Show us your starving waifs

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Vin Suprynowicz
Show us your starving waifs

Americans are generally willing to make considerable sacrifices in order to pay the taxes that fund the most expensive public school system in the history of the world — even though the effectiveness of said schools in advancing our students much beyond what the rest the “first world” would call a fourth- or fifth-grade level is pretty pathetic.

But what if Americans come to realize the giant jobs program they’re financing under the rubric of the “public schools” is no longer mostly about “schooling,” at all, but has instead morphed into a huge archipelago of food banks and full-service welfare agencies?

More than 19 million American schoolchildren are already provided free or reduced-cost meals during the week when they’re at school, according to Feeding America, a national network of charities.

In Clark County, roughly 148,000 children qualify for the free or tax-subsidized meals — not because they are all necessarily poor, but because they live in school districts where a certain percentage of the populace is statistically “poor,” and no one wants to embarrass a child by making him or her assert individual poverty in order to qualify for free stuff.

But that’s not enough, according to freshman Democratic Congresscritter Dina Titus of Las Vegas, who introduced a bill Tuesday that would allow the schoolchildren to head back to their “schools” on the weekends to pick up “free,” tax-funded weekend food handouts, as well — or else carry home backpacks full of canned meats and fruits on Friday afternoons.

“Gimme gimme” welfare food from the “gimme gimme” welfare schools — who could be surprised?

The “Weekends Without Hunger Act” would allocate $10 million per year for five years to launch a federal “pilot program,” giving away food for schools and local anti-hunger groups to distribute.

Meantime buying up more “surplus” agricultural products as a way to control and buy the votes of America’s farmers, as well?

“With 45 percent of Clark County schoolchildren relying on the free and reduced-price lunch program, more than 140,000 students in Southern Nevada are facing hunger at home, and many depend on school meals as their main source of food throughout the week,” Ms. Titus said.

According to who? Where are these kids living, inside hollow trees? Where are their parents? If those parents (in an era when child-bearing is optional) either can’t or won’t feed their children, have they no relatives or fellow parishioners willing to take in these starving waifs — waifs most of whom carry cell phones, play video games, and wear hundred-dollar name-brand sneakers, unless I miss my guess?

If the culture of welfare dependency created by the “entitlement” approach of the federal government over the past 55 years has actually rendered the American family unable to do today, in a land of luxury, what it was able to do through all the tough times of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Great Depression — feed its children — then surely it’s time to end the welfare-state experiment, not extend it.

Ninety percent of the people in the world would love to be poor in America. America is one of the few places in the world where a quasi-literate woman can decide to raise her children alone without benefit of a wage-earning husband, and be rewarded by her government for this brilliant decision — despite the greatly enhanced risk her sons will grow up to be felons — with a subsidized home that has central heating, indoor plumbing, and a color television, all courtesy of money looted from total strangers by our wise and powerful government.

Is America full of starving waifs? In fact, we have an epidemic of childhood obesity.

If Americans today are not properly feeding their children, it’s because of bad spending priorities, not a shortage of cheap foodstuffs.

When I see young mothers in the supermarket line using government food vouchers of various kinds, they’re not generally buying 40-pound bags of rice. Perhaps the grandly named “Weekends Without Hunger Act” should instead be dubbed the “Freeing Up The Family Budget to Buy Beer and the Cable Sports Package Act.”

Anyway, do our state or federal Constitutions grant those respective governments any power to tax the rest of us to feed the children of parents who would just as soon “let government do it”? They do not.

Close down programs, Ms. Titus. Cut taxes so the free market can create real jobs. Leave America’s willing workers their own income to feed their own kids. Eastern Europe tried for 70 years to “guarantee” everyone a free lunch. The scheme fared badly.

And by the way, are you still going to ask us “Where you gettin’ that?” about Democrats promoting higher taxes?

Copyright 2007-2009, Vin Suprynowicz. All rights reserved.