Soap Box

From Webster�s Dictionary:

Charity - the act of giving money, food, or other kinds of help to people who are poor, sick. 

Federal entitlements, regardless of what ever clever antonym or fancy bureaucratic name it goes by is actually charity, or at least that's what it started out to be.

I believe in charity, but sometimes I think I have a much different definition than a lot of people and definitely a different definition from the one the government operates on and what the government practices is not actually charity, but patronage.

Now put aside your politics, your political correctness, automatic rhetorical responses and answer these questions honestly.

Is any able-bodied person entitled to spend their lives sponging on the federal or state dole while you work hard to make a living and pay the taxes that support them?

Does anybody have the right to bring children into this world and walk away without ever paying a cent for their support, leaving the cost of their upbringing to the taxpayers?

If your answers to the two above questions was no, then you should be as angry, disgusted and disillusioned as I am, fed up with bogus disability claims and men who father scores of children and are never held accountable for their welfare.

There are men who go through life carelessly fathering dozens of children who will never even know his name, leaving behind whole families of underprivileged kids who will never have a decent chance at life, being raised in a hard scrabble, hand-to-mouth existence in an environment where dodging bullets is a way of life and the local drug dealer is the most respected person in the neighborhood.

People say that we've gone so far into the entitlement direction that there is no way to rectify it, but actually, there is a very simple way to fix this problem.

To qualify for public assistance, the mother of the child should be required to identify the father, a simple task in this era of DNA testing and the father either supports his children, all his children or go to jail until they all reach the age of majority.

If he has fathered multiple children then he should have multiple jobs, no cop outs, no exceptions.

Just start this program, let the word get around and watch the birth rate of fatherless children fall like a brick.

There are some people who draw a disability check from the government who go out and participate in sports and other strenuous exercises, no more disabled than a race horse.

That person - after medical exams to prove the sham - should be taken off assistance, spend a year in jail and be forced to pay back the money they've already been paid.

Drastic measures?

Absolutely, but things have gone so far that nothing less than drastic measures will ever turn it around?

There is an eventual price to pay for socialism and politicians who consider the federal treasury to be their personal piggy bank to be used as additional campaign funds and public relations, buying votes and good will for their party on any whimsical foolishness they can push through Congress.

Social Security funds should be identified, locked away and never allowed to be touched by profligate politicians.

Every time you buy a gallon of gas you are paying into a fund that is supposed to maintain the highways. But take it from one who spends around 125 nights a year up and down the highways of America, a lot of our interstates and federally maintained highways are like washboards with pot holes.

What happened to the highway money?

The truth of the matter is folks, our federal government, both parties, has proven themselves incapable of handling public funds, of policing double dipping welfare cheats without the guts to face down any problem that could possibly cost them votes.

If Social Security had been handled by investing part of everybody's assessments in the private sector with the government forbidden to touch it, the program would be fat and solvent now, actually capable of sustaining a good lifestyle for retirees.

If the highway funds could be actually put into a lock box and honestly handled without political patronage and cronyism, our highways would be in perfect condition.

If the welfare and Medicare cheats were identified, prosecuted and jailed that problem would soon go away.

We are fast coming down to having, for all practical purposes, a one party system in America, neither really Democrat or Republican but a hybrid, socialist in policy and so big that bureaucracies are tripping all over each other, stupid regulations cripple and alienate industry,
and the entitlement roles and the national debt grows by leaps and bounds.

We are due a day of reckoning.

And make no mistake about it, it's coming.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem

God Bless America

� Charlie Daniels

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