“If a system pays people not to work, don’t be shocked when it produces more people who don’t work.”

The Real Cost of “Free”

Let’s do the math.

The U.S. spends trillions of dollars every year on welfare and entitlement programs—federal, state, and local combined. When you divide that by the number of taxpayers, you’re effectively paying about $3,500 a month to fund these systems.

That’s your money. Every month. Whether you like it or not.

And if only 1% of that is wasted through fraud—and I assure you it’s much more—that’s a billion dollars a month going straight into the ether.

The Government Accountability Office estimates 11% of welfare spending is lost to fraud, waste, and abuse. Eleven percent. That’s not a rounding error; that’s a hemorrhage.

“Fraud isn’t a bug in the system—it’s the business model for people who know how to game it.”

What I Found on the Ground

This isn’t theory for me. I’ve been to the villages in Guatemala and seen what happens when America subsidizes dependency.

One mountain town I visited looked like a ghost village. The mayor told me it used to hold around 2,000 residents, but now maybe 200 remain—mostly women and children. Almost all the men had gone to the United States.

And they’re not just sending postcards home. They’re sending money.

Those “remittances” are being used to build 3,000-square-foot mansions in a town where people once lived in bamboo huts with dirt floors. American tax dollars—channeled through welfare checks and under-the-table cash work—are being wired home and turned into marble staircases and brass fixtures.

Across Latin America, that story repeats. Over $200 billion a year leaves the U.S. in remittances. Not all of it is ill-gotten, but enough is that it’s propping up entire foreign economies—Mexico, India, even China—with money that originated from your tax bill.

When God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26), He was establishing something radical: every human life has intrinsic worth, purpose, and responsibility. We’re not accidents of evolution — we’re image-bearers of God.

That’s why Christians defend life from conception to natural death. But the Imago Dei doesn’t just speak to abortion or euthanasia. It also speaks to the way we treat human dignity in everyday life — including how we deal with poverty, work, and welfare.

The Cruelty of “Compassion”

For decades, the U.S. government has built an entire industry around dependency. SNAP, EBT, and countless welfare programs were supposed to be safety nets, not hammocks. But when “temporary help” becomes a permanent lifestyle, it robs people of the very thing that makes them human: agency.

Work was never a punishment — it was God’s design. Adam wasn’t lounging in Eden collecting fruit stamps. He was tending a garden, naming animals, exercising dominion. Work is how human beings imitate their Creator.

That’s why Paul said in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” Not as a threat, but as a correction. A culture that subsidizes idleness is not compassionate — it’s complicit in spiritual decay.

Mercy Isn’t Maintenance

 Brazil: When the State Loses the Streets

I’ve worked in Rio with a special operations anti-gang unit (BOPE). I’ve walked the favelas with locals who risk their lives just to get in and out of their own neighborhoods. When the government “takes a hard stance,” it means armored vehicles rolling into some of the most densely packed urban terrain on earth—with families caught in the crossfire.

What you need to know

• Red Command (Comando Vermelho) began in Brazil’s prisons in the late ’70s with Marxist roots, and evolved into one of the most powerful criminal factions on the planet.

• They run cocaine and marijuana retail/wholesale, weapons trafficking, carjackings, armored-car robberies, and extortion.

• They impose “parallel governance”: if you live in their turf, they are the government.

• The terrain is a nightmare for police: alleyways too tight for vehicles, multi-story concrete warrens, countless blind corners. Even with BOPE, operations are high-risk and civilian casualties mount.

“In Rio’s favelas, the state doesn’t always rule. Whoever controls the corner rules.”

Why Americans should care: Red Command is transnational. A lot of their product goes to Europe, but some flows toward the U.S. via routes that snake Brazil → Venezuela or Brazil → Bolivia → Ecuador → Colombia → north. When state power erodes, cartels fill the vacuum—and the poison travels.

 A Hemisphere Pushing Back

Say what you will, but a tougher U.S. stance on cartels has emboldened several Latin American governments:

• Ecuador (Jan): Declared internal armed conflict; designated 22 gangs as terrorists; later the U.S. added two to our own lists.

• Guatemala (Oct 21): Congress passed an anti-gang law, formally branding MS-13 and Barrio 18 as terror organizations with stiffer penalties.

• Honduras: Reframed parts of narco-trafficking as terrorism in the penal code.

• Nicaragua: Cracking down—not on cartels—but on churches and religious NGOs. Backwards priorities, and they’re proud of it.

Bottom line: The El Salvador model (mass gang arrests, unapologetic enforcement) is contagious. Some countries are finally acting like cartels are terrorists. Because they are.