It took being elected to the Virginia General Assembly for me to appreciate how politicians corrupt the English language to enable profligate spending. You often see this when legislators spend our money on their priorities to get them reelected. To be sure, that’s a bit harsh. Not all spending is designed to do that. Some is necessary for national defense, public safety, transportation, education and legitimate programs that compose the social safety net for the truly needy. But make no mistake about it, politicians love to spend other people’s money. Sadly, it’s an addiction for some. You can hear it in their voice when they proclaim how they “invested” in this or that. So, let’s begin there by examining how big spenders distort the meaning of words to justify spending like a drunken sailor. (My apologies to my Navy readers, who even while drunk often make more sense than politicians.)
Investing
Let’s start with a simple truth. The government doesn’t invest your tax dollars. It spends them. The only investing that occurs is when you are able to keep some of what you earned and invest it in savings, an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) or the stock market. Politicians do none of that. Moreover, there is no return on investment like one would expect from a business venture or a personal investment where you earn more money by putting your cash at risk.
When politicians say they are “investing,” it’s a gargantuan lie. An investment presumes earning more or less. But when the government does this, you actually have less, because often your taxes go to other people who did not earn what you did through your own labor. So, when they use the “investment” word, know they are lying through their teeth.
Underserved People
This is one of the terms that far-left loves. It amounts to class warfare. They categorize people in a way that presumes certain citizens are underserved. What does that mean? Actually, it’s nonsense. The term “underserved” is designed to make the case that some people have a prescriptive right to your money based on class. Once upon a time, many of us understood what “needy” meant. That included people who had fallen on hard times and needed some help to get back on their feet. Note that once on their feet, the need existed no longer unless there was an inherent disability which required continued help.
Marginalized People
To make matters worse, we now have “marginalized people” to consider, as if the term “underserved” is insufficient to justify welfare payments. This “marginalized” concept presumes that there are people among us that are somehow neglected by the rest of us in ways that predispose them to failure. This too is nonsense. When the government says someone is “marginalized,” what they’re really saying is that you need to serve up more of your money to them. Moreover, the use of this term is designed to provoke some degree of guilt on the rest of us to further justify government handouts. After all, while you were hard at work earning a living, you were actively “marginalizing” people. More nonsense.
The Work Ethic
To be clear, I support helping people who need it. However, I do not support transferring wealth from people who have legally earned it to those who are able-bodied and can find work. In America today, the needy bar has been made so low that almost anyone can qualify for a government stipend of some sort. It’s time to end that. For example, programs like Obamacare have upset the rationale for things like Medicaid. When that program was developed years ago, it was for the needy. But Obama turned it into a healthcare program for the able-bodied. Moreover, there are few work requirements for people to receive benefits from the new program.
The sad truth is we have become a dependency society where the government is seen as the first resort to creating individual success. That is false. It is incumbent on every able-bodied person in America to get a job and pursue success based on genuine effort. In that regard, the work ethic in America is in a state of disrepair. To be sure, the COVID payments didn’t help matters. We paid people to stay home. We actually discouraged work! But that is over — and its time that every American began pulling their own weight. Why?
Because it’s good for the soul to work. Work—genuine work—breeds responsibility and a sense of accomplishment that is essential to the physical and mental wellbeing of every person. Work, not dependency, is the essence of a life well lived. We are designed to work, not subsist on the labor of others. It’s time to dump the twisted dependency rhetoric and renew our broken work ethic.
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