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

Conservative: Welfare Work Rules Empower

Setting 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 Hanging

The GOP Senate’s “two-and-a-half-day work week and lackadaisical work ethic” has stymied President Trump’s agenda, fumes Rachel Bovard at the Federalist, as “nearly 80 nominations for crucial Executive Branch roles “now languish” for want of a floor vote.

Don’t blame Democrats, as “the Senate filibuster no longer exists for presidential nominations.” Republicans could “easily clear every nomination” in a single 40-hour work week — but that “requires work — more hours, more workdays, and the physical presence of GOP senators in the Senate chamber (the place, ironically, senators most hate to be).”

After “the permanent bureaucracy” thwarted the voters’ will in Trump’s first term, everyone understands “how critical these appointees are — everyone, it seems, except the people whose job it is to confirm them.”

Politics beat: Heed Starmer’s Reset, Dems

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is the latest politician “hurrying to the front of the march to claim it as their own,” snarks Dominic Green at The Wall Street Journal. “Starmer opposed the Brexit campaign to ‘take back control’ over British immigration policy but now promises to ‘take back control’ over the borders.”

He flipped because this month’s local elections “confirmed” that “Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party is gaining significant ground.”

Starmer’s reset “should be instructive for America’s Democrats as they struggle through their post-woke identity crisis.”

To “regain public trust,” Dems need “new leaders who acknowledge past errors and recognize new realities by embracing elements of Donald Trump’s agenda and cultivating his voter coalition.”

MidEast beat: Free Gaza From Hamas Rule

As US campus activists hold pro-Hamas demonstrations, “Palestinians in Gaza are demonstrating — and risking their lives to do so — against Hamas’s continued despotic rule,” thunders Commentary’s Seth Mandel.

“Gazans would like Hamas to surrender” — and they shouldn’t “be the only ones demanding this.”

Those “Western governments pressuring Israel to leave Hamas in power are doing so not out of any concern for Palestinians,” but just “bending to public pressure” that’s “being applied by pro-Hamas protesters and orchestrated by pro-Hamas entities” to “ignore the will of the Gazans suffering under Hamas.”

Western governments should “grow a spine and push back against the Hamasniks in your streets,” not for Israel, but “for the people you are claiming to help.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board