When I was growing up the big thing was Welfare and Government Assistance. Welfare was different from state to state so you would have people moving  from one state to another state because the Welfare benefits were better in that state. When I was growing up, supposedly, the Welfare benefits were better in Wisconsin than in Illinois so we would have people move to Wisconsin just for the better benefits. I was pretty young back then so I really do not know how true it was or how much of a real problem it was but it was talked about a lot. There was a lot of racism back then and I am not sure how much of a fact it was or how much racist talk it was. When people talked about Welfare back then they always imagined a Black person mooching off the system. That is because racism was a real problem and how we stereo  typed people was just plain wrong. The funny thing is, after 60 years we still are.

In this country Welfare has always been frowned upon where corporate welfare isn’t even on most people’s radars. Helping people is bad because they are just lazy but helping huge corporations is supposable a good thing because why? I can’t figure that one out. Our government spends twice as much on corporate welfare than it does for social welfare programs. Helping rich people get richer is more important than helping families with childcare. Because of corporate welfare we actually pay twice for some of our purchases. We pay at the time of purchase and we pay with our tax dollars. Paying twice for that gallon of gas just kind of strikes me the wrong way. My tax dollars subsidizing millionaires and billionaires just is plain wrong. These guys are flying into outer space but we deny a poor mother a chance to work because of expensive childcare.  This is nuts.

We use to have businesses make decisions for the location of a business by things like the labor force needs,  water needed, or transportation needs. Now I think that too many businesses make the decisions by the best deal they can get from the state. To build a plant in an area they may now expect huge tax breaks, upgrades in infrastructure and even the training of the labor force to be paid by the state. In a lot of these cases the payback for the community will take years if ever. The tax breaks the that the State of Wisconsin first gave Foxconn would in my opinion  a pay back would have taken longer than the life expectancy of the product that they were suppose to manufacture there. I think that the payback would have taken over twenty years and I don’t think that the life expectancy of any technology product is anywhere near that. Luckily for Wisconsin the life expectancy of the whole project never happened at Foxconn and the State had to renegotiate it. My point is that we are willing to just throw money after businesses but we are not willing to really invest in the American People.

I have seen childcare termed as an entitlement. Education and training as an entitlement. I am 68 years old and paid into Social Security and Medicare for over  45 years and I have seen those things termed  as an entitlement by the Republican Party. Things that I have paid into and have earned are not government entitlements and it is an insult to all the hard working people on this country to try and make us feel like we are mooching off the government. The Senator from West Virginia say he does not want to turn us into an entitlement society. If you look at where his State rates in every category I think what West Virginia is entitled to is a Senator that would work to lift his state up from the bottom. They rate 50^th in infrastructure, 50^th and he is one of them standing in the way of progress. He has made millions off the coal and energy companies and has a multimillion dollar houseboat when the average yearly income in his state is fewer than 30,000 dollars.

Our opportunity and wages in this country have been pretty stagnant since Clinton. The lack of opportunity and collective bargaining has held the American worker back. The money pouring into Washington from all over the world that has enriched our politicians weakens our democracy. Yes we need to drain the swamp. The first thing we need to drain is the money. Serving our government should not put people in the poor house but it should not be an opportunity to get rich through bribes and corruption. If you stop the money you drain about half of the swamp right away. Stop the money and drain the swamp.