THE WELFARE SYSTEM

By

Jimmy Joe Meeker

Originally published in the Wilson County Advocate, Vol. 2, No. 3 (misprinted as Vol. 1, No. 3) ©January 21, 1991 Donald W. Gillette

Anybody out there want to guess how many welfare recipients there are in Wilson County? How many pieces of human slime sit on the porch drunk, selling drugs, while we pay taxes?

Too damned many.

These people are almost qualified enough to get a job sacking groceries or pushing burgers, but those jobs aren’t good enough for them. They don’t pay enough. These rocket scientists won’t work for less than $50K a year.

It doesn’t matter that they either dropped out of high school or were to ignorant to see the future past a used car and a six pack of Budweiser. It doesn’t matter that they can’t read or write. In their minds, they’re worth as much on the job as the Surgeon General. All this because they’re bums. All this because it’s easier to blame society than to accept responsibility.

But they’re smarter than we are. If we get sick, we go to the doctor and pay a couple of hundred bucks in deductibles before our outrageously priced health insurance kicks in. If they get sick, they go to the emergency room. Nobody pays.

If we get in an accident, we pay another couple of hundred bucks in deductibles before our overpriced car insurance kicks in. If they get in an accident, they don’t have insurance. Oh, we can sue them, but for what? They haven’t got anything. So our insurance company pays the tab again.

The list goes on and on.

Who’s the loser here?

We are.

We pay taxes for services from the government. Services like law enforcement and schools.

And the reason we’re not satisfied with the services we get as taxpayers is that these services are spread too thin. These services are available to all citizens, not just the taxpaying ones. The bums get them, too. The problem is that the bums get an inordinate amount.

Take law enforcement. When’s the last time you were arrested for burglary or selling drugs? And how many times have the Sheriff’s Patrol, the Drug Task Force, and the Police had to risk life and limb to catch some rotten slob for these crimes?

Schools. Your kids may be doing well in school, but how much better would they do if teachers didn’t have to baby-sit low-bred cretins and learning time wasn’t taken up trying to get these offspring of morons to try to act like human beings?

Is there a pattern here?

We’re paying for all of it. We’re paying for second-rate services so the bums can get them free. If we didn’t have to pay the bums’ share, we’d be getting first-rate service.

Maybe the county could issue us taxpayer cards. We could hang them around our necks. With this care, you could drive on county roads, get emergency services, and your kids could go to school.

Sure, there are some people out there who can’t work and can’t pay taxes, through no fault of their own. Yes, we need to take care of these people. But come on, folks, how many of them can there be? When some drug-addled scumwad gets arrested for wife beating, I’d say he’s healthy enough to make some kind of contribution to society.

And society is the key word here.

Bums have no place in a society. In pre-historic times, they’d take them out and stone them to death. But not us. We’re civilized. We buy them a place to live, give them subsidized heating and air-conditioning, let them run roughshod over the rest of us, give them so many food stamps per kid to trade in on beer and baloney, and set up jails so they’ll have somewhere to cool off when their Cro-Magnon brains overheat.

Because we feel sorry for them. After all, they’re under-privileged. The rest of us are just stupid.

XXX