OPINION:
Alleged Waukesha killer Darrell E. Brooks has a story that is all too familiar. It’s a story borne out of policies that Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ bill would reinforce with trillions more tax dollars.
Democrat Woodrow Wilson may have created the administrative state, but it was Lyndon Johnson who got us addicted to welfare. Johnson’s infamous line Democrats love to ignore says it all: “Now we’ve got … to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”
He was referring to Black Americans.
Mr. Biden’s effort to put Johnson’s programs on steroids, at the behest of socialists like Bernie Sanders, will lead to more societal rot.
Liberals are fond of saying that it takes a village to raise a child. The village that produced Darrell E. Brooks was one dominated by government and steadfastly promoted by the Left.
After a brief period of decline following the expansion of the welfare state, the poverty rate in the U.S. has remained mostly level for four decades. The Great Society failed to lift up the very people politicians claimed it would help.
Keeping people on the government dole is institutionalized segregation. It’s a prison of dependency that weakens those unlucky enough to grow up tethered to the government’s largess.
Scanning Mr. Brooks’ social media accounts, we find a man so much on the fringes of society he can barely write or speak intelligibly. He’s an abuser of women, rudderless, angry, and a BLM supporter.
You can hardly blame him. A system led by White and Black liberals failed him. Growing up in deep blue Milwaukee, government schools likely failed him. In 2016 Milwaukee public schools’ four-year graduation rate for Blacks was under 55%. That was heralded as an improvement.
He was likely failed by government-run public housing and programs for fatherless, at-risk youth. He was failed by a culture that said there are no moral guardrails and that glorified drugs, crime, and promiscuity.
Even the Soros-backed district attorney that released him on $1,000 bail after Mr. Brooks tried to run over the mother of his child failed him.
More than $22 trillion on welfare spending has yielded urban Black communities mired in a crisis that claims thousands of lives a year.
Mr. Biden plans to do it all over again.
Black median income as a percentage of White income has been virtually unchanged since 1970. The Black incarceration rate has skyrocketed since the mid-1970s. Academia, media and liberal politicians tell us it’s due to systemic racism. The reality is that the programs created to keep kids out of gangs, off drugs, and off the streets, largely did the exact opposite.
Mr. Biden’s “human infrastructure bill” carries with it all the same promises of Mr. Johnson’s anti-poverty programs. “Ending” poverty, creating jobs, “free” government education for the lower-income, and more direct cash assistance to allow economic mobility.
By every objective measure, those are exaggerations and lies we’ve all heard before.
The same people pushing ‘Build Back Better’ are the same people who have maligned the importance of faith, family cohesion, and morality for decades, separating too many from the Biblical blueprint for living in favor of the state.
‘Build Back Better’ won’t save lives in the urban battlefield. It’s not going to convince aimless youth to stop looting the local Nordstrom or shooting each other in the streets. It’s not going to give people the kind of faith, hope and courage to embrace the American principle of hard work to better themselves.
The Biden bill also promotes illegal immigration, which will push Black Americans like Darrell Brooks further to the fringes of society as millions flood cities demanding services and support.
Neither economic nor spiritual poverty will be addressed by a government check or state-run program. The cultural rot is reinforced by economic stagnation and resentment caused by a separate but equal society. Passing the Biden welfare plan won’t stop a man like Darrell E. Brooks from killing people at a parade. It may, in fact, create more like him.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” and “Wake Up America Weekend” on Newsmax Television, author and former Bush Administration official.
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