Family values ignored

When I see someone sporting $2,000-plus tattoos or driving on monster truck tires whip out a benefits transfer food stamp card, I get plum annoyed because they are socializing their tats or tires. Taxpayers are buying their groceries.

But aren’t too many employers doing the same employee expense socialization, only on a larger scale?

I read that 70 percent of food stamp recipients have jobs. And 90 percent of welfare programs go to female heads of households. Programs like housing subsidies, Medicaid, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, child care tax credits and others all discourage two-parent families because handouts are higher for single parents. Now, single parents outnumber married parents, and have four times the poverty of married parents.

When we oppose family wages, we are actually discouraging leave-and-cleave two-parent families and safer neighborhoods because workers have to maximize handouts to offset low wages by remaining single. Handouts have become the family-destroying opiate appeasing the underemployed masses of single parents.

Meanwhile, populations of single parents and prison inmates have gone up six to 10 times in the last 50 years, while wages plummet. Got family values do you? Evidently, we don’t.

Mike Reno

Post Falls