Follow the Leader: FREE MONEY!

Poor people are animals who will only take care of themselves if you...pay them.

Hey, that’s not my opinion. Mayor Bloomberg believes this. If he didn’t, why would he be supporting a program that rewards people financially just for acting like decent human beings?

The mayor’s controversial new anti-poverty program, which places monetary value on very run-of-the-mill achievements, kicked off last week. If you sign up for Medicare you get $40. Take your kid to the doctor and get $200. If your kid passes a Regents exam, it’s big money, baby: $600. The yearly total one can win in the poverty lottery is $5,000, and this time around the program is being paid for with private money. But Bloomberg would love for the taxpayers to take over in the future if his program succeeds.

The program is modeled after a similar one in Mexico, which has been deemed a wild success by, among others, the mayor himself. But in Mexico you might lose a day’s pay if you need to take your child to the doctor. That’s not the case in New York City. Besides, if you need to be paid to take your kids to the doctor, then it seems to me that maybe you shouldn’t have kids in the first place.

That the mayor, or anyone else, would champion any program that seeks to reward people for doing things they should do without even being told speaks to a certain level of soft racism and condescension that exists in the mind of wealthy liberals like Bloomberg. Poor people, most certainly minorities, just do not have the drive within themselves to do what is right for their families. They have to be paid for good behavior; otherwise, they will never behave.

I took a lot of Regents exams in my lifetime, and had I been given $600 for a passing grade I might have amassed a small fortune in high school. But if my classmate sitting next to me was offered that hefty sum to pass the test—and not me—I might have been a bit less enthusiastic about working hard for good grades.

The worst form of contemporary racism is the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” a phrase used by President Bush to describe the dumbing down of America’s education system. It implies that we cannot expect poor, minority students to perform as well as their white counterparts, so we must lower the bar for them and change the terms of their success. An “A” might be good enough for the average student, but if you live in a bad neighborhood and your family accepts welfare then we should only expect a “C” from you, and we should celebrate that “C” like it was the greatest accomplishment in the history of education.

Bloomberg’s plan represents the dumbing down not just of education, but of life itself. The pilot program will actually pay individuals $150 a month just for holding a steady job and between $200 and $400 to complete a job training program. But the best incentive to work should be to have money to pay your bills, take care of your kids, live in a decent house or even enjoy some recreational activities. And you really shouldn’t need any extra motivation to do that. And if I already have no desire to work, a piddling $150 a month is not going to get me off my couch anyway.

But Bloomberg knows what’s best for us all, and he’s charging on with another “great idea” that he found in another country, like congestion pricing before it. But who will this help? A handful of motivated participants will certainly take advantage of the financial incentives, but they probably won’t have to change their behavior one bit. Good habits are learned over time, and bad habits cannot be changed by just writing a check. Improving one’s life is the right thing to do because it is the right thing to do, not because Bloomberg takes pity on you.

Oddly enough, even with a free money giveaway like Bloomberg’s program and its potential to throw thousands of dollars at our poorest citizens, those eligible still haven’t been rushing to sign up. Of the 5,100 families deemed eligible for the two-year pilot program only about 3,000 bothered to respond in time to participate, which led the Bloomberg administration to extend the deadline. There’s the fatal flaw in Bloomberg’s plan: he forgot to offer people a check just for signing up.