If you're on a cruise ship and you learn that the captain is a pregnant woman, wouldn't you still expect that she would know how to steer the boat?  I would!

And yet the GOP budget being passed by Congress allocates $400 million to give pregnant women "navigators."

All kidding aside, "navigators" is the Orwellian phrase liberals use and Republicans eagerly adopt to refer to individuals who help poor people sign up for subsidized Obamacare and other welfare programs.

Here's the budget allocation:

An extension by five years of a program that gives roughly $400 million annually to fund community health workers to help at-risk pregnant women and families navigate the social safety net.

There's so much liberal jargon in one phrase that you need subtitles, like a foreign movie, to figure out what is going on.

First of all, what is a "community health worker"?  How many illnesses does a community health worker treat?  Could it be...zero?  "Community health worker" is a fancy name for a bureaucrat who gets people to start sucking on the public teat.

Now, what is an "at-risk" pregnant woman?  What is she "at risk" of?  What differentiates an "at-risk" pregnant woman from a "perfectly safe" pregnant woman?  I'm guessing that "at-risk" means "at risk of taking taxpayer money."

And now the last part: "navigate the social safety net."  Doesn't a "net" sound like a claustrophobic trap, an energy-draining mist like Star Trek's "Tholian Web" that saps the initiative to work?  Not for liberals.  For liberals, poor people are trapeze artists who leap through the air and perform tremendous feats but need a net below them just in case they miss a swing!

And now the navigating part.  That's a fancy way of saying poor people are too dumb to apply for welfare on their own.  They are so dumb, in fact (according to liberals), that government needs to spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to get them signed up for it.

The fact is that going on welfare is not difficult.  Take Obamacare.  In many states, all you have to do is go on Healthcare.gov and answer a few simple questions like "What is your name" and "Where do you live" and "What is your income." These questions, apparently, are too difficult for poor people to answer on their own.

Some customers don't know how to use a computer.

Many don't understand insurance lingo – what's a deductible, anyway? – and don't know how to pick the best plan for their needs.  Consumers get confused about how to estimate income ...

What is income?  Is that like outcome, only with a minus sign in front of it?

... and determine household size to qualify for premium tax credits that are available.

How many people are in my household?  Can you please come over to my home and count for me?

"People are still struggling with the metal levels," ... referring to the bronze, silver, gold[,] and platinum plan types.

Perhaps they should have called them the "nap," "cookie," and "bedtime story" plans to better engage the pre-kindergarten mindset of these presumably fully functioning adults.

You know, our tax system is tremendously complicated, more so than Obamacare plans, and yet there are no "navigators" to help us fill out our taxes (only an increasingly understaffed phone line).  Why is that?

It seems to me that the only navigators out there are for people who are signing up for welfare or subsidies.  The government is only trying to steer people into one port, and it's a port called socialism.

What's next: government "navigators" at the voting booths?

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.