Taxpayers versus moochers …

This is what it’s really all about. 

Trump’s proposed budget. The Republican healthcare plan. Tax reform.  These are all about reversing the headlong plunge we’ve been in for decades rewarding deadbeats and all those who consistently refuse to accept personal responsibility for their actions, all at the expense of taxpayers. 

If you haven’t noticed, the pool of those paying taxes has been shrinking. Meanwhile, the pool of those reaping benefits from government largesse has been steadily growing. 

Sooner or later, as Maggie Thatcher said, you run out of other people’s money. 

We actually hit that point years ago.  Why do you think our national debt is over $20 trillion?  How do you think it got to that level? 

A big part of how has to do with entitlements. Everybody in Washington knows spending on entitlements is out of control. Yet any time someone suggests reining in entitlements even a little they are tagged as a heartless monster – someone who doesn’t care about the poor, the disabled, the sick, the elderly, and especially the children. 

Or as some clown on TV last night claimed, promoting ethnic cleansing. Particularly against people of color who are dependent on entitlements to survive. 

Most Americans haven’t a clue who is getting entitlements and why. 

The real answer is just about everybody.

People too old or sick to work. People who could work but choose not to. People with crappy jobs because they dropped out of school, have a criminal record, or aren’t willing to do more than the absolute minimum at work.  People who’ve made a lot of bad life choices like having babies in their early teens, getting addicted to drugs, or joining a gang – and their offspring.  People who’ve never taken personal responsibility for anything – including their health, the well-being of their family, keeping a roof over their head and food on the table, or saving a dime for their future. 

But that list wouldn’t be complete without a whole lot of other people – well-educated, with good jobs and decent incomes; people who could easily afford to take care of themselves, their families and the health and nutrition needs of their families, yet expect assistance.  And let’s not forget those who have substantial money set aside, but still claim to need financial aid.

On one hand, you have people struggling to survive – but that’s actually a very small group of the very sick, the truly disabled, and the impoverished elderly. However, the vast majority of the people receiving entitlements use these not for survival, but for a more comfortable life. 

And a large portion of that group never paid a dime into these entitlements. 

They are the moochers.     

Those of us who have actually worked for a living paid hefty taxes for decades for our Social Security and Medicare.  When we collect Social Security, or use Medicare, we’re simply getting back some of what we paid for.  We may not have liked those taxes, but we understood their purpose, the same as we understood why employers and employees paid taxes to support unemployment comp, workers’ comp and other safety net programs.  

It was our responsibility, not just to ourselves, but to others. 

Over the years, however, the glaring abuses of many of these well-meaning programs started to wear on us.  We saw obviously well-off people in late-model luxury SUVs use their EBT cards (the new version of food stamps) to buy $45 birthday cakes at Wegmans. We saw their kids – wearing Ralph Lauren clothes and $120 sneakers – behind them in check-out lines.

We discovered that many otherwise able-bodied people got an average of up to $47,000 a year in financial aid and benefits for choosing not to work at all, while turning down regular jobs because they would lose all their free stuff. We saw people with expensive big-screen TVs in their carts at Walmart while they paid for their groceries with their EBT card. 

What constituted “poverty” was increasingly less draconian than what we considered “poverty.” When people with household incomes approaching $100,000 were considered “poor” enough to qualify for government assistance we knew something was wrong.

More and more kids “needed” free breakfast, lunch, and dinner – plus snacks – at their schools, not just during the school year but over holidays and vacations, because their parents couldn’t afford to feed them; that didn’t seem true. Especially when you drove through some of the neighborhoods where these kids lived and saw new cars parked in the driveways.  Or saw their moms sporting custom nails, hair extensions, $500 designer eyeglass frames, while talking on the latest iPhone from Apple. And they couldn’t afford to feed their own kids? 

None of it made sense. At least to a lot of us.  

We felt like suckers.  We felt too many people were taking advantage of us.  We were perfectly happy and willing to help those in real need. But there comes a time when you think you’re bending over backwards, but discover you’re really bending over forwards.   

That time was long in coming but it finally arrived.   

Hence the new Trump budget. It tries to put a cap on some – not all – entitlement spending. 

So what is he cutting?

There’s been a massive increase in people claiming disability benefits. According to CNN and the Social Security Administration, since 2003, there's been a 29% jump in Americans with little or no work experience getting disability payments. There's been a 44% increase in disability claims by people formerly in the workplace over the same period, largely, some suggest, because of the recession as people who lost their jobs moved from unemployment comp to disability benefits. 

Not everybody on disability is faking it. Yet not everybody claiming benefits is truly disabled – we all know that. Trump wants to cut $72 billion from the disability program over a 10-year period, most likely by tightening the standards for who qualifies and who stays on disability. 

He also wants to cut programs that subsidize college education for the “poor” and those who take jobs in government or non-profits.  Honestly, I’m fine with those cuts, and given the rampant abuse of welfare programs in general his proposed cuts of $272 billion there over 10 years also sound like a good idea to me. 

His plan proposes saving some $40 billion over a decade by barring illegals from collecting the Child Tax Credit and ensuring illegals cannot collect the Earned Income Tax Credit, either. The abuse of both those by illegals has been widely documented. The simple fact that someone in DC has to bring this up only confirms what most of us have suspected for years: under the Obama Administration thousands upon thousands of illegals were allowed, with a wink and a nod, to take billions of taxpayer dollars they should never been given.

And not just in those two programs, but in food stamps and Medicaid as well. If anyone believes illegals aren’t abusing those, too, they’re not just blind but stupid.   

The biggest howls of course have been reserved for his proposed cuts to the SNAP (food stamps) program and Medicaid. He wants to cut $192 billion from “nutritional assistance” programs and $800 billion from Medicaid, both over a 10-year period.

Right now, just about anybody qualifies for SNAP. That’s because states can apply for waivers from the qualification standards and not surprisingly under Obama these were granted practically every time. It’s hard to tell if these were granted out of compassion or simply to expand the number of people who would become addicted to food stamps and, as such, more likely to vote for anyone who promised to continue and expand this program.

The cynic in me believes it’s more likely the latter – politicians generally being the pandering whores they are. It’s the modern equivalent of bread and circuses to get re-elected.   

Medicaid rolls also exploded under Obama.  States were encouraged to add as many people as they could to Medicaid, I believe for the same reason I think pushed the increase in food-stamp recipients. To sweeten the deal, and get the numbers of "uninsured" down, the Feds promised to pick up as much as 95% of the states’ expense of adding more people to the Medicaid rolls, with that percentage from the Feds declining over the years. 

Again, not surprisingly, with the lure of free money in the short term some states went wild adding new Medicaid recipients. Now Trump wants to stop the profligate expansion of Medicaid by changing the formula for the states from blank checks to block grants and capping the number of new participants to be included in determining the block grants for each state.

That means states would get a set amount of Federal money to work with each year and would have to determine how best to allocate that money to their citizens most in need. States will most likely tighten who qualifies for Medicaid – and maybe even add some work requirement, as some states are considering now – while setting standards for how long recipients of working age physically able to work could remain on a state’s Medicaid rolls.     

This all terrifies the poverty-industrial complex to its very foundation. 

It’s about time. Taxpayers have been footing the bill for astounding waste – and yes, fraud – for far too long. Nobody is saying we shouldn’t take care of our citizens in need.  Nobody is saying that children should go hungry or be forced to live in squalor. Nobody is saying any of that.

However, a lot of us are now saying that it’s well-past time for a lot of able-bodied people to step up, get off the couch, and start assuming responsibility for themselves without relying solely on the rest of us to ensure they have a comfortable lifestyle.

The media and Democrats can bitch about it all they want. They still don’t understand what’s happening – a tectonic shift in the attitudes of the American public.

As someone said about Trump’s proposed budget – it’s a budget designed by taxpayers.

Is it perfect? Nope. But it’s a start.