New ideology is turning U.S. into a nation of ‘entitlement’ junkies

From the Asso­ci­a­tion of

Mature Amer­i­can Citizens

BOHEMIA, NY, July 13 — “Amer­ica was founded and grew pow­er­ful because its cit­i­zens had ini­tia­tive and an entre­pre­neur­ial spirit. They worked hard and sought suc­cess. But, a new ide­ol­ogy is being intro­duced in the U.S. that saps the will to work and has the poten­tial of turn­ing us into a nation of enti­tle­ment junkies,” accord­ing to Dan Weber, pres­i­dent of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Mature Amer­i­can Citizens.

“Con­sider the fact that the gov­ern­ment is out there actively pro­mot­ing, Madi­son Avenue style, easy access to free cell phones and food stamps, vir­tu­ally entic­ing peo­ple to game and abuse the sys­tem. Is this the rea­son an unprece­dented num­ber of house­holds in the U.S. have been added to the food stamp pro­gram dur­ing Pres­i­dent Obama’s first term in office?”

Weber also cited the fact that in June, while only 80,000 new jobs were cre­ated in the U.S., some 85,000 peo­ple who had jobs left the work­force and began col­lect­ing Social Secu­rity Dis­abil­ity ben­e­fits. “In fact, since Mr. Obama took office some 3.1 mil­lion new recip­i­ents have been added to the dis­abil­ity pay­ment rolls. Dur­ing the same period our slug­gish econ­omy man­aged to cre­ate only 2.6 mil­lion new jobs.”

He noted that accord­ing to Investors Busi­ness Daily “more peo­ple try to get on dis­abil­ity when jobs are scarce, and changes to eli­gi­bil­ity rules enacted back in 1984 have made it far eas­ier to qualify.”

The AMAC chief added: “To be sure, the major­ity of those on the dis­abil­ity rolls are there because they merit the help, but the skewed num­bers sug­gest that, as Bill O’Reilly of Fox News Chan­nel has pointed out, some work­ers may be leav­ing their jobs to get paid by the taxpayers.”

Weber said that pro­grams such as dis­abil­ity, cell phones, food stamps, etc. need to be scru­ti­nized in order to pre­vent fraud and ensure that the ben­e­fits will be there for those who really need them.

“Instead of encour­ag­ing depen­dency on the gov­ern­ment, our elected offi­cials could be seek­ing ways to rein­state the val­ues of our Found­ing Fathers, val­ues that pro­mote self-sufficiency and path­ways to eco­nomic growth. There’ll always be a need and a respon­si­bil­ity to help those in real need. But we can do that with­out fos­ter­ing dependency.”

He con­cluded that “it is up to us, the vot­ers, to send a strong sig­nal to the Wash­ing­ton estab­lish­ment when we go to the bal­lot box because we can’t ‘hope’ our way out of the fix we’re in. We need to make a change in atti­tude and leadership.”

Posted by Taylor Kaser on Jul 17 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.