Clearly we Americans are not stuck in the past

Vivid videos of public housing buildings being blown up provide an obvious example. Double standards in education called affirmative action have shown themselves to be generally counter-productive. Welfare initiatives in the 1960s have broken up families and shown themselves to have hurt too many people. In all three examples, time has shown there are better alternatives to getting the goal achieved.

The government creating dependencies that may extend benefits from the poverty class to the middle class is up for debate these days. While the trend is decades old, the recent raging debate over the use of a 12 year old to respond to the President about SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) sheds new light on the subject.

The idea of the government providing benefits to groups of people in need is not all that old an idea. There was great debate in the USA after the Great Mississippi River flood of 1927 when millions of poor southerners were placed in great distress. The gist of the debate was not the emotional issue of distress over the calamity’s effects, but the issue of short term costs versus long term costs. In a nutshell, was the government providing relief creating a long term dependency class that in the long term was against the Country’s best interests, and even counter-productive to the people in the long term?

For those using today’s standards and beliefs, be careful and considerate. The morality of the debate had strong opinions on both sides in 1927, and many of those people are ancestors, grandparents in my case, whose morals and hard-work standards were worthy of respect then and still worthy of respect now. Even the issue of civil rights and slavery goes back to the founding of our Country … it is not some 1960s issue that came up in that decade.

History shows the government did get involved in flood relief, and has been involved in relief in many other areas ever since and for many other groups since. Social security is one such example. The GI Bill is another such example. That voters have supported such government benefits says many over decades think this is good for the Country. Certainly those elected thought and think it is good for them. Just look at what seems like pandering from candidates promising even more benefits to ever expanding groups, in types and numbers, both. If you buy this premise of politicians pandering for votes by promising expanding benefits, then the question which follows is: is it good for America? After all, we voters are not stuck in the past.

Again, the recent use of a 12 year old in the SCHIP debate has provided new light on the benefits trend. It seems like a fair question to debate how much the government should be involved in providing benefits, who should get them, and what should they be. Even moral questions about short term and long term costs to the Country are fair game to this voter. Are we even helping or hurting people in the long term? And is continued borrowing to pay for all this in our Country’s interest? Will people, domestic and foreign, even keep loaning us the money?