That's an incredibly sad statistic
'The welfare hurricane doesnt just destroy one family; it destroys generations of them,' Tarren Bragdon, president and CEO of the Foundation for Government Accountability, said at the event Thursday.
And it's never too late to fix this generational welfare problem.
Many of the blue states are reluctant to do this, supposedly out of an act of so-called compassion, but I think that once people become self-sufficient, they tend to shun liberalism and will vote against it.
I think a workfare system makes more sense. If you are on public assistance of any kind, but can still fog a mirror, you show up at 7AM to clean toilets, sweeps the halls...whatever needs to be done. You should also be subject to random drug testing. I think we’d be amazed how many deadbeats would start looking for better jobs. Also, if you pay no federal taxes, you don’t get to vote in federal elections. After all, nothing in the game, why should you have any say in its rules? Finally, if you are a Congressman and vote for a budget that results in an increase of 3% or more in the federal deficit, you cannot run for reelection. Betcha we’d see programs like free cell phones for deadbeats disappear.
wasn’t Maine ok until the Somalis took over ?
Woman sitting next to telephone as her husband comes in:
"Oh, dear! For 20 minutes this terrible man on the phone said the most awful things to me!"
Well, give the Libs an "A" for consistency but an "F" for lack of originality in these attacks.
I would subdivide welfare from “food relief”, because they are extremely different in purpose and practice.
Welfare is easy to understand: payment to individuals. As such, reform is also *technically* easy.
However, “food relief” is counter-intuitive, bizarre and surreal. I’ll try to describe some of its oddities:
1) More than half the programs are not about getting food to the poor, but are part of an agricultural balancing act to stabilize prices to keep farms working. Farming is just an insane line of work, where a modest year can be far more profitable than a bumper crop year, which can wipe farms out by crashing prices.
Farmers get paid a LOT of money when they deliver crops, but most of it is immediately paid for their seed, fertilizer, pesticide, rental machines, leases, and workers. So a farmer might have a gross of $1.5m and a net of only $30k. Everything they do is on credit.
2) Food aid needs to be mostly unprocessed foods, because it could then be used to dump crop overages and seasonal surges. Ironically, giving all this unprocessed food away does not effect the market for unprocessed food at all. This is because those who buy their food much prefer processed food.
3) America has a hyperabundance of food. Mountains of it rot every year, purchased by the government and expensively warehoused, because to leave it on the market would crash food prices, put farmers out of business, then drive prices sky high.
Even during the Dust Bowl of the 1920s, that wiped out tens of thousands of farms from Texas to Canada, there was still way too much food from the farmers outside the region, which made an economic deflation a catastrophe.
4) Welfare money is a good motivator. Food is not. If a person does not have food, their only priority is getting their next meal, not in improving their life.
So the bottom line to all of this is at the state level. That is, block grants from the feds to feed the poor should be augmented with local crop surpluses. This would help farmers in the state as well as the poor.
I vacation in Maine every year. The locals have really educated me on the welfare state there. Not only that, many of the lobster fisherman are drug addicts. So sad, it is the most beautiful state with such wonderful people.