Why is our federal deficit a trillion dollars, and how can it ever be reduced?

There are lots of Facebook political experts who attempt to make you believe that we’re in the shape we are because we waste money on foreign aid. And while here at the Hayride we’re for getting that figure as close to zero as humanly possible, particularly in the case of countries who hate us, that’s not really where China’s bond money is going.

Or you’ll hear that the defense budget is bloated. To a large extent that’s true.

Or that federal salaries and payrolls are off the charts. No question reform is needed in the structure of government, and giving these people a raise, which the president attempted to do by executive order a few days ago, is mind-bogglingly stupid.

But none of those are the problem.

This graph shows the problem…

The reason why you’ll want to paint a bullseye on Lyndon Johnson’s rotting cadaver is found on the left side of the graph, because it was 1965 when LBJ passed all the Great Society programs and brought on the welfare state.

See the jump starting in 1965?

Guess what else made its debut right around that time…

It was in 1966, the next year, when Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, a pair of Communist sociologists from Columbia, published a piece in The Nation entitled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” which basically suggested that if the Left were to aggressively enroll every poor and lower-middle class American in sight in the entitlement programs of the welfare state it would be possible to bankrupt the system and thus destroy capitalism.

Discover The Networks has more on the history of the Cloward-Piven strategy – and as you read this, refer back to the graph above…

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare — about 8 million, at the time — probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.”  Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level.”

Their article called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.” Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of “a federal program of income redistribution,” in the form of a guaranteed living income for all — working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos,Washington would have to act.

This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements — mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown — providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven’s article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States — often violently — bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law “entitled” them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.

Regarding Wiley’s tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, “There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests – and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones.”

These methods proved effective. “The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley’s wildest dreams,” writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. “From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy.”

As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state ofNew York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York’s welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in “the end of welfare as we know it” — the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.

Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. “This wasn’t an accident,” Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. “It wasn’t an atmospheric thing, it wasn’t supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare.”

One disciple of the Cloward-Piven strategy is our current president, who besides having engaged in Cloward-Piven activities throughout his career as a community organizer and rabble-rouser is actively engaged in overloading the system as our current occupant of the White House.

Consider food stamps. Another graph…

That looks like aggressive growth, doesn’t it?

Well, aggressive growth is what you get when you engage in aggressive activity to promote something. Like, for example, when you hold 30 meetings with Mexican government officials about promoting food stamps to illegals in this country, or run radio novelas on Spanish-language stations to promote food stamps.

There are lots of examples of how proselytizing food stamp use and other entitlements has been shockingly successful in building the rolls under this administration.

The largest example, perhaps, being Obama’s re-election.

But it was LBJ who built the programs Cloward and Piven figured out how to destroy the country with. Obama’s just here finishing us off.

Have a great weekend, everybody!