I grew up with a good work ethic. My Dad was a farmer and his dad was a farmer. On my mom’s side her dad was a house painter. Now I’m a house painter. I can truthfully say, I’m most happy when I’m working.

I have been reading Beyond Biden, by Newt Gingrich. He has a few chapters on this subject of work and welfare. I will just give you the sections that I highlighted.

• Historically, America has been on the side of earned freedom, and the heart of that is work.
• We need to help poor people learn how to get a job, and to get better and better jobs.
• Benjamin Franklin: “It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is a miserable man.”
• The left (the socialists) wants to make poor people comfortable in poverty. They are willing to pay you more to do nothing than you can earn by going to work. Why? Because they want you to be dependent on the government. They want to control you.
• Welfare teaches you to learn how to get money rather than how to earn money. They want you to find out all the ways that the government will pay you to stay home. They want you to find all the ways to get free money. Unfortunately, this welfare mentality creates a growing sickness of theft and corruption. For example, in the recent COVID bailout distributions in California, an estimated $31 billion was stolen from the unemployment compensation program.
• Nationwide, during the COVID crisis $400 billion in tax dollars is now in the hands of criminals. But the sad thing about this is that they think they are just being smart or thrifty.
• A culture that teaches people to get money without effort teaches a culture of indolence, poverty, and that looks for others to take care of them. But a culture of work leads to a constant search for learning and self-improvement.
• Remember this adage? “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
• When people come to expect something for nothing, it leads them to indolence. When they are used to getting something for nothing and have been reassured that they deserve the money just for being alive, many of them begin to believe it. Then they become aggressive in demanding money.

America is now on the brink of a decaying culture that demands to be taken care of without going to work.