Back in the early days of John Englers governorship in Michigan he took a chain saw to the welfare rolls here. There was the expected screaming and crying but it worked.
I saw people who had lived on welfare for their entire adult lives scrambling to find work. In a few years those people were turning up at car dealerships to pick out new cars, talking to realtors about buying their first homes, and shopping on earned money instead of given money.
We had just moved to Michigan at that time. I was shocked at the bleeding heart stories in the paper, a man who had been out of jail for 6 months, had no family or dependents and he was crying that they were taking away his food stamps! I worked for a short time at Meijers in Holland, and there were a group of ladies hired at the same time I was that had moved there from Illinois because the wellfare laws were more lenient, and now they had to get jobs! How unfair was that? Engler was an excellent governor, too bad there were term limits.