Sad news from Florida: A man with more money than he knew what to do with has made the tragic mistake of becoming an “enabler” of the poor.

We all know, at least if we listen to the same sources as our Governor, that giving money or any other kind of aid to poor people will only “enable” them in their addiction to being takers of the fruits of other people’s labor:

There is a thin line between being compassionate and enabling people.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I share the terrible news from Florida, where a certain Mr. Harris Rosen has tragically stepped over the enablement line:

Twenty years ago, having amassed a fortune, Rosen decided to give back. He targeted the Orlando neighborhood of Tangelo Park — a crime-infested place where people were afraid to walk down the street and the high school graduation rate was 25 percent.

The first thing he did was provide day care for every parent. Next, he offered to pay the Florida state college tuition for any student from his adopted community of 2500 residents.

The poor, poor deluded man!  How could he visit such a cruel “kindness” upon the people of Tangelo Park? Didn’t he know what would happen? Didn’t he know about the cycle of poverty he was about to create? Didn’t he know that the ungrateful, lazy, shiftless takers of that run down neighborhood would do nothing but turn his money into drugs, violence, and decay?

Alas, no. In his haste to be “nice” to the unworthy recipients of his largesse, he blindly went forward with his ill-fated plan, and ruined the neighborhood, permanently entrenching horrors such as:

… the crime rate has been cut in half and the graduation rate is near one hundred percent.

“When people have the resources to go and succeed, there’s a ripple effect,” said one high school senior who was part of the first pre-K class in the Tangelo Park Program. “It becomes generational. No one in my family ever went to college before, but now, my baby sister can’t even picture a life without college. My mother even went back and got her degree. I showed her that she could do it.”

Oh the horror! The horror!  Please, Governor, please prevent Vermont from doing anything so foolhardy! Please keep the wealthy job creators in our state from repeating Mr. Rosen’s folly. Please don’t “enable” our state’s “takers,” I beg of you!

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In all seriousness: Governor Shumlin, the policies you are promoting will have the effect of destroying families and seriously harming our state’s economy. Your proposal to protect the wealthy from sharing in the support of our state’s well-being, while slicing more out of the hides of those already in need is – to put it kindly – stupid.