Don't Rebate Taxes, Just Give Welfare

Some folks will just never get it, it seems.

In local discussion about the proposed tax rebate of $800 per person or $1600 per married couple, the adage seems, "Never miss an opportunity to spit in the face of a gift horse."

From today's Rapid City Journal:

A few stores down from the grocery, Seeley clothing-store owner Leonard Bachman said the rebate plan – estimated to cost $145 billion – would generate more consumer spending. But Bachman, 76, worries that too much of the money will go to people who don’t really need it while some of those who struggle most financially could be left out.

Low-income people who don’t make enough money to pay income taxes would be left out of Bush's rebate plan in its original form. Bachman hopes the plan will consider all in need.

“There are people out there just barely making it,” he said.

So Bachman isn't so much interested in a tax rebate as he is promoting welfare.

If you didn't pay income taxes, you can't get a rebate. What's so hard to understand about that?

Is Bachman going to go down to Office Depot and demand the $50 rebate on a printer he didn't buy? I would expect so, with this mentality.

I would like to remind Bachman (and other like-minded Americans) that charity is not the role or responsibility of government, but of the private sector. Don't believe me? Ask the Founders and early statesmen of the United States:

Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated. - Thomas Jefferson

With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. – James Madison

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. – James Madison

Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. – James Madison

We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. — Congressman Davy Crockett

And ideas like Bachman's is exactly why (beyond the constitutional prohibition, of course) the government should not be involved in dispensing charity.

Schemes like this that throw around other taxpayer's money without regard for the genuine need of the recipient (or the reason for that need) undermines the whole reason for charity. It further undermines self-respect and human dignity when someone receives something they did not earn. And it breeds a further sense of entitlement to such unearned blessings.

What happened to the America that honored it's Constitution, the Church, personal responsibility, and self-respect?

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