I asked myself this question just today... I also was kinda harsh and unloaded on another FReeper discussing the $60,000,000 in government cheese "handouts" because of it.
Anyhow, I am grateful my wife is able to breastfeed our son. Money was a little tight this year and a day after Christmas (today) our basement flooded. So I sighed and went to the hardware store. My wife called me and asked if I'd get some baby food (our son is just starting to supplement breastmilk with baby food). I had $9 in my pocket and was trying to do mental math to figure out how much I could buy and still pay cash rather than swipe the bank card. I found a box of smal jars for $7.99 that was equivalent to getting two jars free.
I went to the register to pay and the cashier was frantically searching the shelf underneath for more powdered formuala. The customer ahead of me was barely 23 year old single mother flicking a tongue ring in and out of her mouth and obviously tired of waiting for the cashier to stack 9 large cans onto the conveyor. She gave an annoyed sigh and a "that's fine" to the apologetic cashier explaining there were "only 9 cans." The single mother then presented two WIC vouchers to "pay" for over $100 in baby formuala.
The whole way home I fumed. Here I am busting my tail scrimping and saving, my wife clipping coupons and scouring sales ads for deals on food; going light on Christmas for our kids and trying to stay out of debt... while we pay other's laziness, incompetence, and promiscuity.
I don't know whether to divorce my wife (in the eyes of the State) and live of "assistance" trying to suck the beast dry, or stop working and live off the grid. Either way this working to sustain the frivolous lifestyle of others business sucks. They are fast approaching the point where they've ran out of my money....
To quote Jerry Reed "...they have made a mistake because it adds up to more than this cowboy makes."
There were many days my wife and I tried to figure out how we would afford to feed our youngest, who refused to breastfeed consistently. We scraped it together, cut out every possible inessential part of the budget, and made it work, without government assistance. If only the federal government used the same mentality when it formulated its budget...