A Nation of Moochers (8 page)
Read A Nation of Moochers Online
Authors: Charles J. Sykes
Most of those phones are distributed through a Mexican-owned company called TracFone. Since November 2008, the number of customers receiving free or subsidized wireless service has more than doubled to 1.4 million.
Advocates have quickly turned the perk into an entitlement. The spokesman for the leading company offering the subsidized phone says, “Having a telephone service, just in general, is not a privilege, it should be a right of each one.”
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Presumably this means that they are entitled to free text messages, call waiting, and caller ID as well.
Always More
This relative prosperity of America’s poor does not, however, slacken the drive to expand the welfare state or the left’s insistence that we must do more to spread the wealth to the underprivileged.
Since the War on Poverty began, taxpayers have spent $15.9 trillion on various forms of mean-tested welfare, but the push for more continues unabated.
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With only brief and temporary pauses, spending on welfare programs has continued to rise inexorably; antipoverty programs grow and metastasize in both times of recession and prosperity. Historian Fred Siegel notes that the welfare explosion of the 1960s “coincided with the great economic and jobs boom of the 1960s when black unemployment in the city [New York] was running at 4 percent, about half the national average for minorities.”
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Adjusted for inflation, we now spend thirteen times as much on welfare as we did when Lyndon Johnson launched the poverty war. Not even Ronald Reagan or two subsequent Republican presidents could slow the march toward dependency. By 2007, per capita welfare spending was 77 percent higher than it was when Reagan was sworn in to office in 1981.
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Between 1989 and 2008, welfare spending rose by a staggering 292 percent, faster than the growth of spending on Social Security, Medicare, and education, and more than twice as fast as spending on defense, despite the fact that the period included two major wars.
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In the next few years, even after the economic recovery, it will get much worse.
Although much of the increased spending on programs for the poor and the unemployed can be attributed to the economic downturn that began in 2007, President Obama’s 2011 budget would increase welfare spending by 42 percent over 2008 spending levels, bringing spending on the poor to nearly $1 trillion a year.
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This is not a temporary, stopgap, or safety net measure: The budget projects a dramatic and permanent expansion of the welfare state, even as millions of baby boomers move toward retirement.
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Some distinctions need to be made here: Nearly half of means-tested welfare payments go to low-income elderly in nursing homes or to the disabled. These payments are not controversial and do not fall under the rubric of “mooching.”
But the other half of welfare payments go to able-bodied adults and their children.
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While some are undeniably poor through no fault of their own, many of the adults are poor as a result of both circumstances and their own choices, including spotty education and employment histories; many children are in poverty because they were born out of wedlock, which in turn triggers another round of dependency. As the Heritage Foundation notes: “Welfare entitlements generally begin at a child’s birth. Some 40 percent of all births in the U.S. are now paid for by the Medicaid program. Most of these Medicaid-funded births occur to never-married women with low education levels. Once the taxpayer has paid for the childbirth, aid to the mother and child will generally continue through a wide variety of programs for years to come.”
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Unfortunately, the culture of dependency perpetuates the behaviors and patterns that created the conditions of poverty in the first place, including out-of-wedlock births, which have continued to grow along with the welfare state.
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In central cities, the collapse of intact families has become endemic, but nationally the illegitimacy rate for the entire population is about where the rate was in poor central city neighborhoods fifty years ago; 40 percent of births nationwide are now to single parents. And despite years of welfare “reform,” relatively little is required of recipients. Most aid takes the form of “unconditional welfare assistance” for which “the recipient is required to do little or nothing in exchange for the aid,” note analysts Kiki Bradley and Robert Rector. “In particular, the potential recipient is never expected to take reasonable steps to avoid future dependence.”
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Rather than representing a temporary hand up, the evidence also suggests that programs like food stamps, unemployment insurance, and public housing foster long-term dependency, which can be passed from generation to generation. For instance, with public housing programs, there are no time limits or work requirements. No need to get a job or move on with your life. A study of government housing programs by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2007 found that significant numbers of participants in public housing remained in the programs for ten years or longer.
The result is that for millions of Americans, dependency as a way of life means that their dreams and plans for the future are focused not on themselves or their own efforts or the growth of the national economy, but rather on their continuing access to Other People’s Money, even if those other people are running out of it.
“Relative Deprivation”
This point needs to be made again: The expansion of dependency is no longer about ending hunger or malnutrition, or making sure the homeless have shelter, or even providing an economic safety net for the truly unfortunate. Much of that has already been taken care of. With urgent needs already met, advocates need something else to drive the expansion of the dependency state. Their latest gambit appears to be the idea of “relative deprivation.”
Writing in
The New Yorker,
John Cassidy implicitly acknowledges the awkwardness of a situation in which so many of the poor have the accoutrements of middle-class life, such as color televisions and dishwashers. This, of course, does not meet any accepted definition of “deprivation,” and it doesn’t accord well with traditional understandings of impoverishment. It is, for example, difficult to imagine Charles Dickens’s Little Nell being quite as poignant a symbol of privation if she had cable television and central air.
Similarly, it’s problematic to push for continued expansion of the welfare state when the American poor are so relatively affluent. Cassidy argues that the problem is that while the poor have lots of stuff, they live in a world in which
other people have even more stuff.
The poor, he writes, “live in a society in which many families also possess DVD players, cell phones, desktop computers, broadband Internet connections, powerful game consoles, SUVs, health club memberships, and vacation homes.” In other words, they may not be starving or freezing, but they are deprived in comparison to their prosperous fellow citizens. This “relative deprivation,” insists Cassidy, “may limit a person’s capacity for social achievement.”
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This is “chasing your own tail” with a vengeance: If you have one car and your neighbor has two cars, you are relatively deprived. If you can afford to eat steak two nights a week, you are relatively deprived if others can dine on it three nights a week. It is not a sign of prosperity to have a Nintendo if the kid down the block has a PlayStation as well. You are both relatively deprived if another neighbor has an Xbox 360 and an iPad.
The variations are endless: The poor sap with only one house is deprived relative to the family with two houses, who are in turn relatively deprived in relation to those who might have three. I have a forty-two-inch HD television; my coworker has a fifty-two-inch plasma beauty. This pains me, but I am not sure how this is now society’s problem or its obligation to fix.
Philosopher David Schmidtz is sharply critical of the new standard. “Critics of capitalism once scoffed at the clichéd suburban goal of ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ Critics now treat evidence that some group is failing to get ahead of the Joneses as a basis for deeming capitalism a failure.” The shift in emphasis, says Schmidtz bluntly, is “embarrassing.”
“The old critique of capitalism was thoughtful,” argues Schmidtz. “It was right to scoff at the goal of keeping up with the Joneses. Elevating that goal to the status of a principle of justice is mindless.”
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By definition, the Joneses cannot be kept up with. Short of mandatory equality—everybody gets the same stuff and nobody gets anything more—there will always be the haves and have mores. But it is precisely this insolubility that makes the idea of “relative deprivation” so attractive. As a solution to the problem of actual poverty, it is hopeless, but as a rationale for the endless expansion of the welfare state, it is quite helpful.
The dependency culture needs victims, even if that victim has high-speed Internet.
The Kindness of Strangers
(A Moocher Manifesto)
Addiction to digital freebies has not been limited to free cell phones or converter boxes. In a widely read op-ed column in
The New York Times,
a Brooklyn College professor, Helen Rubinstein, laments her loss of “free” Internet access.
“For a long time,” she writes, “I relied on my Brooklyn neighbors’ generosity—that is, their unsecured wireless networks—every time I connected to the Web.”
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Although she teaches writing in her college classes, her use of the word “generosity” is a rather obvious misnomer: generosity implies a voluntary exchange. If her neighbors had given her permission to use their networks, it could well have been an act of generosity, but in Rubinstein’s case, she was poaching their signals without their knowledge or consent. Even so, Rubinstein was unapologetic.
“It may have been unfair, but I don’t believe I was stealing: the owners’ leaving their networks password-free was essentially a gift, an ethereal gesture of kindness. Sometimes I’d imagine my anonymous benefactors … thinking, ‘Well, I have Internet to spare.’”
This is a rationalization bordering on absurdism: There was no “gift,” no act of ethereal “kindness,” no selfless act of sharing. Rubinstein wanted the free Wi-Fi, found it more convenient to mooch than to pay for it, and somehow transformed the freebie into a high-minded entitlement. There is no indication in her apologia that the Wi-Fi was unaffordable or that she was unable to pay for it: She simply did not
want
to pay for it.
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After she lost her signal, she writes, she debated whether she would actually pay for Internet access herself. Writing out her own check “seemed wasteful: paying a company to come wire my apartment, then paying a monthly fee so that I could maintain my own private territory within the cloud of 20 or so wireless networks that were already humming around my apartment.” It would have been so much better, she suggests, if she could just pay a “nominal fee” so she could “partake of the riches that were all around me in abundance.”
Rationalizing her reluctance, Rubinstein reasons that paying for Internet access “isn’t like paying for cable TV, where cable providers pay cable networks in turn.… Nor is it like paying for phone service.” After all, she writes, her e-mail address was portable, unconnected to any single computer, and completely free.
“Which is part of why getting online free felt so natural,” she explains.
Rubinstein was either unaware of, or, more likely, indifferent to the fact that her “free” Wi-Fi was the product of billions of dollars of investments in infrastructure that made her Internet access seem like magic or like an abundant natural resource that was there for the taking. In reality, somebody else invested in that infrastructure, took the risk, planned it, built it, while others (her neighbors) paid for it. Speaking for moochers everywhere, Rubinstein resented having to pay for conveniences others have created and maintained.
“In an ideal world,” she writes, “the Internet would be universally available to anyone able to receive it.” Of course in an ideal world, electricity, water, maybe even Bluetooth would be gratis; but in the real world, somebody else always has to pay.
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The Web site for Time Warner Cable, which provides cable access in New York, explained: “WiFi theft occurs when someone installs a wireless network in a residence or business location and intentionally enables others to receive broadband service for free over their wireless network.” The company cites federal law: “No person shall intercept or receive or assist in intercepting or receiving any communications service offered over a cable system, unless specifically authorized to do so by a cable operator.” Violators of this statute face fines of up to $50,000 and imprisonment for up to two years on a first offense. A second offense can carry a fine of $100,000 or five years in jail. (
www.timewarnercable.com/nynj/support/cabletheft/
)
Chapter 5
ADDICTED TO OPM (OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY)
Free money is, naturally enough, a magnet. But it is also addictive, as the experience of forty years of welfare dependency ought to have made clear. Under the right circumstance, even genuine need morphs into mooching, complete with waste, fraud, and an unshakable and ingrained unwillingness to take personal responsibility, a phenomenon seen in microcosm in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster of biblical proportions that victimized hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents. Many of them lost their homes and their livelihoods through no fault of their own.