People choose all the time. How many poor people do you see that smoke? Are they forced to smoke or do they choose to? If someone can afford the luxury of smoking, then clearly they do not need my money to buy food.
People "shouldn't" smoke, or drink, or listen to loud music, or play video games instead of working, or drive anything but fuel-efficient minivans (or better yet, public transit), or eat anything but cheap vegetables and beans, or do any of a billion less-than-optimally-efficient things, but everyone does, because life sucks sometimes and we have to relax somehow or we'll go insane. Depression doesn't make for productive decision-making either. You can choose which vice you want, but literally
everyone has vices and "wastes" money. It's completely unrealistic to expect the poor (who are also usually the least educated) to be 100% rational economic-bots when literally no human being has ever acted that way. I don't like anyone smoking, including the poor, but having a cigarette doesn't make you inhuman and your children undeserving of food and education.
Wait... So you DO want a religious based government?
No, having laws and policies
because they're Christian would be a bad thing, but some Christian ideals stand on their own merits - particularly, serving the poor and infirm above ourselves, not casting judgment, and being a good neighbor. It's doubly ironic for those who
do profess that we should have policies because they're Christian to argue against the most central and valuable teachings of Christ.
This. It is astounding to me that the left is now openly championing people who make bad decisions or choose to ride welfare as a way of life rather than pretending that all welfare recipients are accident victims unable to earn a living, but I suppose they know their voter base.
It's not that this is an absolute principle, it's that I don't believe that it's a substantial reality. We have work requirements, cut-offs, and a million other checks on welfare. Yes, there's absolutely some waste and corruption in any system ever designed by man, but at some point you just have to accept that. I think efforts to fight this "problem" of lazy welfare recipients is at best irrational, and at worst cynical code for punishing the poor to feel better about ourselves, and additional cuts to welfare will hurt vastly more genuinely needy people than it will somehow incentivize the "lazy" to make "good" choices.
I'm all in favor of welfare for people who truly need it, but let's not pretend that welfare fraud doesn't exist in large numbers; not the majority of welfare recipients by any stretch, but also not a statistically insignificant number of people. Just within my group of friends and acquaintances I've seen dozens of examples of welfare fraud, from people misrepresenting their income, to getting benefits they aren't entitled to, to selling food stamps for drug money. And then there's the larger problem of people voluntarily choosing to stay on welfare or unemployment because the jobs they can get don't pay as well (this happens for a lot of former soldiers who get unemployment based on a military income that they wouldn't get close to in civilian employment). I'm all for welfare, but I like the "teach a man to fish" variety; if you just keep throwing money at people without any real restrictions or oversight, you're providing a financial disincentive to them taking responsibility for their own lives. How about welfare in the form of job training that they can use to make themselves a better employment prospect and take responsibility for themselves? That's empowerment. And empowerment is better than charity out of pity.
I outright reject the claim that welfare fraud exists in large numbers. I also don't give a shit how scummy your friends are. I know lots and lots of professors, I guess PhDs exist in vast numbers in the US and we should base policies around the assumption that everyone goes to grad school.
We're all in favor of 'teach a man to fish' policies, which is why we have work requirements and other programs to institute exactly that.
The primary problems keeping people in welfare aren't laziness or bad choices or other things that we can blame on the people suffering their consequences. It's the lack of job opportunities, poor schooling in some areas, some structural issues at the margins like racism,
yes Nehalem some real issues with family structure that go back to a lot of other causes, and growing income inequality that causes a host of other ills. Welfare isn't the problem, it's the bare thread keeping this country from collapsing under the greed of those who won't sacrifice to help their fellow man.
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