This started as a comment to Skips remarks on Neal Kurks bill HB 1658: ‘An act limiting Financial Assistance for mothers who have additional children while on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). As usual, a few off the cuff remark exceeded the medium so I have promoted them here–and then some.
It should be interesting to see if the Democrats try to frame Rep Kurk, the sole sponsor of HB 1658, as another Republican Extremist. Ideologically he is a GOP moderate, his NHHRA ratings put him near the RINO category, and if anything he fits the Democrats Free Stater legislative profile (another left wing narrative) more than anything.
But he has gotten a 100% rating from NARAL and as far as I can tell supports wide open access to contraceptives. So he’s all in on reproductive freedom, and fully embraces the lefts doctrine, right up to the point where it starts to cost taxpayers buckets of money–and then it stops. With great freedom comes great responsibility. Rep Kurk understands that sometimes people need help, but that we are not meant to be slaves to other peoples freedoms, including so called reproductive freedoms, and to that end we have HB 1658.
All Representative Kurk is doing is trying to put the ‘T” back in TANF. You know the part that means ‘Temporary?” It’s temporary assistance. Temporary. Like, can you watch my kids for the weekend while I find a job, or enter into a relationship in which the father works and raises his own children, or until I can find family or friends willing to help me out. It is not temporary as in, I need to have another child because if I don’t my temporary assistance might run out.
So Kurk’s bill is a disincentive, which Democrats typically love. It says, hey! you might get back on your own two feet a bit faster if you could just find a way to keep your legs together; that way the state doesn’t have to continuously embrace the social engineering equivalent of recapitulation theory.
Remember that from high School Biology? Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny. It is the dis-proven biological theory that as an organism develops from an embryo into its full grown form, it goes through phases representing successive stages in the evolution of its ancestors. It may not work in Biology but as a theory in left wing social engineering evolution it works just fine. Dependent children of dependent unwed mothers, on indefinite “Temporary” public assistance, inevitably become dependent themselves, producing the next generation of social dependents. I call it the Ascension of Democrat Voters. (Sorry I didn’t have time to work up a graphic.)
Women tend to vote Democrat. Single women in particular. Single mothers on public assistance vote Democrat in droves as do dependent adult children who thanks to Democrats can be adults, children, and dependent, all at the same time. This is not however meant to be taken as a sign that 60 years of left wing policy–demonstrably proven to create the very situations in which public assistance can be politicized as a need or a right–is akin to an expensive and politically motivated, multi-generational ground war that sacrifices the freedom and responsibility of millions just to make more disgruntled registered democrats, except that it is. The war on poverty was never about ending poverty in our lifetimes. It was about institutionalizing it as a get-out-the vote campaign for the Democrat party. The Neo-liberal theory of democratization; invade a class, make it dependent on government, and then insist it vote for them to keep the gravy boat full.
If Democrats really cared about poverty they’d accept that government can’t alleviate it. They would embrace the well worn maxim that social distress always rises to meet the publicly funded services available to reduce it. And they would find and embrace legislative remedies to deny people their inclination to seek the path of least resistance.
But don’t hold your breath. People who earn their own money have been known to develop an annoying attachment to it, and become easily disenfranchised by those ideologically inclined to separate them from it. The left will never embrace anything that could cost them a captive constituency and the votes that go with it. Nor will they accept their “Margret Sanger” birth control heritage if it presents similar risks to their pool of voters. (This is also why they will never do anything that actually creates jobs unless they are dues paying union jobs.)
So any Democrat objection to HB 1658 should be understood in its proper context. It is not about benefits, or alleviating distress, or any kind of freedom, it is about sustaining distress, about advocating another lifestyle choice that creates a victim class they can agitate for political power.
