I am told my family qualifies for reduced lunch/free lunch at our local Catholic school. The program has morphed into some quasi funding program.
Also ask consider this: First we had assistance programs because people didn't have enough money to live on.
Then we found out people would take their assistance checks and cash them and still have not enough money to live on.
So we come up with some new programs called housing assistance and Food stamps so the money would get spent on the right things.
We didn't just modify the assistance system already in place, no we created new programs which needed people to run them and desks for the people to set behind to do their work and budgets to fund the program.
Then we found out these folks getting food stamps still sent their kids to school without food or a way to pay for it.
Did we modify the present system? Nope. We created a new program with new people to run it and new desks to sit behind with a new budget...
Makes you wonder if we are making programs to help people or are we making programs to make government bigger?!?!
"Makes you wonder if we are making programs to help people or are we making programs to make government bigger?!?!"
We are creating more programs, intended to fix the programs, which didn't fix the initial programs, ad nauseum, ad infinitum....and the only winners are those who are hired by the ever-bloated government hacks.
First off, you can't convince me that school lunch programs were/are a bad thing. It made a hugely powerful impression on me at a relatively young age.
Secondly, my opinion of welfare is probably not too different than your own. It was created and intended as a temporary measure, so that we didn't revert to the kind of deal the Victorians had in London, etc. It was never intended as a "lifestyle," much less as multi-generational.
I've actually given this some thought - the problem with gov't programs in general is that they rarely change to meet the needs of an environment. They don't evolve effectively or efficiently. Fire depts buy special equipment suited to the needs of their environment, whether it be suburban or urban. Same thing for cops and even garbage guys.
So, the question is: why can't social programs meet the needs of their environment as effectively as firemen, cops and trash collectors?