Welfare Cheats

For years it has been propagandized that black people are the bane of welfare’s existence.  Black women, deemed welfare queens, regularly cheat the system by having babies and instead of using the money to buy food, shelter, and other essentials, these women live high off the hog buying expensive cars to drive and other self indulging extravagant items while children starve without a place to stay and make due without clothes.

From what I’ve seen of welfare anyone who can cheat the system to live large must be a diabolical genius on par with such notables as Goldfinger and Scaramanga.  Welfare programs are seriously tight with their limited resources and the people who manage the program can be notoriously slow to approve their lunch selection let alone a request for assistance.  Anybody who can develop strategies to manipulate this system to their undeserved benefit is truly a gifted, intellectual mastermind.

Personally, like the fictional characters of an Ian Fleming James Bond novel, I don’t think this person exists.  The welfare cheat who drives a new Cadillac and lives in luxury is a work of political imagination designed to repulse the public and make it easier to cut public funding to such programs of social welfare, if not eliminate their funding altogether.  And instead of people truly listening to claims of the welfare cheats and asking themselves how such a person can live so well off such a tight fisted system, many of us have a tendency to simply trust the word of our politicians.

However, I am first to admit that I might be mistaken and such people do regularly exist in our midst.  If anyone knows for a fact that I’m wrong I would appreciate being corrected with verifiable examples of such deception.  Please note that unproven claims of the friend with a cousin who has a coworker who knew a guy who dated a woman who supposedly manipulated the system are not welcome.

On the other hand, there are the executives of American International Group, Inc. (AIG) who begged the politicians in Washington, D.C. for eighty five billion dollars a few weeks ago to keep their company from falling into bankruptcy.  Supposedly, AIG has fallen victim to all the welfare cheats who preyed upon the company’s adherence to government mandates that required financial institutions to give mortgage loans to people who didn’t practice any fiscal responsibility.  The government reluctantly loaned AIG the desperately needed funds to stay afloat.

What a difference a couple of weeks make.

AIG executives are now accused of taking a little less than half a million dollars of the borrowed money to treat upper management to a high dollar spa and luxury retreat at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California.  The rooms start somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred dollars a night.  Maybe the AIG execs think that begging for funds is hard work and they needed a reward for being so difficult that they needed to be rewarded for a job so well done.  Or maybe they just bought into the hype that spending the government’s money foolishly is customary for welfare recipients.

An AIG representative told the Los Angeles Times that the event is an annual affair that is “a key meeting.”  It’s tradition.  However it’s not only tradition but common sense that when you have to borrow money just to get through tough times you have to curb your spending as well.  Relatively speaking half of a million dollars is a tiny fraction compared to eighty five billion.  But half a million of somebody else’s money is a half a million too much to be spending on frivolous items like golfing, massages, and other luxuries that don’t do a thing for adding value to anybody but the people at the St. Regis.

To add insult to injury AIG plans to have another retreat for fifty of its employees at the Ritz Carlton Resort in Half Moon Bay, California.  These people act like they never heard of the big conference room at the local Holiday Inn.  And this isn’t any work of some politician’s yarn developed to perpetuate some political agenda.  The majority of people were against giving these reckless pirates of industry a dime of taxpayer’s money to fund their financial malfeasance.

And what do they do with the money?  They go on a luxury vacation while giving the average American taxpayer the middle finger in the process.  It looks like these exceptional kings of welfare can show the average Dr. Evil a thing or two about being a master of dastardly pursuits.