I just want to follow up to add a couple of things about going to the welfare office.
People who work at the welfare office have access to the very same database used by the police department. Once you put in an address, it tells you every person who lives, has lived, or has been reported to live at that address, meaning every person who has created a paper trail there, or reported it to credit reporting agencies, state agencies, federal agencies, etc. It also gives you the year, make, model and registration information for any vehicle that has been registered to that address for the past several years. It tells whose name all the utilities are in for the address.
When you put in a name, it will tell you all addresses used by this person for the past several years.
If you put in the social sec #, you get bank records, credit cards, vehicle loans, mortgages, investments, property records, EVERYTHING. It cross references and brings up joint accounts too.
Of course, the database is only as good as the person looking at it. Not to toot my own horn, but I would say the average intelligence of a welfare worker is not quite what mine is. However, the tools are in front of the people who work there to catch a user defrauding the system. And they do catch people and kick their asses off there all the time.
The number one reason people get fired from the welfard office: you guessed it - looking up their friends family and neighbors on this system...it's very tempting because you find out EVERYTHING about someone by doing it. You have to have a case # and name every time you look someone up or you WILL get fired.
Why does that have anything to do with this conversation? I'm just saying don't think the gov't is so stupid that everyone is just screwing them over. People really do have to jump through a lot of hoops to hide all their money, even if they are working black market jobs. Even if someone is not paying the IRS, don't think they are not paying plenty of taxes because they still are. In fact someone living off the normal system completely is paying a premium for just about every simple action most people take for granted like paying bills, moving around the country, renting living arrangements, work arrangements, and a myriad of other services and situations people have to procure to do business.
A lot of drug dealers and crack hos and prostitutes and other bad people are on welfare. Like others said, it's for the kids. Hopefully they are not selling every last cent to the Arab convenience store for a third of their worth, and some is getting into the kids' bellies. As far as the insurance for the kids go - they might need it more than other kids if their parents aren't taking such swell care of them, and I hope they get it.
When people talk about entitlements, they often don't realize that the entire bundle of such services covers other programs, like gap coverage for seniors who can't afford to pay their medicare out of pocket expenses, where those expenses are being paid by social programs. Seniors have to be destitute, with no savings remaining (they have all been spent on hundreds if not thousands a month on life-saving meds), before they can qualify for these programs. They cover the cost of medications that otherwise these seniors would die without because they simply cannot afford to pay for them and their families can't either.
They also give extra assistance for the blind, wheelchair bound including paraplegics and other, deaf, and people with MS and other problems to be able to live independently. They give extra assistance to people with children to obtain their educational needs, which can be costly in regards to transportation, special equipment, and other logistics. Regular insurance sometimes is lacking, or is just not there.
Low cost or free insurance is also available to pregnant women, and income restrictions are higher for pregnant women. The average cost of having a child is about 10k, and emergency rooms are not required to take in birthing women without insurance. Many women would be forced to have home births without these programs, and there would be a much higher incidence of infant death and injury in the US if that were to happen because medical care would not be immediately available to these women.
Some people nowadays even want to call Social Security and medicare, programs that we have all paid into for generations, 'entitlements'. Can you imagine all our elders having their checks and medical coverage cut off? They have worked for that money and we are working for a system that is steadily being cut out from under us as we consistently pay into it. We have earned it. It is not a frikking welfare entitlement.
Really this short overview is just a small dip into the different programs that are available to Americans to assist them with many different aspects of life from getting through tough times to starting a business to getting an education, buying a home, working for community programs, taking care of ailing family members, etc. I'm proud that we have these programs. I hate to think what the alternative would be. Trickle down economics does not work and I don't think trickle down social programs would be any better (although that is steadily becoming the unfortunate reality). Even with all the programs we have, people die in the US every day because they cannot afford the proper medical care, nor can they afford to provide the proper nutrition and supplements, alternative treatments, etc.
I'm sure some people think I'm stupid for writing all this. It's not only my opinion. Some of it is just pure humane existence and the human condition. How can we judge these people? If we didn't have these programs, we would have poor women in the street begging with their starving children beside them, no clothes, ribs sticking out with swollen bellies....while Escalades and Cadillacs and Mercedes pass them by, the owners complaining to the cops about getting them out of the way. In short, these programs are a big part of what separates the US from third world countries. Their existence allows people to sit around and conjecture about poor people. We have experienced the alternative, however, and in the not so distant past.
Upton Sinclair, F Scott Fitzgerald, Johnathan Swift, John Steinbeck - and many others I'm sure have written about the industrial revolution and the karmic cost we all pay when we ignore those who toil so we can enjoy the fruits of their labors in the form of cheap goods and services. We have put these programs in place so those festering bodies would not be on the roadsides of the US, but would have somewhere to go and get out of the weather and have some food in their bellies...going backwards on that is just backsliding as a human race, not reforming anything or solving any problems to do with misuse of tax money.