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Our life experienced color our thinking, even for those that see everything in only black and white, with no gray anywhere. I've got relatives that have abused the welfare system. I've seen businesses that have abused the regulations. We are dealing with people in an unfair world. Some will do what is right, even if they are poor. Some will abuse the system, even if they are business owners. Some stories:
My nephew was drawing $11 an hour in unemployment. The only jobs he could find to even apply for paid $8 per hour and would require a move to a place of his own. If he was not working, he could live with his widowed grandmother, not pay rent other than his labor and part of the groceries, help take care of her with the $11 an hour, and help her raise a garden and can and freeze quite a bit of vegetables to help her out. Would you seriously look for an $8 an hour job under those circumstances until the $11 ran out? If you have never been in similar circumstances, be careful how you answer. That $8 was without benefits.
My grandparents came from way back in the hills. Before Medicare and Medicaid, and before I was born, my grandfather had a stroke. There was no money for medical treatment. He lay in bed at home with his wife and family from when he had the stroke in September until he died in December. Can you inmagine the mood in that house while he lay there dying? Can you imagine what his wife was going through, trying to figure out how to raise a bunch of kids without a husband? Maybe that's part of why Mom never made it past 4th grade.
Parts of the system are broken. I have no problem with helping people that really need help, but yeah, some people learn to milk the system. It becomes a generational thing. You have exceptions, I'm one, but people that are born into poverty tend to remain in poverty. That's what they learn from their parents. There education does not prepare them for success. And by education, I don't just mean schools but also their life experiences and what they learn from their parents and other role models. I'm a strong believer in a good education, but the best of schools cannot overcome bad parents or people that don't even know how to be good parents. If they were not taught to be good parents, how can you expect a majority to be good parents? How do you break that cycle? How do you solve that problem? Have the government take over a lot of raising the kids? Hitler showed it can work with his youth programs, but with the government taking over raising the kids, you are on a real slippery slope that I don't want to go to.
People that are not used to having money look at it differently than people that are used to having some. Instead of looking to the future, they look to the present. What can I get for this money now because I'm not going to have any in the future. An example. Many decades ago in my youth, a trailer burned down. The family lost everything. It was covered on TV and others donated about $60,000 to help the family out. So they made a down payment on a new trailer, a down payment on a new car, a down payment on a TV, and several other down payments. They did not pay anything off, just made down payments. Back then, for $60,000 they could have bought a lot of that stuff, totally paid it off. But they did not know how to handle money so within a few months, they were back with nothing. It seems like stupidity, but I think it was more that they just did not understand.
I don't know how you fix the problems. You have to have written rules and regulations for people to qualify for help. Some people are going to find a way to abuse any written system. It is practically impossible to put something on paper that somebody can't figure out a way around. And it is not necessarily laziness. Often you can do better milking the system than holding down a regular job. I think a lot of it is that it is a learned behavior. They can get by at a certain acceptable level by milking the system and maybe getting cash for other under-the-table taxfree jobs. Their ambition and pride is such that that is a perfectly acceptable way of living. I could not do it. I saw how much it hurt Dad to accept the free peanut butter and such when he hit a rough spot due to the economy changing and him finding that his kids needed cash for school lunches and school clothes. He could not raise those on the farm, so he had to take a factory job. He wanted to farm, not work in a factory. But he had the pride and responsibility that he was going to take care of his family.
I think a start is to reduce the benefits to a point that they allow people to live but don't allow them to live better than having a job. Enough for a safety net but not enough for a satisfactory way of life. Also, I saw how my niece finally started really looking for a job when some of her welfare benefits ran out or depended on her getting training and finding a job. I think this kind of reform will help, but how you put the laws on paper in written form to stop people from figuring a way to abuse it, I don't know. How do you break that family tradition of not trying to better yourself? That concept of not trying to better yourself and taking care of yourself is so foreign to me, I just don't have a clue.
