Lacking any new ideas and needing to run from the failure of their old ones, Democratic presidential candidates rely on their shopworn standard, class warfare.
John Edwards rails about the “two Americas” when he isn’t relaxing in his 28,000 -square-foot home, getting a $400 haircut or collecting $50,000 to give a speech about poverty. Barack Obama talks about the “quiet riots” waged every day by people angry because they don’t think they are getting a big enough cut from someone else’s paycheck.
Characteristically didactic, Hillary Clinton says 45 million Americans without health insurance is “a moral wrong.” But whom does she think is at fault?
U.S. taxpayers provide the best medical care in the world to those who cannot afford it, including people who are in this country illegally. Medicare pays the doctor bills of the elderly, Medicaid pays the bills of the poor, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) provides subsidized health insurance for families who make too much to qualify for Medicaid.
At what point, if ever, would Democrats decide that taxpayers have been tapped out?
When John F. Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency in 1960, he was shocked by the poverty in Appalachia, where children were taking home their school-provided lunches to feed their entire family.
After becoming president, Kennedy established a pilot food stamp program that Congress made permanent in 1964. At that time, it served 350,000 Americans and cost $30 million. Today, the metastasized program feeds 27 million at an annual cost of $30 billion.
One in 12 Americans on food stamps is a phenomenal statistic; add to that the expense of staggering waste. The Government Accountability Office says that in 2005, the food stamp program made paymenterrors totaling $1.7 billion — wasting more money than the entire program cost in 1971.
Even though the most prevalent nutritional malady among the poor is obesity — they now have too much to eat — the federal and state governments are actively trying to recruit even more people to the dole. The Department of Agriculture awards “Food Stamp Outreach Grants” to help agencies add to the taxpayers’ burden.
Last month, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s office trumpeted the Democratic governor’s “success” in enrolling nearly 18,000 more people to the food-stamp program. Philadelphia had a “Food Stamp Enrollment Campaign” deemed necessary because an estimated 60,000 people eligible for food stamps hadn’t signed up for them.
If people actually lacked food, they would be clamoring for the stamps; they wouldn’t have to be pressed into enrolling. Clearly, the standards of eligibility are far too low when individuals can qualify for a benefit they don’t need.
States also are encouraging more parents to stick taxpayers with the cost of their children’s medical insurance — sending letters home from school hawking the S-CHIP program, advertising it on city buses and lowering already lax eligibility standards.
Most states allow participation for households with incomes as high as 250 percent of the federal poverty level, i.e., $51,625 for a family of four (in all states except Alaska and Hawaii).
But New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, D, recently pushed through legislation to expand eligibility to 400 percent of the poverty level — $82,600. When the median household income in the United States is around $47,000, how can a family earning so much more than that qualify as needy?
Health care workers in other states are squawking because a year-old law requiring Medicaid enrollees to provide proof of citizenship has reduced Medicaid rolls. The horror!
Maryland had 7,600 fewer enrollees since the law went into effect; Virginia had 11,000 fewer. Obviously, the law is working. Undoubtedly, as some people complain, having to prove citizenship also makes the process more difficult for eligible individuals. But it should be difficult to live off the earnings of others. The problem is that it’s too easy.
Nonetheless, most of the Democratic presidential candidates want to make the process even easier. Does it ever occur to them that taxpayers have a breaking point — that fewer people can’t continue supporting more?
Unless politicians stop lowering the bar for what constitutes poverty, one old adage will prove true: The poor we will have with us always — because we will all be defined as poor.
Examiner columnist Melanie Scarborough lives in Alexandria.
