America has declared war on its own. America is at war with its own poor.

The declaration of war was made official the day Bill Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform bill.

Bold statement, you may say. A little melodramatic, maybe, another bleeding-heart liberal’s cheap attempt to over-dramatize and tug at the heartstrings of the public.

Perhaps. Let’s look at the facts, and you can make up your mind as to whether American welfare recipients are lazy leeches clinging voraciously to the underbelly of society, or just common citizens in need of assistance and encouragement.

Fourteen million people are currently on welfare. Five million of those welfare recipients are children. Children. Not crack whores scamming you and I out of our hard-earned money. Not winos, stumbling over each other with food stamps clutched in greasy hands to buy a new bottle of ripple. Children.

On average, the typical maximum grant for a mother of two is currently $4,404 per year. The federally-mandated poverty line is $11,186 per year. I tell ya, if welfare recipients are pulling a scam on honest taxpayers, they’re sure not very good at it.

Regardless of the statistics, one positive aspect of the new welfare reform bill is supposed to be that it requires recipients to leave the system and get jobs or educational training. This guarantees that welfare does not become a way of life for anyone. But hold on a second…

An interesting fact is that 50 percent of all welfare recipients already are leaving the system within a year. Seventy percent escape within two years. Welfare as a way of life?

Let’s examine the the welfare reform issue from a national economic standpoint. The welfare reform act is being lauded because not only does it supposedly foster a more positive lifestyle for the “lazy and unmotivated,” but it saves taxpayers money. The reform plan is supposed to save $55 billion over the next six years.

In contrast, let’s focus on some other wasteful government spending that seems to have escaped the public’s (and more to the point, our elected officials’) attention. Let’s see where the real government waste is being created.

Last year the U.S. House of Representatives authorized a defense budget that was $9 million more than the Pentagon even asked for. What happened to everybody tightening their belts?

The Senate in return passed the allocation of $1.3 billion for a helicopter carrier (the Navy says it doesn’t even want the damn thing until 2001).

$1.17 billion was allocated for 24 Navy fighters. The Clinton administration recommended allocating $610 million to buy 12 fighters.

$300 million more than what was recommended was earmarked for research and development of a missile defense system (“Use the force, Ronnie…”)

$1.5 billion for a Seawolf submarine the Pentagon didn’t even want (they already have two).

Anybody remember the Pentagon’s Osprey program? It was/is a doomed aircraft program that was initiated in 1989. It’s already sucked $5 billion in developmental funds, and will cost taxpayers $805 million more by the end of the year.

Fewer than ten Osprey aircrafts have gotten off of the ground and the program’s most notable achievement has been crashing and killing an entire flight crew during a demonstration run.

The cost of these and other military expenditures brings the tab for annual defense budget appropriations to $250 billion.

That’s over ten times the cost of the welfare program, which currently costs taxpayers $22 billion a year.

And let’s not forget the Great Gun Giveaway. According to the 1996 Defense Authorization Act, the Department of Defense was ordered to give away, at no charge, 176,218 rifles, 146 million rounds of ammunition and $8.8 million in property to “private” gun clubs (aka, the NRA).

Why is no one bitching about gun clubs that take government handouts instead of earning the money for their own guns?

Why does this government spending spree, which is neither necessary nor even wanted by our military, go largely unnoticed?

Why do we force the most economically suspect of our citizens to bear the brunt of our budgetary cutbacks, while wasteful military and special interest expenditures occur on a regular basis?

If we’re so hot on eliminating “welfare as we know it,” why don’t we examine corporate welfare that goes to help U.S.-based conglomerates advertise overseas? Since when does Coca-Cola need food stamps? Why have our nation’s poor been made the scapegoat of our economic woes?

The answer is simple. We’ve declared war on a group ill-equipped to defend themselves because they can’t defend themselves. It’s as Johnnie Cole said: “a war without bloodshed.” But a war nonetheless. “I don’t mind stealing bread from the mouths of decadence…

“But I can’t feed on the powerless while my cup’s already over-filled…”

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Tim Davis is a senior in theatre studies from Carlisle. He is editorial page editor of the Daily.