Trump: After tax reform gets done, welfare reform is next

Remember, you may not always like the way President Trump says or does things, but you voted for him because he had the right agenda for the country. (And to keep Hillary out of the White House, of course, which is a pretty darn important agenda item all its own.) That agenda is not going to be complete when tax reform passes. The president said last week that the next item to be tackled is welfare reform.

Why? Well for starters, it represents upwards of $1 trillion of the federal budget, so it's a fiscal imperative to make sure we've got the right welfare policies - that we're taking care of people who are truly in need while not throwing a bunch of good money after bad and screwing the taxpayers in the process. Second, when welfare programs persist as long as the ones we currently have, you know darn well there are people who are gaming the system and abusing the generosity of the American people. I do not want to pull the safety net out from under the people who truly need it, and that's the very reason we need to root out abuse of the system. If we're giving away money to people who don't really need it, then it's harder to help those who do. Every politician claims he or she can make things work better and cost less by rooting out "waste, fraud and abuse." The only way to really do that is to fundamentally reform what you do, which is why it makes sense to follow up tax reform with welfare reform. We believe in supply-side economics around here, so we do not believe "tax cuts have to be paid for." But we're all for the federal government not spending money it doesn't need to spend. Reducing outlays is a good idea regardless of what you do with the tax code. Of course, that doesn't mean the Democrats who want tax cuts to be "paid for" are going to cheer this. (Besides, they don't want tax cuts at all, "paid for" or not.) You can already identify what the Democrat talking points will be on this issue:

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Democrat talking points

• Republicans hate the poor! • People will starve and die in the streets! • Millionaire robber barons will benefit! • Free-market capitalism is mean!

They'll say that about this because they say that about everything. The Democrats don't have a single positive idea to offer right now. They rarely do. Their only message is that Donald Trump is awful and Republicans are nasty and want to screw you. Missed in all this is that you don't actually help people by keeping them dependent on welfare. The right approach to welfare is to provide help to those truly in need while providing them with a path back to self-sufficiency as quickly as possible - and to make people take care of themselves if they actually can. What complicates this, of course, is that 50 years of these policies have caused entire generations of children to be brought up in welfare-dependent poverty. All they've ever known is being on the system. And now the very Democrats who've bred this dependency say it would be mean to put an end to it. No. What's mean is when you rob people of the dignity that comes from work and self-sufficiency so you can buy their votes. That's what the current Democrat-designed welfare system does. Reforming it won't just improve the nation's fiscal health. It will give people back the chance for lives that really mean something.