By John W. Lillpop
Ending "welfare, as we know it" was one of the rare issues on which President Bill Clinton and Republican members of Congress actually agreed in the 90s.
As a result, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was signed into law by President Clinton on August 26, 1996.
Back in 1996, conventional wisdom held that the typical "welfare queen" was a poor black woman who lived in one of America's inner cities. She was unemployed and uneducated, an unmarried mother of several children born out of wedlock.
The size of her welfare check was based on the number of children that she birthed, a fact that supposedly motivated the queen to procreate often. The fact that she was unmarried was immaterial.
Our welfare queen was a stay-at-home mom, but she was rarely hailed as an American heroine for making the care and feeding of her children more important than a career path.
Rather, this poor black woman was seen as the root cause of soaring deficits and moral decadence in American society. She was seen as a loathsome figure, an immoral slut too stupid and lazy to do anything but feed at the public trough and produce a new welfare dependent child once a year.
American politicians finally decided that bailing out poor women with loose morals was an outrageous waste of taxpayer money. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was designed to get those poor, uneducated sluts off the backs of American taxpayers!
Things are certainly different in the new century.
Today's welfare queen is actually a king. He is highly educated and sophisticated in the ways of the world, with special skills and abilities that enable him to manipulate people and their money to his advantage. Some would even call him unethical or worse.
The modern welfare king is usually a white urbane male who, "earns" 50 million dollars or more a year when his base salary, bonuses, stock options and other perks are taken into account.
He and his spouse are power players who are unable to spend much "quality time" with their children. Thus, our welfare king typically hires a former welfare queen to tend to the children and housekeeping chores.
Unlike the former welfare queen from a generation ago, the modern-day welfare king is not a powerless pawn in the game of national politics. To the contrary, he has extraordinary access to the president of the United States and to powerful members of the U.S. Congress. His access is typically purchased with large financial contributions.
Because of his influence around and about Washington, D.C., our welfare king need not fret reckless political actions like those which doomed welfare queens in 1996.
In fact, the welfare king can, and does, count on the federal government to intercede on his behalf when his own irresponsible business practices get him into financial hot water.
The welfare king can force members of both political parties to bail he and his associates out of impending doom. His influence can cause the president and congressional leaders, and even presidential candidates, to drop everything in order to bail the king out.
What does it matter to the welfare king that the bail out of Wall Street will cost American taxpayers $700 billion, at a minimum?
After all, in the eyes of the welfare king, the overwhelming majority of American taxpayers are unwashed fools, simple-minded nincompoops who exist only to buy homes they cannot afford, with mortgage loans containing terms almost guaranteed to lead to foreclosure; all the while making the welfare king filthy rich!
Somehow that typical welfare queen from 1996 seem harmless, even spiritual, when compared to the vultures and vipers that our foolish government is about to bail out!
