My Origins and How They Affect My View of Public Policy Issues

The recent death of my 98 year old mother created a flood of memories of my childhood. With this coinciding with my candidacy for State Representative, it represented a great opportunity to consider how those early impressions affect my thinking on a number of today’s state and national issues.

"What one sees depends on where one stands.” This surely has meaning to an exceptionally short or exceptionally tall person in the physical sense, but also has meaning in one’s outlook in life. That is, our past experiences color how we see the world today. Two people with different backgrounds can see the exact same thing and interpret the occurrence entirely differently.

Because of this, Peter Senge in “The Fifth Discipline” promotes dialogue to explore such differences in backgrounds and perceptions, with the goal to more often arrive at collaborative solutions to problems and issues. He also advises exploring our own perceptions and their origins, and scrutinizing them to see whether they square with reality.

This phenomenon of how external stimuli are filtered by our past experiences to create our current perceptions partly explains our political differences. In the hopes that my views can be better understood and thus make finding common ground more possible, I have given some thought to and hereby share My Origins and How They Affect My View of Public Policy Issues of the Importance of Education, the Welfare State and Poverty, Medical Care as a “Right”, Our “Dependency Culture” and Immigration.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul?

The government levying taxes to redistribute wealth to others has been referred to as “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, i.e., “robbing” some people of their money to give to others.

The hazard is that with a reported 47% of Americans not paying income tax, we have reached the point that the receivers (including the public service employees who also benefit from government transfers, and their liberal sympathizers, such as private union members) are a majority that are being supported by a minority of wealth producers. "The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul," said George Bernard Shaw.

Without Constitutional limits being effective to stop these wealth transfers, and the mistaken idea that America is a “democracy”, this is a very real danger. Our entire Constitutional concept of being a “republic” with a limited government is in danger.

But what of the “safety net” which most Americans support? I myself was raised on welfare for the first 17 years of my life after my father died when I was 2 months old and my mom raised us 6 kids. Without that “aid to dependent children”, I am not sure how we would have made it. My mom preached, “Get an education and work hard”. We have, with all six of us getting at least a Bachelor’s degree and four getting a Master’s or more of education. We saw the safety net as temporary.

A problem with many families on welfare is that it has become a cultural fixture, a generation after generation pattern. Many receivers come to think that they are “entitled” to these benefits, and thereby avoid taking any personal responsiblity for improving their situation without continuing public assistance. Currently there is little incentive to get a job at minimum wage when you compare the benefits of the welfare payments, food stamps, Medicaid and Section 8 housing assistance that you would lose if you became employed. Our incentive system is backwards.

Are there solutions to this problem? Should Michigan go back to “workfare”? Or are some “safety net” programs on such a slippery slope that once you agree to the concept, there is no bright line test to know when you have gone too far that you should not start at all? I don’t believe that our society is ready to roll back the safety net that far. Where is the middle ground?

Comments? Your ideas?