At a recent speech in Atlanta, a somewhat famous former elected official made some rather blunt comments about welfare. According to a news report: In discussing welfare, he said rules instituted by liberals to limit benefits to single mothers discouraged blacks from forming families. “Slavery didn’t break up the black families as much as liberal […]

This isn’t a video produced by an anti-welfare group. It’s not even from the United States. Instead, you’re looking at a straight news clip from England that unintentionally offers a very powerful example of how welfare saps initiative, creates dependency, subsidizes irresponsibility, and destroys the human spirit.

The Center for Immigration Studies recently put out a study arguing that immigration has had negative effects on California. One of their measures was a comparison of how many people in the state were receiving some form of welfare compared to other states. I found that data (see Table 3 of the report) very interesting, […]

I’m normally not a big fan of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development since it is an international bureaucracy that persecutes low-tax jurisdictions. But the economists at the OECD sometimes do good work (the same can be said of the IMF and World Bank, not that this justifies taxpayers subsidies for any international […]

Governments that tax work and subsidize sloth are committing a form of slow-motion suicide, and the Greek fiscal crisis is the canary in the coal mine of this phenomenon. Interestingly, some European governments are trying to halt the downward slide, though I suspect that most of them will fail to take the necessary steps. But […]

It’s probably just a insincere negotiating ploy, but Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed to eliminate a major welfare program in California. This article from the Sacramento Bee notes that the Governator also wants to cut bureaucrat pay and impose other reforms. Given Schwarzenegger’s failure to consistently fight against special interests in previous years, and given the […]

Here are some very depressing stories. The Daily Mail reports that a European Court has ruled that the U.K. no longer can impose restrictions on welfare payments to women married to suspected terrorists: A European court has instructed Britain to drop restrictions which limit social security benefits paid to the wives of terror suspects. Ministers […]