Proclamation: Progressives need to stop helping people. 
Forget everything I’ve ever said about hard-working American’s who are just trying to get by. Forget what I said about healthcare being a human right or about structural economic discrimination. Forget all those times I’ve said that great nations have an obligation to keep children off the streets or treat humans equally. I’m done with compassion and empathy. From now on I’m talking selfishness. I’m talking me and you, looking out for number one.
Because the sad fact is that personal stories aren’t moving anyone anymore. I could tell you about the 48 year-old man with whom I spoke last week, who just moved in with his parents because he can’t afford his $600 a month health insurance bill. I could tell you about the girl I worked with who had a baby at 15, the first time she had sex, because she never understood that the two things were related. How she used to come to work with black eyes because her boyfriend beat her but she couldn’t afford to leave him. We could talk about kids who turn to gangs because it seems like the only protection available; about the people who can’t afford annual exams and don’t realized they have cancer until it’s too late; about families missing that one payment that snowballs into bankruptcy, into homelessness; about boys, like my step brother, who miss a probation meeting at 18 and end up in prison, end up addicted to and selling heroin. We could tell those stories, but at the end of the day we can all go home to our beds and our families and console ourselves that it’s not us, it’s them: those stupid sluts, those lazy poor people, those subhuman criminals who have problems that you and I would never be dumb enough to have. Why should our tax dollars help those people? You can’t force me to be charitable. No one is entitled to help. I don’t owe you anything.
So from now on I’m going to speak in terms that everyone can understand: cold, hard cash. Maybe we don’t owe them anything, but investing $1 in pregnancy prevention saves the state $4 in the cost of unintended pregnancies, which costs $7 billion in the U.S. annually.
When your neighbor is foreclosed on, it costs your local government an average of $20,000 per home.
85%, or around $35 billion, of uncompensated health care (a result of the uninsured ending up in emergencies rooms) is paid for by you the taxpayer, and the rest are costs covered by the hospitals themselves, which is in turn passed on to you the patient or to your insurer, which is again, passed on to you the insured.
Head Start programs can generate up to $9 to $17 for every $1 invested, in increased earnings, employment, family stability, decreased welfare dependency, crime costs, grade repetition, and special education. Teaching a kid to read is a hell of a lot cheaper than the cost of incarcerating that kid ten years later.
Drug treatment programs are ten times more cost-effective than the War on Drugs, which has not only not worked and created a system that blatantly discriminates against the black community, it has also empowered organized crime and made drugs cheaper and more easily available.
Investing in people is cheaper and more effective than cleaning up the mess that’s left behind when we let them fail. A rising tide lifts all boats.
It’s not about helping poor or disadvantaged people, it’s about helping yourself. Because when the bottom income bracket of our country falls out, they’re taking you with them. Forget morality, forget compassion and charity, it’s fiscally responsible to invest in those people. It’s an investment in a stronger America, and a stronger America is good for you.
Third Wave Wife 
You’re on the right track. Some people will only care about these things when we show them how it affects them personally.
This needs to be in a newspaper editorial where it will get wider readership. Not many fiscal conservatives will read Third Wave Wife, but this is an argument that ought to appeal to them. You invest in a new roof so you don’t have to replace your whole house later on–it only makes sense. You may not want to spend the money on the new roof–but you do it anyway because the alternative is a falling down house. You may not want to spend on the undeserving poor, but the alternative is a falling down community–and nation.
Thanks Marty! Maybe I’ll send it in. I tend to be a little wordy for editorial submissions.
Very well said, and a tact that really needs to be addressed. Brava! These ‘conservative’ tactics cost more in the long run, especially health care.
And, while we’re at it — instead of complaining about how costly union won benefits are because we’re mad that ‘some’ people have them, let’s call for Everyone to make a living wage, because our economy … our middle class… was built on having a large number of individuals making a wage that allowed them to have funds to save, to invest and to spend. As a nation, we won’t prosper if we have a tiny, ultra-rich uber class and a massive number of individuals in poverty or barely getting by.
Your compassion is something to behold…..I thank God for your life.
Again, I am in awe of the way you flip through idiocy and rescue the possibility of change just enough to make me feel cautiously optimistic about the future.