The Democrats and Black Poverty

The Democrats have been banging all our heads against the welfare state wall for so long that we've forgotten what good feels like. They've shown little or no inclination to address the structural issues of poverty, preferring to continue the same old approaches that have wrecked the lives of individuals and families for several generations in continuing manifestations of the law of unintended consequences. Their formula for success is to promise every kind of benefit to everyone who wants one and never mention who will pay for it. That will always be done by some unidentified someone else. Higher taxes are seldom associated with any particular benefit. And so the party of unblemished heroes marches on.

I've heard that half our population now pays no federal income taxes. If true, that's a prescription for social disaster. It means that there's virtually no down side for half our people to vote themselves larger and larger shares of other people's wealth. It means the enshrinement of theft by ballot box.

The Democrats have cultivated an image of being the champions of the poor. But I believe they may actually be the worst enemies of the poor, and in fact profit from poverty. It's become an industry for them. An old and rather cynical joke says that "broke is a temporary condition but poor is a state of mind." There's a lot of truth to that and the Democrats have profited greatly from nurturing that state of mind.

It's an ongoing, amazing phenomenon that people can come to this country from all over the world with nothing -- including no knowledge of our language, customs and laws -- and succeed beyond their wildest dreams. Why is it that so many people who have grown up here and have plenty of such knowledge are "locked in the cycle of poverty"?

Any student of human behavior can tell you that we live up or down to our expectations of ourselves. High expectations yield high accomplishment, low expectations yield low accomplishment. President Bush knows this and has spoken of the "soft bias of low expectations." Is it any wonder that the constituency most closely tied to the Democrats, the African-American community, is so far behind most others? They are fed a steady diet of negativism, defeatism and victimhood. If it were simply a matter of racism the African-Americans with Caribbean roots would also lag behind but they don't. They don't have the same psychological and social baggage that the Demagogic Party finds it so profitable to cultivate and exploit. In the slash and burn politics of the so-called "Democrats" the Party harvests the votes and reaps the short-term, windfall profits of political power by destroying the self-reliance, self-confidence, self-esteem, initiative, hopes and dreams of the people they claim to be the saviors of. They are the party of grievance, the party of discontent, the party of whines, excuses and paranoia. The message is "you don't have a prayer without us." The message is "You can't." They preach the gospel of failure.