Why Should Anybody Work?

The young interracial couple moved into the garden apartments near my house, and, before long, neighbors were complaining about the noisy stereo blasting, the wild pot parties, and the gangster-type visitors to the complex.

Women expressed concern for the couple's young infant being exposed to the pot smoke and pondered calling Social Services to report them. Others warned against this, afraid of retribution by the couple's scary looking friends who were overheard planning a robbery with a handgun.

Homeowners worried about their property values further declining and blamed the landlord of the complex for accepting Section 8 renters. The landlord retorted that in this economic climate, he had no choice but to rent to government-subsidized clients. He'd been trying to sell the apartments for 2 years and couldn't find a buyer and reiterated that he had no choice.

I later learned that the couple had come out of a Brooklyn shelter and were not only getting subsidized housing but also vouchers for furniture; food stamps; free health care from Medicaid, and, of course, welfare. They appeared to be in good health and when I visited their neighbors, I had a chance to meet the young man (who's white) and appeared to be in his early 20s. He complained about how bad the job situation was. "Man, I can't find work anywhere," he said.

I was sorely tempted to ask why he didn't apply at one of the local stores that had a "Help Wanted" sign in the window but that would have been a merely rhetorical question. Minimum-wage jobs can't compete with a full-service welfare system that sucks people into dependency. Meanwhile, Mexican immigrants are ubiquitous and seem to have found work as car washers, busboys and at other menial jobs.

Another neighbor I spoke to complained that her young adult children had good jobs but that taxes were eating up their salaries, making it difficult to support their growing families. Unfortunately, because they had decent jobs, they were ineligible for the many economic stimulus programs designed to favor only the have-nots. Credit card companies had eliminated their open credit lines and now they were drowning in debt and usurious interest rates. That's the way it goes in this corner of the country.

Much publicity was given to last week's decision of basketball superstar LeBron James to play for Miami instead of New York or New Jersey, which offered him millions more to sign on. Why was that a surprise? Rarely reported was the fact that he would have had to pay $12 million of his salary to the taxman if he'd taken his talents to the greater metropolitan area. Florida has no income tax so his choice to dish and swish with the Heat was, actually, a no-brainer.

In the Northeast and elsewhere, taxpayers are funding the largesse that liberal communities lavish on folks who see no reason to work for a living when they've been suckled by the welfare state from cradle to grave. Star Parker was a single welfare mother who wrote a great account of her rise to independence, prosperity, and national recognition from what she called "Uncle Sam's Plantation." Now she's running for Congress in California's 37th District as a Republican, joining other black and Hispanic Americans across the fruited plain who recognize the disastrous road to perdition that Democrats are leading us down.

Some Democrats may be sincerely concerned about the have-nots but are totally at sea in solving the persistent problem of poverty because they see nothing but the government as the means to eradicate it. Too bad many politicians exploit the problem as a way to hold on to their seats of power and are oblivious to the devastating impact of dependency on the traditional family.

I grew up in Spanish Harlem during the '50s and watched how the tide of temporary home relief swelled into the permanent welfare system. The families that were on welfare then are still on the dole now, with generation after generation seduced by the supersized government handout. Inspectors used to come to the residences of home relief recipients to make sure that there were no able-bodied men in the household. (I used to see husbands hiding on fire escapes until the inspectors left.) Eventually, those able-bodied men would stop returning, abandoning their families to the taxpayers' burden.

The route to dependency is becoming easier and easier, once one learns how to work the system. When I was laid off from a job more than 30 years ago, I had to file for unemployment benefits in person and collect a check at the state office every week. Now, all one has to do is file online and certify for checks in the same way, without even meeting with an employment counselor. Only after one applies for extended benefits is proof required that one is actually looking for work. It's not difficult to understand why unemployment remains so high when the liberal establishment has made getting checks so effortless.

Currently, legislation to extend unemployment benefits has been stalled in Congress, Naturally, Democrats are blaming Senate Republicans for preventing it from passing, which is typical obfuscation. The Republicans are objecting to increasing the deficit unnecessarily when their own plan would extend benefits without adding to the deficit. This is just another Democrat way to maintain the status quo, demonize the GOP as mean spirited, and portray their own party of dependency as the savior of the poor.

Our current budget crisis is headed into the same abyss that engulfed Greece and one has to wonder if the Obama administration's incompetent handling of our economy is one of simple ignorance or a deliberate design to undermine and destroy our capitalist structure. The stimulus programs were a joke and did nothing to stimulate growth. Meanwhile, the government grows fatter and richer.

I've lived through quite a few censuses and I can't recall as much bureaucratic rigmarole as in this year's process. I dutifully filled out the lengthy census forms as soon as I received them in the mail because I didn't want to deal with one of the 140,000 new census takers knocking on my door. Nevertheless, I received a call from a staffer asking to verify the information I'd entered on the new and expanded forms. I asked her why this was necessary and she said, "It's the law."

Since when? What the administration did was increase the size and cost of the forms and create thousands of temporary make-work government jobs to fudge the unemployment figures.

The mother at the garden apartments who had the struggling adult children kept asking me why anybody should work for a living just to pay for people who'd never paid a penny into the system.

Good question but one that I couldn't answer.

Alicia Colon resides in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com.