Pregnant South African women binge drinking in order to get more welfare

A horrible article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Pregnant South African women are deliberately drinking large quantities of alcohol to harm their unborn babies in a bid to earn more welfare money, it has been claimed.

Expectant mothers living in the Eastern Cape, one of the poorest areas in South Africa, are bingeing on a ‘moonshine’ type drink which contains battery acid – with some drinking up to five and six bottles a day.

It has been reported they do it to claim a disability benefit from the government – using their disabled children as a source of income.

Video taken by Sky News shows a mother drinking a homemade brew called ‘kah-kah’ while heavily pregnant.

[...]The addictive milky brown brew is made from yeast, water and battery acid.

[...]The World Health Organisation said there has been an increase in the number of babies born with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) in the area  since 2002.

The syndrome is also the most common birth defect in South Africa.

The irreversible symptoms mean children suffer from speech problems, physical deformities, learning difficulties and behavioural issues.

Families receive 250 South African rand ($29 US) per child, per month but a disabled child brings in around 1200 rand a month ($138 US).

It’s very important for Christians to understand that policies that sound compassionate can actually provide incentives to people to do more bad things in order to get more money from the government. A good rule of thumb is this: whatever you tax, you get less of. And whatever you subsidize, you get more of. We shouldn’t be paying people to do evil things. We should be encouraging people who do good things instead. It’s important that we not just feel good, but that we do good.

Filed under: News, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Baby, Child, Disability, Pregnancy, Single-Mother, Socialism, South Africa, Unborn Child, Welfare

Surprise! Social Security ran a $47.8 billion dollar deficit in 2012

CNS News reports.

Excerpt:

The Social Security program ran a $47.8 billion deficit in fiscal 2012 as the program brought in $725.429 billion in cash and paid $773.247 for benefits and overhead expenses, according to official data published by Social Security Administration.

The Social Security Administration also released new data revealing that the number of workers collecting disability benefits hit a record 8,827,795 in December–up from 8,805,353 in November.

The overall number of Social Security program beneficiaries—including retired workers, dependent family members and survivors and disabled workers and their dependent family members—also hit a record in December, climbing from 56,658,978 in November to 56,758,185 in December.

In 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was an average of 112.556 million full-time workers in the United States, of whom 17.806 million worked full-time for local, state or federal government. That left an average of only 94.750 million full-time private sector workers in the country.

That means that for every 1.67 Americans who worked full-time in the private sector in 2011, there is now 1 person collecting benefits from the Social Security administration.

There are about 310 million people in the United States.

Now consider that the same people who make you wait in line at the post office and the department of motor vehicles are teaching your children in public schools. What are the children learning there? Are they learning marketable skills so that they will be able to get private sector jobs and pay for these programs? No, they are learning about recreational sex, global warming, feminism, gay activism and other leftist dogma. They learn how to feel offended, how to blame men, how to blame white people, how to blame job creators (“the rich”), and how to blame the our armed forces.

We have borrowed over one trillion dollars from future generations to pay for these entitlement programs, and there is no reason to believe that a bunch of brainwashed children will be up to the task of paying for those entitlements. We shouldn’t be aborting 1 million unborn children a year either – we should be marrying and raising them with two opposite sex parents. The welfare state is just not sustainable when we destroy the supply line of new law-abiding productive workers. We have a growing public sector parasite feeding on a shrinking private sector host. It just won’t work for much longer.

Filed under: News, Child Abuse, Debt, Deficit, Disability, Economy, Entitlements, Medicare, Private Sector, Public Sector, Slavery, Social Security, Spending, Sustainability, Sustainable, Unemployment, Welfare, Welfare State

Assessing Obama’s claims about income inequality in America

From Zero Hedge.

Excerpt:

Tonight’s stunning financial piece de resistance comes from Wyatt Emerich of The Cleveland Current. In what is sure to inspire some serious ire among all those who once believed Ronald Reagan that it was the USSR that was the “Evil Empire”, Emmerich analyzes disposable income and economic benefits among several key income classes and comes to the stunning (and verifiable) conclusion that “a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year.” And that excludes benefits from Supplemental Security Income disability checks. America is now a country which punishes those middle-class people who not only try to work hard, but avoid scamming the system. Not surprisingly, it is not only the richest and most audacious thieves that prosper – it is also the penny scammers at the very bottom of the economic ladder that rip off the middle class each and every day, courtesy of the world’s most generous entitlement system. Perhaps if Reagan were alive today, he would wish to modify the object of his once legendary remark.

And it gets worse for those who don’t report their income:

If the one-week-a-month worker maintains an unreported cash-only job on the side, the deal gets better than a regular $60,000-a-year job.  In this scenario, you maintain a reportable, payroll deductible, low-income job for federal tax purposes. This allows you to easily establish your qualification for all these welfare programs. Then your black-market job gives you additional cash without interfering with your benefits. Some economists estimate there is one trillion in unreported income each year in the United States.

This really got me thinking. Just how much money could I get if I set out to deliberately scam the system? I soon realized that getting a low-paying minimum wage job would set the stage for far more welfare benefits than you could earn in a real job, if you were weilling to cheat. Even if you dodn’t cheat, you could do almost as well working one week a month at minimum wage than busting a gut at a $60,000-a-year job.

SSI pays $8,088 per year for each “disabled” family member. A person can be deemed “disabled” if thy are totally lacking in the cultural and educational skills needed to be employable in the workforce.

If you add $24,262 a year for three disability checks, the lowest paid welfare family would now have far more take-home income than the $60,000-a-year family.

Why am I getting up early every morning and going in to work to pay for the lifestyles of these other people? Well – this is how the Democrats are able to get elected. They buy  votes from the people who are dependent on government by paying them off with money taken from people who work for a living. And they think that this Robin Hood redistribution of wealth is noble and compassion. I am “greedy” because I want to tax cuts to keep more of what I earn.

Filed under: News, Barack Obama, Community Organizer, Dependence, Disability, Government, Income Inequality, Independence, Liberty, Marxism, Medicaid, Progressive Taxation, Redistribution of Wealth, Scam, Social Programs, Socialism, Spreading the Wealth Around, Taxes, Unemployment, Wealth, Wealth Redistribution, Welfare, Welfare State, Work

How psychology medicalizes character flaws to remove personal responsibility

Story from Town Hall from moderate conservative George Will. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s encyclopedia of supposed mental “disorders,” is being revised. The 16 years since the last revision evidently were prolific in producing new afflictions. The revision may aggravate the confusion of moral categories.

[...]This DSM defines as “personality disorders” attributes that once were considered character flaws. “Antisocial personality disorder” is “a pervasive pattern of disregard for … the rights of others … callous, cynical … an inflated and arrogant self-appraisal.” “Histrionic personality disorder” is “excessive emotionality and attention-seeking.” “Narcissistic personality disorder” involves “grandiosity, need for admiration … boastful and pretentious.” And so on.

If every character blemish or emotional turbulence is a “disorder” akin to a physical disability, legal accommodations are mandatory. Under federal law, “disabilities” include any “mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities”; “mental impairments” include “emotional or mental illness.” So there might be a legal entitlement to be a jerk.

[...]Furthermore, intellectual chaos can result from medicalizing the assessment of character. Today’s therapeutic ethos, which celebrates curing and disparages judging, expresses the liberal disposition to assume that crime and other problematic behaviors reflect social or biological causation. While this absolves the individual of responsibility, it also strips the individual of personhood, and moral dignity.

James Q. Wilson, America’s pre-eminent social scientist, has noted how “abuse excuse” threatens the legal system and society’s moral equilibrium. Writing in National Affairs quarterly (“The Future of Blame”), Wilson notes that genetics and neuroscience seem to suggest that self-control is more attenuated — perhaps to the vanishing point — than our legal and ethical traditions assume.

Related to our recent discussions about personal responsibility and blaming others.

Filed under: News, Accountability, Character, Disability, Disease, Drugs, DSM, Ethics, George Will, Irresponsibility, Medicine, Morality, Personal Responsibility, Psychology, Responsibility, Sin, Sinful, Social Science, Sociology, Therapy