Do welfare/govt handouts create dependance

Have these "cure poverty" programs worked or did it create a dependent people?

 

Well, look at the war on poverty, the set of social programs first set into motion by Lyndon Johnson. Trillions have been spent since that time in 1967. What was the poverty level then compared to today? It's slightly higher today, but generally remains about the same. It was 12.8% in 1968 when Johnson left office and is about 13.5% today. In 1900, poverty was at about 56%. So, in 67 years it dropped almost 450% and in the 43 years since then, with the massive amounts spent, poverty remains at about the same level. Unless a significant portion of the population is falling into poverty, I think it quite likely that there is a significant dependent class living off government benefits and largely unable to escape poverty because of it.

 

-*they should create independance. -independance from the government. but to answer the question; yes it creates dependance--on the government

 

You can give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for life.

 

I don't think welfare creates dependance. It depends on the person. Someone might collect welfare and think that since he is getting money for free, he doesn't have to do anything else. Others will not wish to be on welfare for too long and will try to get a job.

 

they work, so long as the person has the incentive to progress. Nothing helps speed that up like lighting a bonfire under their behind. I have plenty of incentive to progress, but i was able to because i had not made any life hindering choices.

 

How many who are on public assistance programs have been there longer than 10 years?
How many families have been on it for generations?

 

I fully agree.

However the majority of people on government handouts are there because of having too many children. Often what you have are single mothers.

So you could teach her to fish, and she could make some good money on the shrimp boat, but who is going to watch the kids? It costs more in the short run to pay for daycare than to just pay her to stay home with them. And saying "screw the kids" is wildly unpopular, even if people are unsympathetic towards baby mamas.

My personal opinion is that we should poney up and pay much more in the short run to get these kids into boarding schools. The home life in families that can't come close to paying for their kids are probably pretty dysfunctional more often than not. And the neighborhood and local schools are almost invariably horrible.

The parents would then have their wages garnished according to the number of kids they had, and we could be fairly unmerciful towards them as now they're the only ones suffering for their poor choices.

Of course, their garnished wages are unlikely to come close to covering the expense of boarding school. So as I said this requires spending much more in the short term.

But I think it would have massive long term benifits.

Some people seem to think that if you just slash benifits than everybody will shape up and not have kids until they can afford them. However I'd say that there are thousands of communities, dozens of countries, and basically the entire continent of Africa that clearly refute this. "Love" is one of the few things that are free, and food is exceedingly cheap in America. I'm betting slashing benifits alone would just mean people having lots of kids despite the shocking poverty they're living in. We instead need to replace the underlying culture.

 

For some, it's dependance to the point of entitlement.

 

Absolutely. Of course, in the context of modern life, teaching someone the skills to get them the opportunity to make their own way in the world is likely to take more than a day, and if they don't get any fish in the meantime they'd have starved to death before they have reached the point of standing by the river for themselves! Also, the process of 'teaching him to fish' takes not only time, but money - investment in improved educational facilities and other infrastructure to that people are able to get to the point of being able to 'fish for themselves'. It isn't as simple as it might first appear, and certainly isn't a matter of saving a whole lot of money by just stopping or radically cutting welfare payments.

It is a long term process that needs to be treated as an investment by the country in its own people, but the only alternatives to it are either maintaining a dependency culture among some (certainly not a good thing!) or simply leaving poor people to just die (also not a great way for society to behave, in my opinion). The problem is always going to be, though, that the best and most sensible solution is, in the short to medium term, probably the most expensive and difficult to get going, even if it will produce by far the best result in the long term.

Simply withdrawing fish is easy (and relatively cheap), but ineffective at allowing the man and his family to survive for themselves. Keeping on throwing the fish out instead of bothering to take the time (and money) to teach him at all is also quite easy (and relatively cheap), but it only perpetuates the problem as generations of potential fishermen get progressively further and further away from the point of using thier own fishing rod as the memories of fishing get dimmer and dimmer in their collective memory. Doing the right things to solve the problem are far more expensive and difficult, and far less attractive to short-term politicians, and to those who think that people who 'can't fish' must be in that position entirely as a result of their own laziness, not because nobody has ever given them the opportunity to learn to fish effectively for themselves.

 

There's a major difference between poverty then and poverty now. Poverty then meant starvation, freezing to death under cardboard bedsheets, etc.

 

There is no excuse to be on a public assistance program for that long. A few years and no more than that should be long enough for someone to find employment - although it took me a good five years to find my job, and six years on, I have only had one job interview.

 

....not if you keep giving him Free Fish.
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(D)ependent upon (D)ependents and their (D)ependence--The (D)emocrat Party

The welfare programs are working exactly as intended........
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And when you're the child of someone on the dole you consider it the natural order of things. Or, if you're told by politicians that you have no chance of success for reasons totally out of your control, being on the dole is a natural alternative. Or, if you're just getting started and flipping burgers is beneath you then you stay on the dole until you get offerred that really, really good job.

I watch birds force chicks out of the nest when it's time. I've watched foxes force their young to go elsewhere. I had an adolescent bear on my porch crying for his momma because he'd been forced to leave her. Amazingly, to me, people aren't this bright.

 

Or, tell him he can have Chuck's fish.

I read an article about people on the dole in England and I was shocked when a healthy young man with an advanced university degree said he worked for a year and didn't like it so he had a right, a human right, to be supported by others. Great dependence? Nah.

 

yes but people shouldn't be forced to work if they don't want to and businesses should do more to get people to work by paying higher salaries for low skilled work

 

People shouldnt be forced to give money to those who refuse to work!!! How many welfare queens does this nation support?

Businesses wont pay higher salaries because you liberals refuse to get rid of the cause!!! THE 15 million ILLEGALS here driving down wages!!!!! Talk about head in the sand!

 

Of course people who are able should be forced to work. It's natural law. You don't catch your food, you die.

 

Our welfare program, is a scam. An invention, a grand manipulation of the rich/elite, to allow domination of society as a whole, plain and simple.
　
If it isn’t/wasn't, welfare would be set up as a work program where people would have the opportunity to earn what they get, and not only build self esteem and pride, but encourage them to do better for themselves, their families, and their communities. Instead, it is a program that completely disenfranchises an entire group of the population, not only teaching irresponsibility but instilling it into able bodied individuals to accept their own uselessness. They are taught they are not good enough to be in regular society, and that they are too incompetent to work, maintain a secure existence on their own and must accept the pattern of dependency that keeps them from working.
　
It is by design a deceitful scheme against humanity itself that destroys entire communities from which they have been herded into, to be more easily managed and maintained from within. It is a deliberate attempt to keep a section of the population uneducated, out of the way, non-competitive, and disillusioned. It’s controlled social programming, to establish a dominating class, and keep the peasants out of the way when it comes to sustaining a selective group of financially secure, economically dominating class of upper elites.
　
What we are seeing today, the reason our nation is economically unstable, is the results of a dominating manipulative plutocracy which is the two party system. A place where opportunities and rights themselves have become more exclusive. A place where economic security is more of a controlled asset, restricted for and limited too the deserving class. Criteria being established of course by the best government money can buy.

 

many of the rich don't catch any food they live off of investments so this luxury of not working should be afforded to the poor as well in the form of gov't handouts

the country should fix the easy handouts and dependence at the top before the bottom

 

Good grief.

Double good grief.

This explains a lot about you.

 

I fail to see the problem with that.

 

They shouldn't be forced to work, they should have the opportunity to work for the money the government has so graciously offered or they can starve, their choice. The free medica,l dental, child care, college, and all the other free crap given to people and the illegals, you know people on welfare, needs to stop.

That's what is great about a free country. Freedom to choose. Unfortunately the system is set up to create dependency which is why it doesn't work.

 

we already TRIED taking children from indigent parents...it resulted in massive abuse. Children were parceled out to work on farms under slave like conditions, millions were systemically sexually physically abused. It was a disaster.