Successful, self-sufficient blacks just don't make very good news copy.

meh.
My moms used food stamps when I was a kid. We were poor then. We were a young family with my dad in the Marines.
Most families that start out on food stamps get off them after a few years. The poor are not terminally poor. They are transitory poor.
The true least of these are those involuntarily permanently poor.
Nathan

Few remember that the overwhelming majority of blacks were too proud to take food stamps when the program was first rolled out. In fact the Johnson administration proudly deployed thousands of "evangelists" to persuade blacks to use them. Government aid programs are about dependency, not help, by their very nature. (You don't get a bigger department budget next year by making people not need your program anymore.)

Yeah, that sounds like a bunch of crap. Sounds like they're trying to justify their own existence, at the expense of blacks. Shocker!

intriguing thought, julia
'gov't aid programs are about dependency, not help, by their very nature."

i've been thinking about the gleaning law in OT Israel for a while (Lev 19:18ff?, also Ruth) and any correlation in principle to modern economic policy. The law has (wealthier) landowners refrain from harvesting a portion of their crops for the sake of the poor among them. This to me is a federally legalized welfare program. But the exceptions are two, and to me also huge:
1. The poorer work to get the free stuff. They have to go to the crop and glean it themselves. Not terrifically hard work, seeing that they don't do any of the seeding, tilling, irrigation, what have you.
2. The benevolence is on a personal level, and in a context of a relationship.

In these two the welfare program today is not the same.

jeff

jeff...that's what we call "club level" charity in econ, if not personal. federal involvement negates the possibility for personal/club charity (and is not charitable at all in its own implementation)--crowding out opportunities for charity and love.

julia and judy are spot-on about government programs justifying their existence: if you don't spend all the money you're budgeted in a given year, you get less budget the next--exactly the opposite of the residual claimant in a profit-driven enterprise.

Exactly! It is so easy to overlook how government aid has been actual competition for the Church's influence: do you want to go to a local assembly with accountability that will give you a "get a job, stop sleeping around" lecture when you get help with your rent, or do you want to live in subsidized housing where they tell you never to make more than a certain amount of money? Which is a recipe for long-term success? I'm sure a smarter person than I could correlate muted/stunted numerical church growth to the advent of wide-scale government "help." And of course "help" from the government is almost always ultimately about control. Just ask all the folks who were sterilized in the 1940s-1960s.

jeff...sure, man. onlyshawn awt g-to-the-mail diggity dawt cawwwwm.

how's that for some obfuscation? :)