.

There will always be homeless people. Most, however, are homeless by choice, occasionally facilitated by social welfare programs. Most free spirits do not grow roots in the rescue missions of the larger cities and become “home guards” (permanent party) in the Skid Row rescue missions. Many are simply afflicted with wanderlust and a strong desire to survive by their own instincts. To be sure, there are misanthropes, like members of the FTRA, but they include wanderers who are occasionally willing to exploit the symbiotic relationship between social workers and the drifters (symbiotic, because these types accept handouts and create jobs for social workers). One of my characters, “Sandhouse,” introduced in Chapter 3 of “Undercover Hobo,” illustrates this phenomenon. These types will tolerate social compassion for only a short time; then they resume roaming. 

In the Great Depression, city and county governments shared the cost of poor houses and poor farms with the federal government.  Dodging the local costs of welfare spawned the practice of officers from poorer counties transporting indigent transients to adjacent county lines, surreptitiously dropping them off, and telling them how to reach the poor farms, or poor houses, of the neighboring counties.

You must have lived for a long time to note the changing attitudes toward accepting welfare in America. When Erskine Caldwell wrote Tobacco Road, there was a strong indignity attached to welfare for most people. He wrote the book in 1932, the year FDR ousted Hoover after one term, when people called poor farms what they were; when “the poor” was a compound noun. Most of the people get that way nowadays through indolence and lack of ambition; not by some catastrophic event, like the Great Depression.  The importation of poverty from third world countries, outside legal channels, has expedited America’s drift to socialism, and it is approaching completion.  The election of Hilllary would have expedited it, but the attitudes are still there and the march toward socialism and its attached chains, is inexorable.