Newt’s Welfare: Think of It as a Homeless Drill : GOP would kick the poor off the dole after two years. Where will they go? Guess.
Looking over the Republican welfare plan, I finally understood where I went wrong. It was back when I was a tiny fetus swimming around somewhere in the first trimester. I should have kicked real hard and put it to my mother straight: “Get a job or have an abortion; either way, show some personal responsibility.”
I didn’t do that, and as a result, I spent the first years of my childhood in the Bronx being deformed by welfare. My mother never understood what a burden this welfare put on us. She thought it was a good thing the heat stayed on and we ate regular until she could get a job sewing sweaters again.
My mother was a registered alien, so under Newt’s welfare plan she wouldn’t have been eligible for aid. Mom came through, though, and after a couple of years on the dole she put in 25 more years in a sweatshop and always paid her taxes, as a good alien should.
Like Newt’s and Bill’s family backgrounds, mine was also not exactly Ozzie and Harriet. My father was a great guy but he had another family and divorces were difficult and expensive in Catholic New York. He also got laid off the day I was born. When he got his job back four years later, he went 15 years without missing a day of work until he suffered a stroke at his machine, and then the New York Knitting Mills gave him a posthumous award. My father provided as best he could for two families and yet helped raise me better than any orphanage could.
I know the Republicans wouldn’t have wanted my mother to get an abortion, because they would have believed that her fetus was sacred, even though she was unwed. Sure, they liked me as a fetus, but the second I popped out they labeled me illegitimate.
I was still in diapers and already made to feel like I’d committed a crime. The fact that I’ve never been indicted and have paid taxes ever since I was 12 and joined the private sector delivering orders for Mairowitz’s grocery store doesn’t mean a thing, because the Republican Heritage Foundation has studies proving that we illegitimates cause all the crime.
Of course I was different. I was white. I knew how to use welfare as a springboard to a job. When I was 16, I hitched down to Camden, N.J., in the summer and got a union job making real money. I was in Camden a few years ago--it has the highest welfare rate in the country and you don’t see those black kids there making real money getting union jobs at the Campbell Soup factory, or at GE or the shipyards; all you hear is the lame excuse that those places are all closed down.
Tough love, baby, you picked the wrong time to be a fetus and you can’t expect the federal government to bail you out.
Like Newt says, the Federalist papers make clear this is a republic, not a democracy, and it’s every fetus for itself. That’s why the Republicans plan to eliminate aid for severely disabled kids. Sink or swim.
Another group of ex-fetuses that better watch out are the ones who pick teen-age mothers. After the Republican revolution, they get nada . Certainly not birth control or abortion counseling. Like Republican welfare guru Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. of Florida told the National Chamber of Commerce, “It is time for society to send a signal to our teen-agers: Do not sleep with someone and expect the taxpayers to bail you out if you have a child.” And that goes for your baby, too.
It all gets back to my point about knowing where to be born. The right mother is important. But neighborhood, class, race and wealth ought not to be overlooked.
It’s also going to be very important to be born poor only in upward swings of the business cycle. Entitlement is out, so if you get a recession and the unemployment and welfare rolls go up, it’s every poor kid for himself. Also, the soup pot is going to be a lot smaller. The Republicans are planning to cut welfare by $40 billion over the next five years by sending block grants to the states, which they can use for other purposes. The states will no longer be required to provide a 50% match.
Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic. Perhaps the Republicans will create jobs by lowering the minimum wage. But jobs or no jobs, the Republican plan kicks the poor off welfare after two years. Where will they go? Don’t get hung up on second-wave questions.
Think of the new welfare system as a two-year training camp for the future homeless. Yes, even the kids; they’ll love it. Newt Inc. will package it as “Virtual Poverty--the Arcade Game.” And if they don’t like it? Tough love--they should have kicked harder in the womb. They had their chance.
