Curing American poverty

The Associated Press recently conducted a study based on all manner of government statistics and national surveys and determined that Americans’ economic security is low compared to prior decades.  They based their determination on how many Americans have either lived below the poverty level, taken government assistance or been unemployed or a combination of the three.  Aside from the government assistance, I’ve been there.  Many of us have.

The point of the study was to try and figure out how to make Americans more economically secure but they sidestepped a major factor.  Many Americans are economically insecure for the very reason that they’re trapped on public assistance.

We hear the president and others complain about a shrinking middle class.  If the middle class is shrinking it’s because some are moving up, not down.  The poverty rate was arrested by LBJ’s Great Society.  After a decade of decline in the poverty rate prior to the big social programs the poverty rate has remained pretty much steady since the mid-‘60s.  It fluctuates a point or two depending on whether or not we’re in a recession but the percentage of people in poverty hovers between 12 and 15 percent.  From 1959 until the Great Society the poverty rate dropped from around 22 percent to 14 percent.  Since then we’ve sort of been locked in a holding pattern.

Before I make this next point I want you to suspend your emotions and think logically.  Poverty, by and large, is the product of bad choices.  Yes, I know there are some exceptions but the vast number of poor people are poor because of the choices they’ve made in life.  Whether or not you’re poor is based largely on whether or not you can find and hold a job.  The recession notwithstanding, many people can’t hold a job either because of their personal habits – i.e.: drugs and/or alcohol – because they don’t show up for work or because of their attitudes while they’re at work.

Plenty of people show up for a job interview ill-prepared, improperly dressed and lacking basic personal hygiene.  These are easy fixes but for reasons unknown some people don’t want to be told what to do.  But a major culprit of cyclical poverty is the very Great Society that was designed to lift people out of it.  You know the drill.  We have people now in third generation dependence because that’s the way they were raised.  Living free of government shackles is not even an option for too many Americans.  It should be.

Conservatives judge success of their policies by how many people are off welfare.  Liberals judge their success by how many people are on it.  Take the food stamp program, for example.  The number of people on food stamps has exploded during the Obama administration and they crow about it.  It’s a national disgrace.  Abuse is rampant and Obama made it even easier to get on the program.  He justified that by saying he needed to do it because of the recession but think about that for a moment.  If there’s a level at which one needs public assistance then hard times will bring more people to that level.  We don’t need to go out to the street to greet them.

We also need to come to terms with the fact that plenty of people are poor and happy.  Elitists love to look down their noses at poor people and assume they can’t be happy unless they surround themselves with the trappings of wealth.

I’m all about showing poor people a way out but first they have to want to go.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Stop encouraging laziness

A story came across the news wire and my senior research analyst brought it to me in the studio while I was on the air.  It was an AP story out of Atwood, Mich. about how farmers were complaining they wouldn’t be able to bring in the cherry and apple crops without illegal aliens.  American workers, they claimed, were either not available or not willing to work.

George W. Bush was fond of saying that illegals are doing the jobs Americans just won’t do.  The truth is illegals are simply doing some of the jobs Americans won’t do for the money.  Americans won’t live 15 to a room just so they can find employment.  There’s not a job in America that Americans didn’t used to do before the illegal aliens came in, undercut them and stole their jobs.

That’s not to say that the American worker is blameless.  Atwood, Mich. is about four-and-a-half hours from Detroit where the unemployment rate is 16 percent, more than double the national rate.  One would think that Detroit and Atwood might be a great match.  Farmers are looking for workers and Detroiters are looking for work.  So why are farmers in Atwood still resorting to hiring illegal aliens?

Part of the problem is some of the farmers are lying.  The unemployment rate in Michigan is 8.4 percent.  Detroit may be driving that number higher than it would normally be but there’s no doubt that workers are available for the farmers of Atwood.  Some farmers would rather deal with illegals because they can pay them low wages or even lower wages if they pay cash under the table.  But part of the blame should be placed on the shoulders of the workers themselves, or, should I say, the government that encourages them not to work.

Before the sequester, unemployment benefits had been extended so that many unemployed workers could draw unemployment benefits for 99 weeks.  That’s nearly two years!  As a result of the sequester the number of weeks was cut back.  Total benefits vary by state but in Michigan you can still conceivably stay on unemployment for 67 weeks.  That’s almost 16 months!  Granted, unemployment benefits are substantially less than what one was making while employed but you’re also not working.  There’s something to be said about doing nothing and getting paid.

I’ve never drawn unemployment.  I don’t begrudge anyone who has.  I’ve just chosen not to do it and I’ve been unemployed a number of times.  This is radio, after all.  The worst time came when I was program director of a station and got washed out in a format change.  I was let go with no severance pay.  I worked on straight commission for an ad agency and made a whopping $100 in three months.  It never even occurred to me to file for unemployment.

In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.  It was my lack of success in sales that prompted me to pack up everything I owned and move to Nashville without a job.  Within two days I had a fulltime job selling memberships at a health club and a part-time gig at a radio station.  Within three months I was back in radio full time.

The point is, poverty is a great motivator.  As long as we’re paying people not to work, they won’t.  Time was when Americans would do what needed to be done to put bread on the table.  Nobody’s going to drive four-and-a-half hours if they’re getting paid to sit at home but they’ll drive a lot further than that if it’s the only way they eat.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

GOP: Don't overplay your hand

Republicans have a nasty habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  Just when you think they may have it won they find a way to lose it.  The latest trio of issues swirling around the White House might very well be President Obama’s undoing if only the Republicans don’t overplay their hand.  One of the three is not really a scandal.  Can the Republicans tell which one?

Some conspiracy theorists believe the entire IRS scandal is a red herring, a diversion to distract us from the Benghazi scandal.  Were that true the Democrats would had to have planned the entire scheme two years in advance because that’s when the IRS started targeting conservative groups.

Outgoing IRS Commissioner Steve Miller now claims they grouped the conservative applications together so that one group wouldn’t be approved while another was being reviewed.  No one thought to ask Mr. Miller one simple question.  How did he know which groups were conservative?  That simple question would’ve boxed him in a corner.  Once again, the Republicans wasted a golden opportunity.

But where a lot of Republicans and conservatives are overreaching is on the Fox News story.  Like the AP story, it’s not a scandal.  It may have been heavy-handed treatment by the administration but, so far, there’s nothing to indicate anything illegal.

In the case of reporter James Rosen from Fox News, he was reporting information on North Korea that was classified.  Whether or not he knew it was classified is another matter but this administration – any administration – is obligated to plug such leaks and that’s what they did.

They accessed security badge records at the State Department from Rosen and matched his movements to department employees.  They obtained a search warrant for his e-mails and between the two found the leak.  Now Fox News is outraged that the administration was targeting their reporter.  The fact is had he not been broadcasting classified information there would’ve been no investigation.

As I’ve stated before, the administration’s investigation into the Associated Press over another leak pertaining to a CIA operation in Yemen is what’s driving the mainstream media to actually do their job on the IRS and Benghazi scandals.  The last thing the Republicans need to be doing is trying to equate the AP and Fox News issues with the real scandals.  Once all the facts come to light and it’s clear the administration was simply trying to plug leaks the Republicans cannot have been on the wrong side of those issues if they want to be on the right side of the real scandals.

Obviously the IRS was targeting not only conservative groups but conservative individuals.  Who knows how deep or how high this scandal goes.  We do know that senior White House officials were aware of the Inspector General’s investigation.  Saying they never told the president stretches credulity. 

We also now know the State Department gutted the original CIA talking points on Benghazi and inserted their own, including the ridiculous notion that the attack was simply the product of a YouTube video protest gone bad.  The simple question is who made up the excuse about the video and why?

If the Republicans allow themselves to get sucked into the Fox News story as some sort of scandal they run the risk of destroying the credibility of the real scandals and that would be a real shame.

This is probably as close as we will ever get to leveraging an issue to make fundamental changes in our tax system and scale back the beast known as the Internal Revenue Service.  Please, Republicans, don’t blow it.

How Benghazi, the IRS and the AP are all connected

There are three stories swirling around in the press right now and I'm going to tell you how they're all connected.  There's the Benghazi cover-up.  We'll get back to that one in a moment.  There's the IRS story in which the IRS was targeting conservatives.  Then there's the AP story.  The Obama justice department subpoenaed phone records from the AP ostensibly in search of a leak about a CIA operation in Yemen.  This is the story that connects the other two.

You see, the Associated Press and most of the mainstream media view the subpoenaed phone records as overreach, at the very least, and a gross violation of the sacred bond between a journalist and his or her source, at the very worst.  Once anonymous sources understand the government will violate that bond whenever they please then secret sources will cease to exist.  The mainstream media types view this as an abuse of power by the Obama administration and they know that anonymous sources are the bedrock of investigative journalism.

The AP story may not yield anything criminal by the administration.  After all, they saw a CIA operation compromised by someone who leaked information to the Associated Press and they're probably within their rights to plug that leak.  The White House denying any knowledge of the details of the story is laughable but that's another issue.  But what that story has done is it has made the mainstream media suspicious of the White House.

The IRS story, although it only involves conservative victims at this point, is troubling to the mainstream media because they know an administration powerful enough to sic the IRS on conservatives is powerful enough to sic the IRS on them, if they ever have a mind to.  That's why they're covering this story.

ProPublica, which bills itself as an investigative journalism organization, is really little more than a front group for George Soros and his liberal agenda.  They are funded, in part, by Soros' Open Society Foundation.  And they partner with practically every mainstream media outlet in the country including NPR and all the major news networks, as well as many establishment newspapers.  Pretty scary.  They have now admitted to getting nine confidential applications from the IRS last year and using them in hit pieces they tried to pass off as investigative journalism.  As the noose tightens on the IRS scandal it was inevitable that ProPublica would be exposed.  They tried to get out in front of the story to pass themselves off as whistle-blowers when, in fact, they're part of the entire ugly conspiracy to target conservatives.

ProPublica's involvement in this nasty affair is a not-so-subtle reminder to the rest of the mainstream media that the thin line between their being used by this administration and serious journalism is far thinner than they were previously willing to admit.  They feel sullied by it all.  They've awakened to the sad fact that they had become little more than apologists for this administration instead of holding it accountable, as is their duty as journalists.  The news in recent days that the heads of CBS News and ABC News both have siblings who not only work in the Obama White House but are directly involved in the Benghazi affair surely are jolting enough even for a jaundiced news media.

The AP story and the IRS story have caused the mainstream media to double back and start asking more questions about Benghazi.  What first appeared to them as conservative hysteria over minor details is now being viewed through the newly-grinded lens of an administration that will disregard any law to get what it wants or to cover up its indiscretions.  Here we are eight months after the Benghazi attacks and the major networks are just now demanding to see the e-mails pertaining to the talking points on Benghazi.

The AP story will probably pan out to be a non-issue but it will prove to be the catalyst that finally opened the eyes of the mainstream media about what's been going on for the last four-plus years.

For the first time ever the mainstream media don't trust Barack Obama.  Welcome to the club.