Theft at the Public Till
kitchens. Name it. Nationwide, poverty is big business-as long as you are po- litically connected. The consequence to poor people of this ever-expanding poverty industry has been that over the past two decades, the purchasing power of welfare benefits has fallen in every state in the country, in spite of the fact that aggregate spending on most other social programs has soared. It doesn’t take too much intelligence to figure out the idiocy of paying thousands of dollars a month to “shelter” a homeless family instead of pay- ing for a real apartment. Incompetence is a heavy contender with greed as prime motivator of the bureaucracy. Any time there’s money to be had, every manner of opportunist crawls out for a piece. Various layers of government blame one another. Taxpayers are bilked and poor people are sacrificed as hundreds of millions of dollars pour into the sinkhole of the social welfare establishment. Poor people are not the beneficiaries. They aren’t even in on the deal. As the public’s recognition of the misery of poor people increased, so did the cacophony of private interests competing for government contracts, foundation grants, donations by individuals and corporations, and tax ad- vantages for the donations to correct their version of the problem. The only people who did not cash in, the only ones absent from the debate in any public way, as ever, were poor. As the agencies that did cash in grow and reinvented themselves, it became apparent that they were in an inherent conflict of interest with poor people. Welfare mothers, for instance, wanted an adequate guaranteed income, which would have rendered many of the ac- tivities of the social welfare professionals meaningless. The agencies wanted a guaranteed income, too: for themselves. With the money and power to lobby effectively, they got it. Despite the fiscal success of the Clinton welfare reforms. The Social Welfare “mindset” as we know it cannot be fixed. That mindset pervades throughout much of government. Tinkering with it for decades has accom- plished little of value. Bureaucracies within bureaucracies have bloomed, mutations of a polluted society. Too many contradictory interests compete at the public trough in the name of poor-people. Entrenched charities dwarf any efforts at self-determination and actively muzzle the political expression
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