Why the Feds want to keep you poor

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

It has been established by me in this column and by many others elsewhere, that on a personal level we each act like raving capitalists, trying to keep the money we have and obtain more if we can.

Sure, most of us are altruistic to a certain extent, but few are fully altruistic. Those who are, are celebrated; e.g., Mother Teresa.

This being the case, we all vote with our personal financial situation in mind.

It has been correctly pointed out the rich will vote for lower taxes. It has also been pointed out the poor will vote for “free stuff.”

I think we can all agree these statements are basically true.

For a long time, perhaps naively, I have been thinking the politicians are more interested in catering to the poor than the rich simply because the poor always are always a larger group, hence more votes.

(I have never believed most politicians ever really personally care about the poor — it is just a head count and sound bites for them. Otherwise they would live like the president of Uruguay, see the New York Times' Jan. 5, 2013 article about President Jose Mujica.)

However, a reader’s response to one of my recent columns was an epiphany for me. That response was this: “...Which explains why 19 of the 22 states that went for McCain and 20 of 24 that went for Romney paid less in federal taxes than they received in subsidies and payments. They know which side their bread is buttered on.”

Aha! Politicians prefer the voters who are poor because they can control poor voters. You can control anyone with “free stuff” if they don’t care or are gullible as to what this is about. It is pure old psychological conditioning.

Conversely, if voters don’t care about subsidies and payments, you cannot control them with these tools.

And a further Aha! Poor voters thus keep all the government programs in place. This is the most important point.

Poor voters need things and the government supplies those things. This keeps millions of bureaucrats employed. And for elected officials or those appointed by elected officials, this satisfies their power trip which makes their world go around.

It’s not even germane if the Chinese or the rich are destroying the middle class (ideas I completely reject). The important point is the Feds want the middle class destroyed and for it to continue to stay destroyed so they can stay in business and stay in control.

If everyone were succeeding on their own, the federal government could go back to defending the borders and promoting free trade between the states. They would have nothing else to do. The federal government would be tiny. (That’s no fun.)

So, as long as the feds promise to help poor folks down in the trenches but never succeeds at raising them from their squalid way of life, the game continues. And by the way, squalor is relative — if you get to flit around the world without ever having to buy a plane ticket or using priceline.com, you see everyone who does as living in squalor.

All this has been helped by the changing culture of the last eighty or so years as well.

Back in the days of Franklin Roosevelt, being poor and asking for handouts was something shameful in our culture. This stigma, if you will, self regulated the government programs to largely serve those truly needy. Today, that is all gone.

There is no stigma for taking government handouts. The complaint is “Why can’t I have more?”

Hence, the receivers and the distributors are in a symbiotic relationship — they feed off each other.

In summary, want to know why the middle class is shrinking? Because the federal government and the politicians who run the federal government want it to shrink.

This writer has blamed the federal government and its minions for many things. Yet, it has become obvious I missed the most important one — the federal government grows and hence puts more controls on us when we do poorly and become ever more dependent on it.

That is Washington’s real objective.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.