BEST OF JIM COOK

June 26, 2006

SLIPPERY SLOPE

They have intensive care units in hospitals now specifically for newborn babies that are having problems. It’s expensive. I know, because my new granddaughter spent three days there. It was over $30,000. There was another baby there born premature. He was a crack baby and weighed only two pounds. The nurse said he’d be there up to five months.

Later I thought about the bill for this tiny infant struggling for life. It would cost about $1,200,000 and the state would have to pay it. Then I thought some more about the kind of life he would have. With a drug-addicted mother, there was little chance he would get the love and nurturing necessary to be a well-adjusted and productive person. More likely he would be in trouble with the law and have his own problems with drugs and alcohol.

No doubt his mother would continue to rely on the government to pay for raising him. She would get aid to dependent children, public housing, health care and food stamps. When you add all the assistance up, it would probably run close to $25,000 a year for him. That would go on for twenty years or so until he began to get assistance directly. Then he would get the same benefits his mother received including free rent and a welfare check. If he wanted to claim that he suffered from depression, he could get another $1,000 a month from Social Security. Should he take the time to file a tax return, he could get another welfare payment at tax time. Chances are he’d be in and out of the court system. That’s also costly. He would need a public defender, court time, incarceration, a parole officer, and the continued attention of the police. As an adult he would probably require at least $50,000 a year in social expenditures. Should he live to age 70, that’s a total of $4,200,000 in social costs for him. These are rough estimates, but you get the picture.

There are millions of dependent people in similar circumstances in America. Their numbers are growing dramatically. What you subsidize you get more of. In addition, the U.S. government imports poor immigrants, some of whom begin to rely on social programs permanently. Once these expensive programs are in place they are almost impossible to stop. They change the culture. Look at the difference in how we handle old folks from just five or six decades ago. There’s no way to go back. Social programs are a slippery slope. Once they take root they grow until they are unaffordable and irreversible. Eventually their runaway costs ruin a nation.

When social costs become too expensive, the voters will put left-wing politicians into power who promise to keep the free money coming. The high taxes they force on us will deprive the private sector of capital and incentives. The economy will weaken further and the government will be forced to increase social spending all the more. It will be a mess as only the government can create.

There is something else even more important. When you give money to people that they didn’t earn, it weakens their character. Horrible things happen to little children every day in our country, and it was not always so. We rarely read about the epidemic of addiction that afflicts the underclass. The liberal media doesn’t like to mention it. In fact, it’s become the liberal blind spot.

A while ago I wrote a letter to Anna Quindlan, a Newsweek columnist, pointing this out. She had mentioned the positive charity work of the nuns. "How nicely you put it," I wrote. "Touch the sick, the poor, the children, the powerless…" However, what you liberals forget is that you’ve taken charity out of private hands and turned it over to the government. That has engineered a social disaster. "How many hundreds of blocks in your city or mine are you afraid to walk through on a summer evening? Giving people money that they didn’t earn is the worst thing you can do to them. You have a blind spot about the sorry consequences of your social sympathy. You liberals refuse to see the horror and the magnitude of it because of your complicity."