BEST OF JIM COOK

April 17, 2007

BLINDERS

Daily newspapers in America convey a steady diet of left-leaning sentiments. A known liberal newspaper like the Minneapolis Star Tribune serves up some of the worst foolishness. We had a tragedy recently on a northern Minnesota reservation. Two young native American boys age four and two wandered away from home last November and went missing. They were found this spring frozen solid. They had wandered through 75 yards of woods, crossed a small lake on the ice and fell into open water on the far shore.

In reporting on the story, a reporter depicted the four-year old as "bold and adventurous." The two-year old "loved tagging along with his older brother." A spokesman for the reservation commented, "Now we know where they are." Nothing was written about what in the world a pre-schooler and a toddler were doing wandering around on their own in the winter. There was no mention of parental neglect or wrongdoing. Two unsupervised little kids died because of the gross negligence of their parents and we can’t get a liberal writer to pen a single criticism. In the eye of liberals, minorities can do no wrong.

The last thing newspapers will ever report on is the toxic liberal social programs and government checks that have elevated alcoholism rates on some reservations to 90%. You will never read about the subsidies that have caused the most self-sufficient people on earth to plummet into near helplessness. Does anybody doubt that if native Americans had never been given a dime, they would have been light years ahead of where they are now? The terrible conditions on the reservation have now spread to the inner city. With an unemployment rate there of 70%, as many as seven million black males are now unemployed. To put that number into perspective, there’s less than a million and a half men and women in the Army, Navy and Air Force. The government estimates they are paying to raise 20 million children without fathers. Millions of other males across the nation are idle and lacking in personal initiative. They live off the government or the subsidies of women who are paid for the children they bear. In our city, some of the most heinous crimes recently have come from white males beating and killing infants just a few months old. These lowlifes are surely the product of welfare households.

Lately I’ve been reading how the government won’t be able to afford the retirement benefits and health subsidies for the baby boomers. I’ll tell you what they are not going to be able to afford; a swelling population of the underclass who rarely work and live primarily off subsidies. In all too many cases these people have lost the ability to work. They’re unemployable. Because they are bored, a lot of them make mischief and so we have a very expensive legal system with public defenders, court officers, judges, parole officers, wardens, police, guards and security personnel who would otherwise not be necessary. Then we have hospital emergency wards filled with victims of gunshot wounds, beatings and stabbings. In addition, there’s the bad health of the underclass because of diet, booze and drugs. They drive up all our medical and health care costs.

The government is also paying for a host of occupations that serve the bottom rung of society. Social workers have multiplied, as have chemical dependency counselors and job trainers. These all sound necessary, but never seem to help much. New prisons and hospitals, public transportation, patrol cars, homeless shelters and a million other expenses soak the government and the taxpayers.

The underclass have helped turn social security into a partial welfare program. Anyone with a problem gets $1,000 a month. Filing a tax return gets another $1,200. Then there’s various state welfare programs. There’s the federal program that replaced Aid to Dependent Children. There’s health care, food stamps, subsidized housing, rent and the payment of heating bills. If all these poverty programs were somehow reducing or curbing the population of the underclass, you could live with it. But, it’s just the opposite. These subsidies attract people, and it’s causing the world’s worst parents to aggressively have offspring. What you subsidize you get more of.

This trend promises financial ruin. It’s a budget buster. For one thing, taxes will be raised. Worst of all, the people paying the taxes are also paying to increase the threat to their safety and security from a growing horde of very bad actors. This is the liberal legacy. No wonder they don’t want to write about the social mess they have inflicted upon us.