Rick Lowe
I'm often taken to task by a couple of my friends because I do not believe the Government really cares for the real needy and suffering. They only pay lip service and a government safety net is asking for an unsustainable debt that future generations will be forced to pay.
More to the point, churches and volunteer organisations are much more effective and efficient at providing a safety net for those that need help.
Charitable organisations provide their services to the unfortunate and needy out of love and compassion, without the curse of a "bloated, wasteful, coercive and ineffective government bureaucracy".
In the final, I agree that the needy and suffering need help, but when government gets involved the "safety net" so many of us want becomes a hammock – "a giant welfare bureaucracy that robs people of their initiative and potential, and leads them into chronic dependency on government."
By the way, this excellent piece by Dr. Arnold Kling at the Cato Institute provides some more insight into this subject.
It is not easy to disestablish a government safety net.
The US as a large safety net and how much is help and how much created dependency.
Unless you are a politician the answer is obvious.
When a country as had a large safety net for a very long time it has encourage a dependency pattern that can not realistically be undone in a just a few years.
In such countries a safety net can only improve or work if the persons receiving it are required to produce $1,00 worth of service for each dollar received.
Simply sending money out has nor and can not work.
There is also a big difference between recipients. The father of a family with three childrens that as always worked and suddenly is ill is a very different situation than an out of work grown up kid living with is parents.
The problem in politics is that the left always tend to demand universal benefits for all situation as there only solution and that is a recipe for bankruptcy.
The efficient way to make social benefit rational is to required the recipient to perform an equivalent amount of community work.
A) Beneficiaries would keep their self esteem and feel that they are valuable instead of gradually degenerating in to dependency of chronic welfare.
B) It would also motivate the beneficiaries to find a better job.
C) The recipients that where abusing the system would simply not show up for this kind work and stay home or find other work.
D) Cities and States could certainly use this labor force.
E) We would finally get the real unemployment figures.The name could actually be changed from unemployment to Work Fare or Temporary Employment.
Countries spending billions on unaccountable welfare programs as we have it today are investing in poverty.
The left would probably object to this kind of “Work for benefit” type of welfare and be calling it force labor but on the contrary it is the present system that is forcing working citizens to pay for a Welfare System that leads to failures and more and more cost.