Go Home Already: Revelations and Reminders

If someone's shocked by Ward 8's unemployment numbers, they've never spent much time in Ward 8. I believe the lessons of induced demand are applicable here. Provide a heavily subsidized public resource (highways, cheap suburban housing stock) and people will use them until you get gridlock. Widen the highways, you create more demand and more gridlock. But when you start charging the actual "market rate" for that formerly subsidized commodity (higher property taxes, tolls, user fees), or reduces capacity within the system (narrowing roads), the market either finds a less-expensive alternative (public transit, carpooling, flextime) or it moves to a totally different market where marginal rates are lower.

In the case of Ward 8's perpetual unemployment numbers (which were still hovering around 20% during the boom years), you're providing publically subsidized housing and entitlement programs. What's the motivation for them to seek an alternative; i.e., employment? In Mayor Williams' second term, he managed to slash many of the social service programs that Barry pushed in the 1980s. The result was a migration of welfare cases to PG County where benefits were marginally more generous, which resulted in the County Executive trying to get the DC Council to pay for their new "transplants."

Ward 8 has a population of residents who can't work, either because of age or health reasons. You also have a population who choose not to work because they don't want to. DC should be focusing their limited resource on those people who actually merit a safety net, not the ones who turn to petty theft at the end of the month when their welfare checks run out. Check the crime stats: burglaries and thefts spike towards the end of the month, and it isn't because someone "got their visit from Aunt Flo."

Pretty much true. But one point I'm unsure on..... are those that can't work (because of age or health) included in unemployment numbers? I always assumed they were counted as permanently out of the working population.

"DC should be focusing their limited resource on those people who actually merit a safety net, not the ones who turn to petty theft at the end of the month when their welfare checks run out. "

Agreed completely. The most messed up part is that those that don't really merit a safety net are stealing limited resources that are supposed to be going to those that really need it and would use it for what it was meant for - a temporary helping hand, or to help those that can't work.

So how do you differentiate between the two?

When I was a kid my parents got food stamps for several years. My mom cried the day she broke down and applied for government assistance. But both my parents worked full time, at menial labor jobs even though they both had advanced degrees, and they got off food stamps as quickly as they could. And we lived very spartan lives, cutting back to what most these days would consider unacceptable - no meals out, meals made totally from scratch as that was cheaper, clothes from thrift stores only. All the kids over 12 had jobs, from bailing hay and cleaning houses to taking in laundry from neighbors. My brothers and I started a lawn mowing/landscaping service that made a surprising amount of $$ considering the fact that we were just kids.

Maybe there's a lot of that going on in DC public welfare programs that I'm not seeing. But I am skeptical.

To put it in perspective, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing us way more than social programs here at home do, and our regular military spending and the waste therein dwarfs what we spend on public housing, etc. But I'd argue that the amounts we do spend on social welfare programs are actually causing more harm than good, due to how we administer them, and how we've allowed them to become a sustainable multi-generation substitute to actually working for a living.

You know how many helicopters were lost in Vietnam? Who makes them? Bell Helicopter. Who owns Bell? Bell was nearly bankrupt when First National Bank of Boston asked the CIA to use the helicopter in Indochina. How about the F-111 fighter? General Dynamics of Fort Worth, Texas. Who owns that? Find out the defense budget since the war began. $75 going on $100 billion. Nearly $200 billion will be spent before it's over. In 1949, it was $10 billion. No war...no money.

The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.