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It seems absurd because Americans have long been encouraged to believe that welfare recipients are lazy bastards who refuse to work. While examples can be found, there is no evidence that this is a fair description of any more than a tiny minority. The vast majority of these people are like the rest of us. They want to have a good life and a future for their children, and they are prepared to work hard to achieve it.
It makes us feel better to believe this myth because we can then bitch about the need to cut our taxes. That is an easy promise for politicians seeking election.
A sufficient but not generous federal funding for exhausted welfare recipients would be about $7.5 billion/year. This is easily affordable. For that we could lift millions of worthy Americans above third world living standards. If you don't think we have places that are in the third world have a look at how the poor have to live in the Mississippi delta and other high unemployment areas. With some wise public policy we could harness this resource and give them self respect and worthwhile employment.
The tax reform desperately needed in the USA is to find a way to get the wealthy to pay their share. This administration has been low taxing for the obscenely rich - not for the rest of us. W's cutting the tax on dividends from investments was a massive income boost for those with millions invested. It saved them about 20 times that reasonable federal welfare budget. So I would look there for the real welfare spongers.
You don't get out much, do you! Most welfare recipients are just like you, we finally agree on sometime.
I have never received welfare support, but I have been involved in distributing it. If you have never been there it is easy to think the way you do.
It is a complex and dull subject, but if you understood the first thing about welfare policy, even you would be able to see through the popular image of the poor to the underlying causes. Most of them are decent people who can see no way out and eventually give in to despair.
It is fine to be critical but first you need to learn how to properly think critically using your own mind and powers of reasoning.
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Absolutely absurd
Very few New Orleans residents were "on" welfare, since access to welfare was restricted by "welfare reform" under Clinton, with strict time limits and work requirements.
They were members of a COMMUNITY already which pieced together unemployment, brutally low-wage jobs, veteran's benefits and workfare, and this COMMUNITY was destroyed, deliberately if by inaction, after hurricane Katrina in a trail of tears.
To imagine that all these folks will learn anything other than further humiliation by becoming the servants of rich white SOBs is barbaric.
Their COMMUNITY was stolen out from under them by real estate speculators. The Organization of American States and the United Nations need to investigate the destruction of this community, which resembles the forced relocation of the Cherokee nation to Oklahoma.
The genocidal treatment of the American Indians was also dressed up as something that would educate the Indians and make them "the right sort of people", that is, servants.
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