Having been in need in the past for assistance, I can say this is the exact opposite for me. Being on the dole increased my drive to get off of it. I hated taking things without earning them.
Perhaps you were on hard times a while ago, before the easy, anonymous ways of EBT. A person with EBT shops and pays the same way as a person with a platinum credit card. They don’t have to pull out food stamps. They don’t have to eat surplus government cheese products and mystery meats.
Similarly, although less obviously, other programs have become easier to access. Here, I have to go on what I’m told and not what I’ve seen directly. SSDI comes to mind.
If you were getting aid 30 years ago, it was enough of a pain that you wanted to work to get off it if you were at all normal.
From what I see, the liberal formula for success includes going to the right prep school, the highest name recognition university, and then spending the rest of your life climbing the ladder by manipulation, association, and Alinsky-type subterfuge. This is not a formula that can be used to build a great nation and to help provide people with the opportunity to contribute and succeed at high levels. It’s actually a formula for cynicism and reduced ambition - which is rampant currently.
There is politics everywhere in society, and IMHO one of the important roles of government and laws is to help provide a level playing field so that people can fail or succeed on the basis of their hard work - not their connections.
Upward mobility in American society is absolutely dependent upon this, particularly since those coming from the lower socioeconomic ranks don’t generally have connections (especially if they don’t fit into a politically ‘favored’ demographic).
The left, in their hypocritical and false embrace of ‘equality’ are absolutely by their actions the party of pedigree (”where did you go to school?”), connection (”who do you know?”), and influence (”how much money can you give us?”). As such, I can’t imagine them having a legitimate solution for helping the poor.
John Kasich of Ohio has his problems, but his ideas for those on entitlements should be heard. He thinks helping if fine, but any help without a plan to get the people off of the help they’re receiving is simply digging the hole deeper for those unfortunates and for successive generations.
He believes it isn’t just ‘ending’ eligibility for benefits after a period of time that is the answer, but that for so many it’s a matter of training or retraining for gainful employment. As the IBD article points out today, though, the programs are so addictive financially that many can’t get away from those benefits because the immediate loss of benefits per dollar earned puts the recipients immediately back in financial crisis.
This nation must find a way to get people off of the dole, or a financial crisis will crash the economy in such a way that those people will draw nothing from a government that has nothing.
I never was on the dole. I remember having a bare pantry, and $20 in my pocket to my name. I took a $100 financial calculator to the supermarket to make sure I didn’t put more than $20 in my shopping cart. When I was a clerk in that supermarket I saw people carefully adding up the prices of what they put in their cart. I never thought I’d be doing it. I bought a lot of Kraft mac and cheese, which was 25 cents a pack, and a lot of cans of tuna. I suppose that I might have been able to afford steak and lobster if I had taken food stamps.
I know a lady who moved here from Great Britain after marrying a Yank. After she gave birth to four of his children he picked-up and ran off with a younger model. Desperate, she went on welfare for a time. She told me she would never do it again because “those people (the bureaucrats) treated me like absolute sh**. and I refuse to allow myself to be degraded like that ever again”.
She has worked 2 and 3 jobs to support herself ever since.