Food Stamps and the welfare state

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/us/29foodstamps.html

This is particularly disturbing. The authors focus on the exception in the food stamp program...the married, working, middle class. This may be a new demographic but the vast majority of recipients do not fit this mold and honestly the majority of recipients are the reason for the stigma the food stamp program has carried for many years...Mr. Dawson's comment about the lazy, unworking, unmarried, poor is all too true. Food stamps may have once been an assistance program but it is not now...it is rightly called an entitlement program and is well represented by the tale of the ant and the grasshopper. The problem is that if the ants defect to the grasshopper's way of subsistence there will come a time that resources cannot be shared because of scarcity and people will die. The government (the grasshopper) has for the last eleven decades slowly adopted the same mind set slowly and inexorably consuming more than we (the ants) produce and taking more and more from the people to feed progressively larger expenditures that do not return resources to the producers. There is a point in the future when this trend will either have to be reversed or the system will collapse.

If we look to history for a precedent the great depression is a great example of the model we are now playing out. Unemployment and dept are skyrocketing and the dollar is near collapse, all because of failed regulation and rapidly expanding government programs and primarily because of the defection of an ever increasing minority of ants to the way of the grasshopper; resources are becoming stretched because there is less being produced than is being consumed and values of real goods are decreasing because there is no demand as driven by inflation which ties back to regulation. In the 1990's during the retraction of entitlement programs there was contraction of the national deficit in correlation to this retraction. This was driven by congress, not President Clinton, who later promoted the expansion of the food stamp and welfare programs that reversed the earlier retraction and once again expanded the national deficit. During the 1940's and 50's there was an unprecedented expansion of entrepreneurship, manufacturing and production, and an accompanying expansion of wealth in the middle class that established an enormous reservoir of capital upon which the nation financed tremendous expansions of the national infrastructure and the federal government.