Okay, I admit it. I work and I hate paying taxes.
I hate the bi-weekly assessments that get taken out of my check. I hate that the IRS hassles me every year. I hate seeing my hard-earned dollars going to Uncle Sam so that he may use them to support military massacres in Latin America.
I also hate that my money is used to pay for a doltish Congress that breeds the likes of a Sen. Jesse Helms or a Congressman Tom Delay, to subsidize farmers, to invest in the many bureaucratic entities that seem to be more counterproductive and cruel than helpful. And currently, like a growing number of Americans, I, too, hate it going to the welfare system.
That last sentence is almost exactly the same as a line used in the opening portion of an essay by Peter Edelman that appears in the latest edition of The Atlantic Monthly. Edelman started his commentary by discussing his (and almost every other American's) eternal hatred for the so-called system of economic dependency.
The welfare system, he asserted, is one whose benefits have never been enough "to lift people out of poverty," but is in need of dire reform and re-evaluation.
Edelman, a former Robert Kennedy aid, did all he could to help foster some new legislation as President Bill Clinton's assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. That is, until September of 1996 when he resigned in protest.
Last August, President Clinton signed into law an historic bill, which aimed "to end welfare as we know it."
Pressured by a right-wing Republican Congress and nightly public opinion polls (which have, for years, supposedly represented people like you and me who have developed a malevolence for a program which began during the New Deal era), President Clinton signed one of the meanest and most irresponsible pieces of legislation that has ever come out of his office.
The legislation posed so-called quick-fix policies for a "troubled program," like two-years-and-you're-off type remedies and attempts to "force" welfare recipients to look for jobs and to stop relying on government help to survive by issuing a lot of "tough love" rhetoric.
The new law serves to knock off thousands of children into food shelters when their daddies or mommies don't go out and find jobs.
While Republicans and the so-called "New" Democrats go into their soundbite mode, issuing statements like, "The new bill is going to change America's underclass behavior of dependency into one of a new work ethic," I am going to sit right here and inform you that it will be an utter and dangerous failure.
Yes, I am angry about the state of those who are part of the lower portion of the social-economic scale, and yes, I hate the fact that I have helped to subsidize a program that has not eliminated the problem of poverty that those who came 60 years before us set out to end.
But I am upset about it, not destructive.
As a society and as a people, we have moved away from the political consciousness of wishing to rid ourselves of poverty and human suffering, to the point that our main emphasis is on cleaning up the government and balancing the federal budget.
This piece of legislation is a reflection of that change. Right now, many of us are preoccupied with the notion of cleaning up government entitlements, so that when we are in our last days we will have a system available to help support us.
We are searching for solutions to give us that security. We are worried about where our taxes are going (not to mention our declining wages and corporate downsizing), and we want action.
This is what they have given us.
Contreras is a senior history and
English major.