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Agreed. The baby with the bath water. Unfortunately, there are many people scamming the system and there is little interest from the bureaucrats running these programs to screen for the cheaters. Or make the able bodied work.

The moral question: is it fair for an honest working person, who is struggling to pay his bills and buy essentials, to pay for a some lazy SOB who gets to stay home and watch tv all day (maybe do and deal drugs), gets free food, health care, has more children, gets free services like phones, kids meals at school, free text books, etc. etc.

Two issues:

1. Begs the question — why work when you don't have to? Especially when people are trying to be honest. Makes honest people into dishonest people. It destroys society. When few people are working and paying into the system the whole system collapses.

2. The person on welfare will be stuck in it for ever. They lose all work skills and all hope and become complete dependents. They have no ownership of their lives and therefor don't manage their lives to find a job, make tough decisions like not having children because they can't afford it, etc. And their children become dependents, and so on. A pretty sad story.

Unfortunately, there are many people scamming the system and there is little interest from the bureaucrats running these programs to screen for the cheaters.

Welfare was never about helping people. It's about enslaving them to get their vote.

Madison was very clear on government "charity":

Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 3rd Congress, 1st Session, page 170 (1794-01-10)
The Annals summarize speeches in the third person, with the actual text of Madison’s quote as follows: “Mr. Madison wished to relieve the sufferers, but was afraid of establishing a dangerous precedent, which might hereafter be perverted to the countenance of purposes very different from those of charity. He acknowledged, for his own part, that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”