The New York Times has an interesting article on welfare.

New Rules Force States to Curb Welfare Rolls

The rules, drafted in response to a budget signed into law by President Bush in February, represent the biggest changes in welfare policy since 1996, when Congress abolished the federal guarantee of cash assistance for the nation’s poorest children.

Since then, the number of welfare recipients has plunged more than 60 percent, to 4.4 million people, from 12.2 million. Most of the decline occurred in the first years, before the 2001 recession. Federal and state officials say they expect the new rules to speed the decline in welfare rolls, which has slowed in recent years.

The rules are far more than a bureaucratic application of the new law, passed after four years of partisan deadlock. For the first time, they set a uniform definition for permissible work activities and require states to verify and document the number of hours worked by welfare recipients.

Nationally, in 2004, the last year for which official figures are available, about 32 percent of adults on welfare were working. Under the new rules, 50 percent of adult welfare recipients must be engaged in work or training in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, or states will face financial penalties. The penalties can reduce a state’s federal welfare grant by 5 percent in the first year and by two additional percentage points for each subsequent year of noncompliance, up to a maximum penalty of 21 percent.

Some state officials and antipoverty groups, including many who opposed the 1996 law, say the new work requirements are unrealistic. But Bush administration officials point to Georgia as evidence that the goals are achievable.

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Check out the graph in the article. Welfare Reform is one of the most successful policies ever implemented.

Further, though I’m not a fan of Government give-aways like “All Kids,” shifting assistance from direct welfare payments to subsidizing Health Care is good policy. Any policy that allows people to sit at home and watch TV is insane.

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“Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class. –Alexis De Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism”

Below is an important article. It’s sad that so few here in the “West” truly understand the nature of the threat posed by Islamic Fascism.
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The roots of Islamism

But there is a wilful blindness among many in the West who refuse to acknowledge the totalitarian nature of the ideology which drives jihadi warriors. Even though the shelves of every Western bookshop sag under the weight of texts which record the cruelties and barbarism inflicted by totalitarianism in the twentieth century, there seems to be a remarkable reluctance to accept that totalitarian thinking could be behind contemporary cruelty and barbarism.

Instead Western commentators attribute Islamist violence to specific, discrete, grievances such as the presence of American troops on Saudi soil, the failure to establish an Arab Palestinian state or the material poverty of Arab peoples. In every case the blame for Islamist violence is laid at the door of the West, for failing to deliver “justice”.

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Islamism is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Like its sibling ideologies, fascism and communism, it offers followers a form of redemption through violence. Like fascism, Islamism envisages the creation of a purified realm purged of toxic outside influences and internal corruption. Like communism, Islamism is not ethnically exclusive, it seeks to enlist new converts through proselytisation, political education and military advances. Like both, it reserves a special hatred for the West, for political freedom the separation of the public and private realms, dissent, sexual tolerance and a belief in the sanctity of individual life. And like both it finds a dark and furious energy in hatred towards the Jewish people.

Communism, Fascism and Islamism have all been responses, indeed reactions, to Enlightenment thought. The intellectual roots of Communism lie, naturally, in the works of Marx and Engels. But their work grew out of the ferment on the Left in the early nineteenth century and the ground laid by thinkers such as Proudhon. Marx and Engels’ work, in turn, was developed by their disciples, from Lenin and Ho Chi Minh to Louis Althusser and Che Guevara. Fascism developed out of the racial “science” of the late nineteenth century, itself a form of perverted Darwinism, the anti-liberal thinking of German critics of the Enlightenment such as Herder and the celebration of violence advanced by Italian Futurists and German ultra-conservatives such as Heidegger, Schmitt and Junger.

The Washington Post has an article describing America as more “socially isolated” than it has been.
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Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says

Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States.

A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two.

The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties — once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits — are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone.

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Here is the study the article was based upon.