As ugly as some of the words in this thread have been I've read a few good points in it. I particularly agree with Bright Eyes, and while my logical side agrees with albed I simply don't identify with his cold attitude toward his fellow human beings.
Simply put, the goal of welfare should be to make it so people don't need it. If it works then eventually it makes itself obsolete. Some welfare systems are successful by this metric, while others are dismal failures. If you wanna blame poor people for not using welfare properly then go ahead, you might be right. We've all heard the saying, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach that man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Perhaps that hungry man is too lazy to learn to fish on his own, but then again it's just as likely that the fisherman is too lazy to teach him. It's so much easier to just pull a fish out of the water and hand it over, or worse yet, enact a law that requires every fisherman to give a percentage of his catch to the poor. But how does that solve the real problem?
When a welfare system fails then all parties involved share the blame, both the poor who depend on it and the rich who fund it. But when it comes to fixing a broken system the only people who really have the necessary tools are the rich. There's gotta be a better way than just doling out money and hoping people don't waste it, it's a problem that requires a lot more creativity than that. Make 'em feel guilty for being lazy? Nope, that ain't gonna do it. Threaten to take away their welfare checks? Wrong agian. Rub your own success and wealth in their faces? That'll just piss 'em off, and it won't accomplish a damn thing.
The problem with the vaunted 'American Dream' isn't that it is fantasy but that so many people believe it to be so. Once upon a time people set goals for themselves, they even set deadlines for accomplishing them, and for the most part they managed to make their dreams come true. But that kind of incentive is an intangible thing, so some people claim that it isn't real or even desirable. That's where the system breaks down because welfare depends on intangibles to provide incentive to its recipients. Without the American Dream of being self-relient, productive members of society the welfare check is nothing more than a crutch to most people. At some point in every person's life, they need to learn to hope and to try for better things before they can actually attain them. But when you give people free money you take away their incentive to try, and then you rob them of their hope, and then you're nothing but a thief.
As in all things, throwing money (your own or the taxpayers') at the problem invariably makes it worse.
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