Why Can’t the Poor Be More Like the Rich?

What a novel idea that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has for ending poverty in America. Government incentives. After all, Bloomberg pointed out, the government already offers incentives to the rich to stop planting corn or tobacco, or to drill for oil or not drill in certain places. “You can argue that a lot of the things Congress subsidizes, people should do anyway,” Bloomberg said in an interview with National Public Radio. “But the truth … is, when you have a bonus, you tend to work harder and do more.”

So once we start offering government incentives to poor people “to do things that can benefit them, such as attend school, get a library card or go to the doctor“, they will start, a hum, “behaving” as well as the rich, according to Bloomberg logic. Does anyone except the Mayor really believe that turning the poor into masses of Paris Hiltons, OJ Simpsons, et al would be a good thing?