Shoving Entitlements Down Throats
Good grief…
Claridon Township—Tim Taylor’s job calls for finding ways to distribute food stamps to Geauga County’s Amish. He might as well be trying to sell them cars.
The horse-and-buggy crowd philosophically opposes the support program overseen by Taylor’s agency, the Geauga Department of Job & Family Services. Accepting public assistance is verboten within the Amish culture. It simply is not done.
But Taylor is under orders to at least try to get them enrolled. The Ohio Department of Job & Family Services has asked Geauga and Holmes counties, which feature the state’s largest Amish populations, to lift dismal food-stamp participation rates.
Has anyone even bothered to consider the idea that maybe the Amish don’t need foodstamps? That maybe “dismal food-stamp participation rates” are an indication of a sound economy where people are capable of providing for themselves?
I’ve never understood why the government markets entitlement programs (I especially don’t understand why they’d market them to people who aren’t even citizens, but that’s a topic for another post). Making government assistance available is one thing, but hawking it as though they were selling a “get rich quick” program or something is quite another. I know why they do it, though. It’s because they use enrollment numbers to justify the entitlements. They point to the number of people getting food stamps and say, “Look at all the people we’ve helped.”
But that’s a rather backward way of looking at entitlements. We shouldn’t be gaging the success of social policy by the number of people we can get signed up for government assistance. We should be gaging social policy on the number of people who don’t need government assistance.
