Opinion

Take take take

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It was in 1850 that a French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, warned that “under pretense of organization, regulation, protection or encouragement, the law may take from one party in order to give to another, help itself to the wealth acquired by all the classes that it may increase that of one class, whether that of the agriculturists, the manufacturers, the ship owners, or artists and comedians.”

He said of this “lawful plunder” that the people may end it “or they may desire to take part in it. Woe to the nation where this latter thought prevails amongst the masses.”

Woe, in other words, to the United States in 2012, an orgy of corporate welfare, cronyism, subsidies, handouts and bailouts. Economists call those who game the system for income they haven’t earned “rent seekers.” “Moochers” is the refreshing term preferred by Charles J. Sykes, a Milwaukee talk-radio host and a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. In his new book, “A Nation of Moochers: America’s Addiction to Getting Something for Nothing” (St. Martin’s Press), he calls out the myriad breeds of Americans — from the Goldman Sachs C-suite down to able-bodied welfare recipients who feel neither shame nor obligation — who have won a place at the bottomless national trough.

BAILOUTS AND HANDOUTS

The mulligan given to both sides in the mortgage debacle — bailed-out banks and homeowners — that inspired Tea Party fury isn’t even the most disturbing case of American mooching. Bailouts are (supposedly) temporary and sometimes get paid back. The bank portion of the $432 billion TARP bailout actually has earned the federal government a profit, though because of losses in the auto bailout and elsewhere, the program will cost us $19 billion.

The more shocking ongoing costs don’t make headlines. Just one of the many federal ethanol tax subsidies, the one George W. Bush signed into law in 2004, cost us $30 billion before Congress killed it last year. Total federal agriculture subsidies paid out between 1995 and 2009 are estimated at $250 billion, mostly benefiting big farms. A major beneficiary? Agri-giants like Archer Daniels Midland, which has successfully bought politicians from both parties for 40 years and has received billions worth of federal largesse in return.

A government controlled by ADM becomes an ATM, and those who know the password simply step up and help themselves. President Obama’s indigent aunt, Zeituni Onyango, who lives in public housing and receives $700 in disability checks, told Boston TV station WBZ, “I didn’t ask for it. They gave it to me. Ask your system.” Then she “said flatly that she owes this country nothing in return.” Onyango, a native Kenyan, lived in this country illegally for 10 years, six of them after being ordered deported, before finally winning asylum in 2010.

After the hoopla about 1990s welfare reform died, welfare quietly rebuilt its empire. By 2007, Sykes writes, real per- capita welfare spending was 77% higher than it was when Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in 1981.

Any stigma attached is long gone. Sykes writes more with disbelief than indignation that some universities are openly encouraging their students to go on welfare, while hipsters wielding college degrees happily go on food stamps with which to buy their organic locally grown farmer’s-market greens.

A 30-year-old art grad student who spends her food stamps at Whole Foods told Salon.com, “I’m eating better than I ever have before . . . at first I thought, ‘Why should I be on food stamps?’ Here I am, this educated person who went to art school, and there are a lot of people who need them more. But then I realized I need them, too.”

THE DEATH OF SHAME

It’s so easy to slide from “want” to “need” to “have a right to” when shame is dead and the corpse of individual responsibility lies next to it.

In the 1960s, only about 30% of those eligible for welfare took the checks. Married Columbia professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven led a campaign to erase the stigma attached to welfare and urged a push to get more poor people on the dole, saying they wanted to “sever the connection between economic effort and outcome; they wanted, instead, to guarantee a high level of living as a matter of right.”

They were met by what now appears to be shocking resistance. The president of the Urban League, Whitney Young, Piven said, “gave us a long speech about how it was more important to get one black woman into a job as an airline stewardess than it was to get 50 poor families onto welfare.” What a dolt!

Marrying their old-school Bolshevism to late-’60s unrest, they said the poor were neglecting their untapped power — “their ability to menace and riot.” They openly called for “rent strikes, crime, civic disruptions.” By 1971, 90% of those eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children had enrolled in it. “Black neighborhoods started falling to pieces,” commentator John McWhorter wrote. “I wish Piven and Cloward had stayed obscure teachers instead of helping to ruin the lives of, for example, some of my relatives.”

Yet the Obama administration is proud of its giveaways: Obama’s undersecretary of Agriculture, Kevin Concannon, thinks that though the program is growing at a record rate — 31 million were on food stamps the day Obama was elected, 42 million two years later — he’d like it to grow even faster. Giddily, he envisions 57 million Americans shopping for groceries with Uncle Sam’s plastic.

But why stop at free food? Thanks to the Universal Service Fee on your cellphone bill, 1.4 million Americans are receiving free or subsidized cellphone service. More than 70% of the “poor” own cellphones.

If there’s a common thread running through the diverse examples in Sykes’ book, it’s that it’s easy to see how such programs got started. It’s always, “Let’s help the poor,” “let’s help the children,” or, quintessentially, “let’s help the poor children.” Fine, but how to sell it to the middle class? Invite them to the party, too. And of course keep the champagne flowing for the upper class. A Tax Foundation survey found that 70% of us are receiving more in government benefits than we pay in taxes.

GIVING TO THE RICH

Sometimes the process of expanding an anti-poverty program into a free-for-all takes years. Not the ones dealing with the housing bubble, though, which the Obama administration has been cursing and reinflating with alternate breaths. The HAMP (Home Affordable Mortgage Program) was announced, in February 2009, as a way to keep poor people from being thrown out into the street. But in order to win political support, the numbers climbed into absurdity, to the point where Obama announced in March 2010 that someone earning up to $186,000 a year, with a $729,000 mortgage, qualified for federal help. This, in a country where the average home sells for $242,000.

The middle and upper-middle classes benefit hugely from the sacrosanct mortgage interest tax deduction, but they also pocket billions more in little-discussed insurance payouts. Along the Gulf Coast hurricane belt, private insurers have been driven away by the government, which provides the heavily discounted National Flood Insurance Program to owners of 5.5 million properties, with a maximum payout of $1 million per. As a direct result, people gambling with public money insist on building waterfront property in places where there is a good chance they’ll be destroyed. It’s the construction philosophy of the indefatigable optimist known as “King of Swamp Castle” in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”: “When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.”

One Alabama owner of a $153,000 house rebuilt it so many times that he pocketed $2.3 million in insurance claims. A Houston home with a worth of $116,000 generated $1.6 million in payouts.

Naturally, most waterfront dwellings aren’t owned by the poor. If you don’t count 2005, the year of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in the years from 1998 to 2008, the wealthiest counties in the country filed 3 1/2 times more claims and received more than a billion dollars in claim payments than the poorest counties, reported the Institute for Policy Integrity.

Using Katrina as an excuse, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco helped herself to $564,000 to remodel her staff space. Reported Citizens Against Government Waste, “The newly refurbished office space . . . includes hookups and mounts for two flat-screen televisions, Swedish granite countertops, walnut paneling and frosted laminated glass.”

Even the wealthiest of the wealthy get government handouts just for doing jobs they’d do anyway. Goldman Sachs is snout-to-snout with Ben Affleck. Most states have tax credits for movie production, based on the false theory that this spending is a good way to stimulate job growth. In fact, skilled workers simply swoop in from out of town, buy a few hotel rooms and meals, then disappear.

Massachusetts, which has one of the most generous incentive programs, calculated that in 2009 only 222 jobs were created in the state, at a taxpayer cost of $325,000 each. The Associated Press estimated that a quarter of the tax breaks simply went to cover the paychecks of millionaire Hollywood stars of the movies that filmed in the Bay State — films like “The Fighter,” “The Social Network” and “The Town.” Nationwide, film-production subsidies total some $1.5 billion, a sum that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates would have paid for 23,500 middle-school teachers, 26,600 firefighters and 22,800 police officers.

REWARDS FOR EVERYONE

When college students move into tent cities, bang on drums and demand their loans be forgiven and properly soul-nurturing jobs be provided to them, they’re just playing the mooching game.

Who can say the system is fair — that you need merit and hard work to succeed? Simply establishing membership in a protected interest group seems like a surer bet, and “unemployed Berkeley Environmental Studies graduate” seems no less deserving of a government check than, say, “owner of former rice field.” (A Washington Post study found that people who do no farming at all received $1.3 billion in payouts from 2000 to 2006. A Texas contractor who tried to give back the $1,300 a year he received in payments because his land was once used to grow rice was told not to bother because the money would just go to other non-farmers who owned former farmland.)

Are we, as the pundits and pols keep telling us, “bitterly divided?” Why wouldn’t we be, when so much wealth derives from special pleading? “This odious perversion of the law,” Bastiat warned, “is a perpetual source of hatred and discord.”

Speaking of Occupy Wall Street, President Obama said last fall, “We want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do is rewarded.”

He contradicted that sentence with his next one, an invitation to mooch: “And that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers — that those folks aren’t rewarded.”

Bastiat saw through all that when someone told him, “Your doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty. I go on to fraternity.”

Bastiat answered: “The second part of your program will destroy the first.”