“The Constraints of the Constitution?”

There is an article and video posted at the American Thinker of an interview that Barak Obama did on Public Radio station WBEZ-FM in 2001.  He talks about the need to break free from the ‘constraints’ of the Constitution in order to redistribute wealth to the black poor.  We have been giving money away to both black and white poor since the 60’s, and all we have done is destroy the families of the poor in the process.  Will these people ever realize that we have lost the war on poverty.  We need to declare defeat and go home.  I don’t mean that we should not help the poor–we should.  We need to do it in a way that does not foster generational poverty.  If money can be given to the poor at the local level, the local authorities know who is able to work and who is not.  They also know who is spending the money on drugs and alcohol and other addictive behaviors and who is using the money as a bridge to get out of poverty.  We were much better off when a neighbor would quietly leave a bag of groceries on someone’s front steps because they knew that the head of the household was out of work.  We were better off when the chuch fulfilled its mission to take care of the poor–not depend of the government to subsidize them.  Giving people money without asking them to earn it or without holding them accountable for their behavior is neither wise nor effective in fighting poverty.