"Life is hard.
It's harder still when an entire class of people with their hands out stands between you and success.
...Dissident Soviet-era thinker Milovan Djilas coined the term "the New Class" to describe the people who actually ran the Soviet Union:
....Not workers or capitalists or proletarians, but managers, bureaucrats, technocrats, and assorted hangers-on. This group, Djilas wrote, had assumed the power that mattered in the "workers' paradise," and transformed itself into a new kind of aristocracy, even while pretending, ever less convincingly, to do so in the name of the workers.
Capitalists own capital, workers own their labor, but what the New Class owned was political control over other people's capital and labor.
...Here in the United States, a lot of programs officially aimed at the poor look suspiciously like subsidies to the New Class, too.
Among "means-tested" programs, Food Stamps, now officially called SNAP, cover about 46 million people up to 125% of the poverty line (set at about $16,000 for a single mother and child).
Other programs, such as the Earned Income Tax credit, cover people at slightly higher incomes, up to 200% of the poverty line.
When federal spending on the dozens of programs are added up and state and local contributions included, the budget for assistance is about $1 trillion.
If we simply handed those people, perhaps 60 million of them, their share of the cash, that would be more than $16,500 each.
A single mom and her baby would get over $33,000, twice as much as a poverty wage.
A family of four would land more than $66,000, $15,000 more than the average family income.
So where's the money going?
To people who aren't poor, such as doctors paid through Medicaid or landlords paid through Section 8. And to tens of thousands of members of the New Class, people like social workers, administrators and lawyers who run more than 120 different means tested federal programs.
It's not just poverty spending, of course.
Higher education spending goes more and more to administrators, not to faculties, and, for that matter, NASA seems more interested in feeding its bureaucracy than in going to Mars, or even back to the Moon.
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