Mark Twain wrote, “Reader: Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
Is blaming Maine’s economic mess on the poorest members of society the best idea our government officials can dream up? Maine is one of 23 states investigating welfare “fraud” as if it were the poor who mismanaged Maine citizens’ pension funds and some of the state’s other funds.
Wyoming and Mississippi also want to give welfare recipients drug tests before they receive benefits. Will legislators in Maine, Wyoming, Mississippi and Washington who have taxpayer-financed health plans, also be subject to random drug/alcohol tests? Will the government’s financial managers who gambled the American people’s pension funds on the stock market (and lost money) also be randomly tested? Will the banking, auto and real estate executives who caused America’s financial collapse also be tested for drugs?
I have heard it said that welfare people are lazy and won’t find jobs. Well, exactly which jobs won’t they find? The ones that our patriotic American entrepreneurs shipped overseas, or the jobs lost by the wealthy patriots in the recent economic collapse?
It is shameful to blame the powerless for the financial mistakes of the powerful. During the Irish famines, the British called the Irish lazy and ungrateful for not working on job-creation projects when, in fact, the Irish were so weak from hunger they couldn’t stand up.
We are governed by comfortably detached idiots.
Richard Mullins, Dixfield
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