Free Shelter: Book 2, A Long Days Night by Ira Tabankin Page B

on the working people’s backs. They have a home to live in, which they usually trash since they’re not paying for it. Their children get free schooling, usually with free breakfast and lunch (even during the summer months) provided by those of us who work for a living and pay our taxes. In many cases, the poor live better than the working middle class. The young of the poor don’t have jobs, most don’t want a job, yet they can afford to wear sneakers that cost $150 a pair. You’ve been successful in taking respect for authority away from entire groups and a generation of people.  Do you know that the average welfare payment for a family of four was more than the average salary of those working? Welfare was never designed to be a lifestyle, it was designed to help tide people over till they got another job. We’ve had entire generations want nothing more than to go on welfare. Parents teach their children how to ‘game’ the system. Teenage girls have a baby to get a check, they have more babies to get larger checks.  What happens to those children when they grow up in a house, not a home, a cold house where their mother had them, not out of love, but for a larger check? Your ideas bring additional pain and suffering to the people the programs were supposed to help. Welfare has created a new class of people who have no desire to give anything back to society. We’ve spent over a trillion dollars on the war on poverty, the result is we have a higher percentage of poor today than we had when the various programs started. You can’t just throw money at a problem. It’s like training wild animals to act cute to get fed, they soon forget how to find their own food and can never be released back into the wild.”
     
    Ricky smirked at us, “Tony, the problem is we’ve never allocated enough money to solve the problem and attacked it like a full fledged war. If we cut the military budget by 50 or 75% combined with new taxes on the 1% we’d have enough money to finally bring everyone out of poverty. Once everyone in the world comes together under a common set of laws, we won’t need a massive military. Everyone has to realize we have to work together and share resources. Everyone has to pay their fair share in order for the world to pull itself out of the current depression.”
     
    I’m getting angry at my son-in-law, “Ricky, without the military who’s going to defend us?”
     
    “From who? If everyone shared, if everyone were under one flag there would be no need for wars. There’d be no senseless wars and deaths anymore. The world would save trillions of dollars which could be spent improving everyone’s standard of living. We could turn this planet into a real utopia. We need to force the governments of the world to resign and turn governing over to the UN.”
     
    I shake my head and feel nothing but disgust, “Ricky, when you find this mysterious utopia call me, I’d like to see it. You keep forgetting to factor human nature into your equations. You’ve become like the college professors who’ve never worked in the real world teaching how to solve the world’s ills without any experience. Human nature prevents mankind from ever becoming a utopia. You’re in your mid-thirties, haven't you learn anything about human nature?”
     
    Ricky’s face turns crimson, “They all have PHDs which is far more education than you have. Their theories are correct, the problem is people like you and Tony don’t try to live the right way.  You’re just like the other 1%, you don’t give their theories the time they need to work.”
     
    “Ricky, that’s true, I have a BA from College and a Ph.D. in street and logic. You’re missing the street and logic. Without them, you’re left with nothing but theories that have been proven failures. Where are your new ideas?   Increasing taxes is something the left says every day, it’s been tried, it hasn’t worked. Even JFK cut taxes to stimulate the economy.