32 SOWELL from 9
cisco. As for the el- derly, 80 percent are homeowners. whose monthly housing costs are less than $400, including prop- erty taxes, utilities, and maintenance. The desperately
poor elderly conjured up in political and media rhetoric are-- in the world of re- ality-- the wealthi- est segment of the American population. The average wealth of older households is nearly three times the wealth of households headed by people in
THE WEIRS TIMES & THE COCHECO TIMES, Thursday, June 2, 2011
the 35 to 44-year-old bracket, and more than 15 times the wealth of households headed by someone under 35 years of age. If the wealthiest seg-
ment of the popula- tion cannot pay their own medical bills, who can? The coun- try as a whole is not any richer because the government pays our medical bills-- with money that it takes from us. What about the tru-
ly poor, in whatever age brackets? First of all, even in low-in-
come and high-crime neighborhoods, peo- ple are not stealing bread to feed their children. The fraction of the people in such neighborhoods who commit most of the crimes are far more likely to steal luxury products that they can either use or sell to get money to sup- port their parasitic lifestyle. As for the rest of
the poor, Professor Walter Williams of George Mason Uni- versi ty long ago showed that you could give the poor
enough money to lift them all above the official poverty line for a fraction of what it costs to support a massive welfare state bureaucracy. We don’t need to
send the country into bankruptcy, in the name of the poor, by spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor, and who could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human shields behind which the ex- panding welfare state can advance. The goal is not to
keep the poor from starving but to create dependency, because dependency trans- lates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus. We have all heard
the old saying about how giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Inde- pendence makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes for politicians. For politicians, giv-
ing a man a fish ev- ery day of his life is
the way to keep get- ting his vote. “En- titlement” is just a fancy word for depen- dency. As for the scary sto-
ries politicians tell, in order to keep the entitlement programs going, as long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it.
Thomas Sowell is
a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.
tsowell.com.
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