Welfare work requirements empower, slashing funding can help science and other commentary

Conservative: Welfare Work Rules EmpowerSetting a work requirement to collect welfare is more than “a way to reduce costs,” argues Merrill Matthews at The Hill: “Its real benefit is to help individuals regain the dignity and self-respect that comes from having a job.” As the GOP budget bill moves to “require states to enforce a work requirement” for some able-bodied individuals on Medicaid, liberals “claim the heartless Republicans are trying to punish people just for being poor.” Libs “think they are doing welfare recipients a favor, but they’re not,” as time out of the workforce makes people “lose needed work habits and skills” and “respect for themselves,” — which can encourage drug and alcohol abuse.People who are “required to work for their benefits” often “discover that work is empowering”; they just need “a little push to get started.”Libertarian: Slashing Funding Can Help Science“There’s a good chance” President Trump’s slashing of “federal spending will liberate science from the corrupting forces that Eisenhower warned us about” in a 1961 speech, when he “cautioned Americans about the growing power of a ‘scientific, technological elite,’” points out Reason’s Zach Weissmueller.When government controls funding, “there’s homogenization, and only one set of ideas is allowed to emerge,” says University of Buckingham biochemistry professor Terence Kealey, crushing “what’s so important in science, which is different ideas competing in a marketplace of ideas.” Weissmueller notes: “Before government money flooded in, private research facilities like Bell Labs were centers of innovation,” and could be again.

“If Kealey is right, slashing science funding could, counterintuitively, accelerate” innovation in fields like medicine “in the long run.”Eye on DC: Senate Keeps Nominees HangingThe GOP Senate’s “two-and-a-half-day work week and lackadaisical work ethic” has stymied P...