Reply #26: The money they're given isn't the problem.

[Philostopher]

The problems are deeper, and more difficult to tackle -- many poor people are trapped, quite literally, by the way our whole economy functions. It doesn't matter how able your body is if your elementary school didn't encourage you to learn and you drop out as soon as you hit sixteen because you can't learn or nobody cares to encourage you. I grew up in a small, rural, 95% white town, so trying to assess blame by laying it on the culture is a straw man (not saying you're trying to do that, but many Republicans -- and even many Dems -- do). Access to birth control and sex education, prenatal care, affordable child care, and jobs that can actually feed a family would be a good start, but you see, those are complex programs and moderately costly. On the whole, our economic system works on the backs of the non-working and working poor. The pilot program in Wisconsin proved that ultimately, it's cheaper to help those who are really motivated and just pay off the rest. Some people just cannot get out of the hole -- they have physical or psychological problems for which they can't afford to compensate, they have learning disabilities that are complicated to get around. Sadly, as the original poster noted, those people have been not only redlined as far as where they can live -- they don't even enter into the dialogue anymore.

I'd be all for doing away with the welfare system if everybody had health insurance, everybody had some kind of fair pension plan, and everybody who wanted a job could be guaranteed one in a system that would provide sufficient economic stability for them to live without having to work two jobs without health insurance and leave five year old kids alone at home to fend for themselves, and nobody was a broken arm away from total poverty ... but that climate does not exist today in this country. The way things are going, it never will exist here, because seven dollar an hour jobs are still jobs, so when you have people working two or three of them just to keep their heads above water, the powers that be can claim those people are employed.

The situation is incredibly complex, of course, and to fix it would be difficult and expensive. It's easier to just shrug and say, 'oh, well, I guess it's their culture, I guess they don't want to improve themselves because we're feeding them for nothing,' than it is to figure out what it would take to fix that, and bite the bullet and ask the very rich to pay for the privilege of working within a system that's made them very rich. Even the Dems have shied away, in recent years, from saying that -- many people who are very rich became that way because of the economic system we have in the U.S. that doesn't tax them at a rate commensurate with their holdings. The more you have, the more you can afford to get out of paying.

Again, I'm not saying that you in particular -- or even all Republicans -- hold this attitude, but many do. Many Dems do, as well -- it's so easy to blame the victim, especially when it's difficult and expensive to change the system. I won't flame anybody for having incorporated the attitude that's been flung at us for the past twenty years. I know better, but not everybody does, and that's not necessarily their fault -- finding the information to tell you how screwed up the system really is for some people requires effort, and not everybody's motivated to make it, but I won't blame them for being lazy because it's really not all that easy to find the information that quantifies all the reasons some people never get off welfare.

There probably is a certain subset of people in this country who would sit back and take a check for doing nothing and never think about getting work, but to insinuate that any majority of people who draw public assistance want to be in that situation, or have any idea how to get out of it, would be far too simplistic for reality. Many of them would help themselves and 'climb the ladder' if our economic system hadn't sawed off the first three or four rungs, then forced a lot of people from the middle of the ladder backward.