To hear policitians talk, you'd think the poor were sitting by the fire and having to do write their lessons on a shovel.

Please try to locate the last family that starved to death in this country, other than freakish criminal incidents. Most nutritionists are worried about kids getting too fat. And as we all know, a kid who eats too many burgers won't learn well in class.

Our local power company subsidizes people who need heat.

To fall completely between the cracks nowadays, you really have to try. It happens, but most often because nobody told them where to go for help.

There are billions upon billions spent each year making sure that people have what they need to get a leg up. While this has certainly helped a lot of people, it has also resulted in is a huge class of people who are now primarily wards of the state. Family values in many minority communities have collapsed. The values, secular values, that make people successful are not only not taught in schools, but often derided.

And a generation has been raised, like Lindy, who believes that if a problem is not solved by the government, it cannot be solved at all. Few politicians are motivated to change this perception.

The original point of my tirade was not that I am angry that some wide-eyed Keane kid is eating gruel on my nickel. It was that I am sick to death of not only having the government take more of my income than a goddam medieval serf had to cough up, but of liberals telling me that I should be thanking them on my knees for the privilege of being skinned. The original Lindy post was basically saying "You have more, so they get to take more. And you should LIKE it." That's what pissed me off. I really didn't want to get into how swell it is that we are plunging into a welfare state. Our budget is twice the size it was during the Carter adminstration, in constant dollars, and nothing is noticeably different.

If the vast majority of the Federal budget wasn't being squandered as bribes primarily to keep politicians in power, I wouldn't mind it so much either. The nasty little secret is that politicians are not particularly interested in people becoming independent of the government. If Ted Kennedy could figure out a way to make himself responsible for the air you breath, he would.

As for social security and Medicare, they take a far bigger bite out of the budget than all the welfare and education programs combined, and the sooner somebody does SOMETHING about it, the better. Tell the government to make me an offer. I'm willing to give up something to keep our country from collapsing under forty trillion dollars of debt.

Step one would be admitting that social security is welfare, and always has been, and that we should just all pay the taxes and only give the benefits to the elderly who really need them. Why would that be that much different than all the other wealth-transfer taxes we pay? Before that, we can at least not create any new entitlements.