You can’t vote yourself rich, despite what the public sector unions tell you. Nor is any government provided benefit “free,” despite taxpayer funded ads such as these, intended to drum up demand for “free health care” for your kids.

New York’s new state tourism slogan.  Polls found “I Love New York” was a lie, unless you’re on the dole.

For years blue state Democrats have purchased votes with taxpayer funds.  Democrats have enlarged, enriched and generally embiggened poverty relief programs to cover more and more of the middle class. Don’t believe ‘Puter?  Wrap your mind around the following facts, each assuming a four person household:

New York’s Child Health Plus program gives kids taxpayer subsidized health care if your annual household income is less than $92,200 annually.

New York’s Food Stamp program gives you free food if your annual household income is less than $28,668 per year.

These are only two of the myriad programs where New Yorkers can receive “free” stuff (like forgiven mortgages and gas for your war wagon). In addition to Child Health Plus and Food Stamps, New Yorkers can also select from among the following evergreen dollar fountains: Family Assistance; Head Start;Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program; Medicaid; School Breakfast and Lunch Program; Special Milk Program; Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC); Summer Food Service; Unemployment Insurance; and Weatherization Assistance Program.

If that’s not enough wealth spreading for you, you may want to look into the some other highly recommended “New York programs of interest,” such as: Breast and/or Cervical Cancer Treatment Program; Commodity Supplemental Food Program; Early Intervention Program; Elderly Pharmaceutical Insurance Coverage Program (EPIC); Growing Up Healthy Hotline (probably advice on how to get more money out of the sucker New York taxpayers); HIV Uninsured Care Programs: and Smokers’ Quitsite.

‘Puter’s not even counting the hundreds of millions of dollars New York spends on special education programs annually, or purely federal programs such as Social Security.

New York has an entire agency devoted to nothing but wealth redistribution, robbing from the rich and giving to the “poor.”  It’s called the State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance.  But redistributing ‘Puter’s wealth is hard.  So hard, in fact, that the OTDA developed a helpful user manual for its personnel to ensure each eligible New Yorker steals as much from the sucker tax-paying New Yorkers as he is able.

If you think ‘Puter’s cherry picking by using New York, think again.  You can go here and see just how your state is spending your hard earned dollars, and on whom. New York may be a bit of an outlier, but it’s not that far from the national norm. Sadly.

None of this is to say the government (local, state or federal) shouldn’t help the truly needy, those who through no fault of their own are currently or permanently unable to care for themselves.  Nor is ‘Puter advocating for draconian cuts to programs efficiently meeting basic human needs, such as food, clothing and shelter.

However, at a certain point, each taxpayer should step back and take a look at the sprawling mass of bureaucracy dedicated to spreading the wealth.  Is the bureaucracy meeting basic human needs? Is it doing so efficiently? What’s the overhead cost for administration of the program against the dollars to the recipients? Is the program needed anymore? Is the program duplicative of other programs? Are the benefits too generous? The questions are endless. And the questions are never asked, much less answered.

Democrats have created two special interest groups dedicated to neither asking nor answering ‘Puter’s questions.  Any change to the status quo, except as may enrich these groups further are verboten.  Those groups are welfare recipients gaming the system and public sector employee unions.

The sheer cost of these programs, coupled with an absolute lack of transparency regarding cost and efficiency, drive New York’s tax burden ever-higher, driving productive citizens from the state, causing taxes to rise to make up for the lost productive citizens, ad infinitum.

Democrats, locust-like, ultimately destroy every governmental unit they control. By doling out others’ wealth, they purchase loyal voting blocs (public sector unions, benefit recipients) to do their bidding.  The only problem is that Democrats must continue to feed the monster they’ve created, the one with the insatiable appetite for dollars.  The monster that will not take no for an answer.

New York is an example of what happens to states that buy into the Democrats’ redistributionist model, promising never-ending “free” benefits to all comers.  And the advent of the “poor” family of four earning $92,200 is a harbinger of the end times, just as surely as that guy on the pale horse riding down the Thruway to Albany.  Eventually, there’s no one left in the state who’s not a net taker. All the makers have wised up and left. 

It’s going to suck for the Democrats when their constituency realizes it’s been had.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.