by Jerry Agar

“I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”  Winston Churchill

A recent report from the Illinois Policy Institute reads:

By asking Illinois taxpayers to send more of their money to government, Governor Quinn is implying that there’s room to cut from family budgets.

Here is a chart that breaks down household spending of the average Midwestern household by category. We ask Governor Quinn and would-be tax hike supporters: What should families cut from their household budgets to make room for higher tax bills?

If it makes sense to you that a government can't spend its way to prosperity and that there is a limit to what tax paying families can afford, you might wonder how government can be so mistaken.

What if it isn't a mistake?  What if bankrupting the nation is actually the plan?

Consider that under the current administration the size of government has expanded, spending is unprecedented and the drive to nationalize health care - against the nation's wishes - seems an obsession on the part of the president.  It can't be that politicians are blindly stumbling around in a fog of economic misunderstanding.  Too many of them are actually intelligent people for that to be the case.

Economists, contrary to Biden's and Obama's assertions of total agreement with the spending, have warned that the spending is dangerous.  In an ad in the New York Times, signed by several hundred economists, they wrote, "it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today."

So what is going on?

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, then both sociologists and political activists at the Columbia University School of Social Work, in a 1966 article in The Nation entitled, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty." The two argued that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits and that a welfare enrollment drive would create a political crisis that would force U.S. politicians, particularly the Democratic Party, to enact legislation "establishing a guaranteed national income."

The strategy is to put the weight of the poor increasingly on the nation to the point of bankruptcy and revolution.  By constantly adding to the number of Americans considered the poor and/or entitled, income distribution increases and budgets at all government levels are strained.

An article in the American Thinker reads:

Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health care through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.

The most pressing debate in the nation today is health care.  What will another massive government program do to the economy?

Government grows each year as politicians lecture America on the need for more and more social services.  The assertion is that without government intervention, the poor cannot survive here.

America has always been, and continues to be, a giving nation; a charitable nation.  America cares about the poor.  To be told that we don't (and that we must continue to shovel more and more of our labor into government managed programs - often of dubious success) is not only an insult, it is dangerous.

It is worthwhile asking whether if massive government spending has not solved the problem of poverty yet taxes keep going up anyway, the goal was ever really to help the poor or to bring down the economy.