Tag Archives: Welfare

News

British woman has sex with strangers in order to get fatherless child

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Story here in the UK Sun. (H/T The Other McCain)

Excerpt:

LARA CARTER has slept with 20 strangers in the past year – in a desperate and reckless bid to get pregnant.

[…]Lara, an assistant office manager, says: “This is absolutely the right time for me to have a baby and nothing is going to stand in my way.

“All my friends have babies and I desperately want to be a mum.

“I don’t have a steady boyfriend and feel my time to have a baby is running out. I only need a man to provide his sperm – I would have no interest in seeing him again. That is why I’m a sperm hunter.”

Her obsession with getting pregnant started a year ago, when she attended the birth of a friend’s baby.

She says: “The moment I saw my friend hold her newborn child, I had a huge desire to feel that love too.

[…]She says: “First, I check if I’m ovulating… I meet some friends at a bar and instantly start looking for potential sperm donors.

“When I find a potential sperm donor, I get their first name and ask if they have any STDs. If they haven’t and we end up spending the night together, I’ll sneak out in the morning.

“When I don’t want to spend the whole night with a man, I’ll get the deed over and done with before I go home. I’ve had sex in some unusual places, including a car and even nightclub toilets.

“Obviously, I encourage them to have unprotected sex, but some men want to use a condom.

“If they do, I always have one that I have pre-pricked in my handbag. That way the sex isn’t a waste of time.”

[…]Most people are very honest when asked if they have an STD. I trust my instincts.”

Lara has already spent hundreds of pounds on baby clothes.

She says: “Whenever I see a lovely baby outfit, I have to buy it for my future child.

“I’ve also chosen the names my children will have. They will be Tilly and James or Matthew. I also take pregnancy vitamins, even though they are expensive.

Lara admits her yearning for a baby is made worse by her circle of 20 close female friends – 17 of them have had children.

She says: “I look at my friends with envy and know I would make such a good mum. They know about my quest to be a mother and support what I’m doing.

“However, I haven’t told my family, and am worried about their reaction. I’m happy to be a single mother and I wouldn’t want anything to do with the father.

“My parents are still together, so I didn’t grow up in a single-parent family, but plenty of people do it these days. I have plenty of savings to give a baby a loving, well-rounded home and lots of friends close by who can babysit. I have it all planned out.”

She adds: “When I do get pregnant after a one-night stand, I won’t contact the father… I want a baby, not a man.

The UK has generous welfare benefits for single mothers.

Excerpt:

Single mother Tracey Turner, 26… currently receives £136.50 a week in benefits, which includes £42.50 income support and £94 child tax credit.

On top of this, her local council pays all of her £161-a-week rent and gives her a hefty discount on local rates.

A British pound is worth about $1.60 USD. 300 pounds a week x 52 weeks = 15500 pounds = about $25000 USD per year in benefits, not including the “hefty discount on local rates”. Local rates = local tax rates.

I think what is the most interesting is analyzing the parts of the first article that I have bolded. It tells a story about what is causing this woman to act this way, and what she thinks about herself, her relationships with others, and about the purpose of her life. Keep in mind that this is not unusual – the out-of-wedlock birth rate in the United States is 40%.

Commentary

What is the conservative plan for taking care of the poor?

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Here’s is the Heritage Foundation explaining what conservatives would do to solve the problem of poverty.

Excerpt:

Since 1964, the U.S. has spent $15.9 trillion on means-tested welfare programs. After adjusting for inflation, welfare spending is 13 times higher today than it was in 1965. Welfare spending has grown more rapidly than Social Security, Medicare, education, and defense. And what do we have to show for these efforts? According to the Census Bureau, a record high 3.7 million Americans fell into poverty in 2009. The out-of-wedlock birthrate is now 40% and the African American out-of-wedlock birthrate is 72%. When the War on Poverty began the out-of-wedlock birthrate was just 7%.

The collapse of marriage is the root cause of child poverty in the U.S. today. It is far past time to reboot our poverty programs to promote work and encourage marriage in order to control costs and promote greater self-reliance. Among Rector’s recommendations:

  • Slowing the growth of the welfare state: Congress needs to establish reasonable fiscal constraints within the welfare system. Once the current recession ends, aggregate welfare spending should be rolled back to pre-recession levels. After this rollback has been completed, the growth of welfare spending should be capped at the rate of inflation.
  • Promoting personal responsibility and work: Able-bodied welfare recipients should be required to work or to prepare for work as a condition of receiving aid. Food stamps and housing assistance, two of the largest programs for the needy, should be aligned with the TANF program to require able-bodied adults to work or to prepare for work for a minimum of 30 hours per week.
  • Ending the welfare marriage penalty and encouraging marriage in low-income communities: Current means-tested welfare programs penalize low-income recipients who get married; these anti-marriage penalties should be reduced or eliminated.

During the administration of President Bill Clinton, conservatives successfully reformed one welfare program in the 1990s: replacing the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). But President Barack Obama’s failed economic stimulus gutted those reforms. And his budget proposal would spend $10.3 trillion on means-tested welfare over the next decade. Before the current rise in poverty, that was enough to give $250,000 to each person currently living in poverty in the U.S., or $1 million for a poor family of four. Our nation can’t afford another 10 years of failed War on Poverty thinking.

You can read more about this issue in this Townhall.com column by Walter Williams, which explains everything you need to do to avoid being poor, and to avoid making your kids poor.

Excerpt:

Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. If you graduate from high school today with a B or C average, in most places in our country there’s a low-cost or financially assisted post-high-school education program available to increase your skills.

Most jobs start with wages higher than the minimum wage, which is currently $5.15. A man and his wife, even earning the minimum wage, would earn $21,000 annually. According to the Bureau of Census, in 2003, the poverty threshold for one person was $9,393, for a two-person household it was $12,015, and for a family of four it was $18,810. Taking a minimum-wage job is no great shakes, but it produces an income higher than the Bureau of Census’ poverty threshold. Plus, having a job in the first place increases one’s prospects for a better job.

The Children’s Defense Fund and civil rights organizations frequently whine about the number of black children living in poverty. In 1999, the Bureau of the Census reported that 33.1 percent of black children lived in poverty compared with 13.5 percent of white children. It turns out that race per se has little to do with the difference. Instead, it’s welfare and single parenthood. When black children are compared to white children living in identical circumstances, mainly in a two-parent household, both children will have the same probability of being poor.

Here’s more Walter Williams: (2 minutes)

And some Thomas Sowell: (4.5 minutes)

Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell are my two favorite economists.

Commentary

The relationship between government spending and immigration

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Political Map of Canada

Mark Steyn is one controversial Canadian. Here is a summary of his concerns about government spending, immigration, multiculturalism and Western civilization, from Canada’s national newspaper – the National Post.

Excerpt:

Rates of public spending growth here in Canada, meanwhile, are only sustainable if we permit mass immigration, given that Canadian birthrate declines are more drastic than even America’s (where they hold, for now at least at roughly replacement levels). These days, that immigration comes from Muslim countries, something that has caused severe social unrest in European countries that have relied on a similar model.

“In the space of about 20 years, the Muslim community went from really nothing to overtake the well-established Jewish community in Toronto. And the idea that that’s simply just one more interesting exotic item in the Canadian salad bar—we would be extremely lucky if that were the case.”

Amsterdam, among the most liberal cities in the world, he points out, is suffering an epidemic of gay bashing from unassimilated Muslims. In Sweden, perhaps Europe’s most tolerant country, half the Jewish population of Malmo has fled after a sharp rise in Islamic anti-Semitic attacks.

“I was in Malmo a couple of weeks ago,” he says. “It’s future is as a Muslim city.”

That he considers Muslim fundamentalists an unwelcome element in liberal society is the kind of thing that gets Mr. Steyn so readily branded as a bigot, particularly in Canada where a worship of his most hated term “multiculturalism” has, he says, utterly shrivelled the limits on public discussion. That may, however, only prove his point.

“It’s a sick fetish,” he says. “The idea that multiculturalism simply on its own terms is a virtue in itself is completely preposterous.”

What the fact that 75% of Canada’s population growth relies on immigration says “in effect, is that tomorrow’s a crapshoot; tomorrow is whoever happens to turn up.”

When Immigration Minister Jason Kenney suggests, as he did this week that Canadians can choose between higher immigration levels, or having more children, he leaves out one option: for Canadians to stop spending at a rate that demands population growth. In any case, Mr. Steyn says, the fact that most immigrants bring behind them older or unproductive family members is just a way to “kick the can 10 years down the line and ensure there’s an even bigger population making demands upon the state for which you’ll have to bring in even more people.” Eventually, the pyramid scheme runs out. We are, he says, engaged in nothing less than “civilizational suicide.”

An interesting story just came to a conclusion in Canada. A Canadian-born Muslim was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan while fighting Canadian soldiers. In Canada, Muslim men can marry four women who will all collect wefare. The article raises questions about whether the women entered the country legally. The same thing happens in the UK, according to the article. (In fact, there is an epidemic of rapes by Muslim gangs in various countries who justify their raping by same that the non-Muslim women are not dressed to proper Islamic standards.) Some work needs to be done to acclimate immigrants to Western standards of conduct.

A policy of preferring skilled immigrants might help prevent the problem of radical immigrants, but that’s not the policy favored by the left – they want unskilled immigrants because unskilled immigrants tend to vote for bigger government, more wealth redistribution, higher taxes and more control of business. These policies are put in place by the left in order to buy votes from those who like to collect government handouts. In fact, the left opposes immigration of skilled workers, since they are more likely to vote for lower taxes and limited government. I think we could be very open about legal immigration – but then we have to make immigrants responsible for paying their own way and following the laws of the land.