How Welfare should be according to Anti-Welfareists

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People against State/Government Welfare often say that Welfare should be there to make people get off of it as soon as possible.

Moreover, many of those Anti-Welfareists further claim that welfare should be cut or abolished altogether, simply because it makes people get
dependent on it.

That would be the same as telling the disabled man needing continuous oxygen supply, that now we are going to cut his oxygen, because
"he is getting too dependent on it".

Yeah, sure he is. But he was dependent on it even before he was connected to it.

But anti-welfareists deny any talk about THAT issue!

I suspect that the reason people are against welfare is not so much about its costs. It is because they fear that the more handicapped/disabled people we let
live, the less ressources there are for others. By silently killing the disabled, or making the disabled subject to the Laws of Nautre (Natural Selection, Darwinian Evolution, in a societal context known
as Social Darwinism), the weak cease to exist, and the strong prosper.

We all know how that can happen. Large sum of capital up front and risk free investments. There would be no welfare only growth and I am sure elitists in their think-tanks are well aware of the concept. They just want people to suffer. It makes them happy.
No reason why poverty cannot be eradicated right now.

People who are against welfare think the poor are getting a free ride, and either they and their children should either get jobs or die.

i always find the people that make 4k or more a month who complain about the welfare stealing their money and they want it back funny. I mean f**k if i had 4k a month after taxes I'd be set. I live off the 700. they like dam if i welfare didn't exist i'd have 4 50k cars instead of just the two. and more 2k tv's etc.

meanwhile some people are lucky to have on crappy but running car.

also yeah from what i gather they want the welfare people dead. some will be up front and say it, to the point of talking about genocide(though they don't see it as such, but " just round them up and shoot them" sounds like genocide to me) others just want all the food, money, medical to stop going to them and even though there's not enough jobs to go around, they imagine they'll just be fine somehow. just as long as they don't see the bodies right?

I dream of a star trek or true communism economical system. Its a good system, however as the Russians learned, humans at nature are greedy. Russian communism was the people are all shared and poor, while the gov is rich and drives bmws. so it wasn't true communism. If it had been everyone would have been driving Toyota's and having decent food( no long lines to just get bread)

lucklily we don't live under true capitalism. or millions would die each year.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTBmZzHQQXo[/youtube]

I've been seeing studies like this for at least forty years: Conservatives (or Republicans) give more to private charity than liberals (or Democrats).

http://philanthropy.com/article/The-Pol ... ing/133609

I find that discussions are more interesting if I assume that nearly everybody has good intentions, until they prove otherwise. The Western political world is not divided between angels and demons, but composed of mostly decent people who subscribe to different ideologies. But I guess if you decide from the outset that everybody who disagrees with you is an evil monster, you needn't bother trying to understand any other points of view. Easier that way I suppose.

Disabled people are just as capable of contributing towards society as anyone else, when given the chance.

Disability is not entirely caused by a medical condition. It is largely due to the rest of society's unwillingness to make adaptations to work around that condition.

I have personal knowledge on this. I worked as a case manager, and I saw how messed up the system was.

I advocate the following.

1. Get government OUT of the welfare business.

Government can't "discriminate" on who gets help and who does not. It is so easy to fake your income/assets to qualify for benefits (if you don't mind lying). Lots of people who deserve help do not get it because they don't meet an arbitrary annual income level. Likewise, lots of people can loose their benefits once they make more than X but don't yet make Y which is what they need to be self-sufficient.

There is more than enough research out there showing that government-run welfare is designed to perpetuate a class of cheap and disposable labor...not to help people in need.

2. Make welfare something run by private charities.

Admittedly, how to fund these is more problematic than government-run which is funded by taxes, but (in the USA) if the government provides the money, their rules apply...making who runs it irrelevant. A private charity can scrutinize if someone gets benefits. It's no longer about meeting an arbitrary monetary level. More so, if the applicant appears to be wanting to get something for nothing, you can just turn them down. They have no right to benefits, so they can't claim they are being discriminated against.

The best part of a privately-run charity is that if the populace does not approve of how they run things, they don't donate. A charity has to be good stewards of their money or they find it very hard to get donors. Government welfare doesn't do squat. Your case worker might get a meager salary, but their supervisors, and their supervisor's supervisors, etc. are paid very well.

I know government has tried programs where if you don't do X, you don't get your benefits, but the political nature of government-run welfare is that such standards can be increased or decreased based on political agendas and not what works in denying benefits to lazy people and providing benefits to people who legitimately need help.

3. Require that as much as possible, the goal of welfare is to get people off of welfare for good.

Welfare should be helping people to be self-sufficient. The only people who should be life-long recipients are people who will never be able to get and keep a job through no fault of their own. We shouldn't cut people off until they are able to stand on their own feet. Decrease benefits as they earn more, yes. Cut them off before they are able to do without the help, no. Tolerate people hovering at a level that lets them get benefits but never enough to have to really hold a full-time job, absolutely not.

Charities won't fix capitalism.

Solidarity is what we need, not the church. Is doing what the priest says to get food in your mouth; the freedom Ron Paul "libertarians" keep talking about?

Last edited by RushKing on 26 Feb 2014, 12:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

One of the biggest factors at play here is the amount of money given to the church, which counts as giving to charity (including when you do your taxes, which is where they usually get the numbers for these studies). Since the conservative base is much more likely to be religious, their "charitable giving" numbers are obviously going to be much higher. Mormons are required to give 10% of their income, as are many of the various iterations of conservative and fundamentalist churches (more likely with churches that focus on the Old Testament angry and jealous God while only giving lip service to the teachings in the New Testament). There are some churches that actually ask for 20 or 25%. The church I grew up in required 10% pre-tax, and the social hierarchy within the church was determined mostly by who gave the highest %. That church spends the majority of their money on continuous renovations to the church building and constantly hiring conservative guest speakers and christian bands. Very little of their money actually goes to charity.

You also have to consider that the liberal base tends to include large quantities of the urban poor, who are more often the recipients of charity than the donators. The urban poor are also much more likely to file a standard tax return vice an itemized return (an itemized return is required to claim charitable donation deductions) as in most larger cities there are hundreds of businesses that will do your taxes as a promotion to get you in (and they all will only file standard 1040EZ non-itemized tax returns to minimize their liabilities).

Plus you have to consider the fact that many people cheat on their taxes, especially when it comes to deductions. Which means that with a higher number of people claiming their church tithing as charity on the conservative side is also going to skew your numbers. When the IRS started requiring SSNs for dependents, millions of children suddenly "disappeared" during the next tax year. I think that if they were more strict about charitable donation documentation, you would see the rates fall quite drastically.

I personally don't think that giving money to your religious institution should count as a charitable donation unless it is donated to a separate fund that is specifically used for actual charitable work. This may help put it into perspective: The members of Westboro Baptist Church get to claim every penny that they give to their church as charitable donations, despite the fact that their money is not actually spent on charity.

I guess basically I am just saying that those numbers are pretty worthless. It is like saying that someone who lives in a state with a high state income tax gives much more to charity (government run programs) than someone from Florida (no state income tax), which also a worthless statement.

And yet I know of studies that show how poor people - who are more likely politically liberal - give not as much monetarily, but in fact give in greater numbers. And then there's Christ's parable of the poor widow who found a coin while sweeping, and so gave it as her offering at the temple. While all the rich were giving tons of wealth at the same time, she in fact had given more, because as Christ said, she had given everything she had.

Currently impossible without plunging the country into an economic downward spiral with rapidly increasing crime rates. Government spending and safety net programs are actually a major contibutor to our economy. Food assistance has actually been determined to have the largest bang for the buck of anything else the government does. $1 of food aid results in $1.84 in economic benefit.

Welfare reform (I'm talking a complete structural reform and not the token superficial changes of the past) is what is needed, not its elimination.



This is my philosophy on paper. Unfortunately, the realist in me is quite aware that private charities tend to be politically or religiously biased, which means those in need must conform or perish. It would essentially be a curtailing of people's freedom of speech in exchange for survival. I personally believe that forced conformity of opinion and action is one of the most detrimental things that can (and sometimes does) happen in the US.



Agreed 100%. This should be the major driving force behind welfare reform instead of a fanatical demand to reduce short term budget shortfalls by just making cuts. Unfortunately, the only driving factors in government are what is happening right this second and what will happen come campaign time. There isn't a single member of our legislative branch at the moment that I believe gives a single thought to how their actions and policies will affect the next generation.

Conservatives at all income levels give more than their liberal counterparts. They are also more likely to give to secular charities. They also give more blood.



I personally am neither conservative nor religious, nor do I consider charity a moral duty or a major virtue. What I want to question is the claim that 'people opposed to government welfare programs are just evil Nazis who want poor people to die.' That kind of attitude is not conducive to intelligent discussion.

Hahaha, nope. I worked in the Christian media industry for years, many of which had charitable arms (and all of which were tax exempt). Unless you specifically requested that your contributions go towards a particular cause, the ministry can use your money for literally anything. Which usually means luxury cars, jewelry, and designer clothes. And people pour money into their pockets nonetheless.

You don't consider charity "a moral duty or a major virtue?" Believers and unbelievers alike would be taken back by that statement.

A hundred dollars does more for a recipient than one dollar does. Suggesting that someone who has less and gives a lower amount is somehow "giving more" is ludicrous. It's making it about the the person providing the charity rather than the person receiving the charity.

Charity helps people based on the amount of money donated. How much wealth the people donating have is completely irrelevant, as is their attitude in giving. What matters is getting the money to those who need it.

That story is nothing more than a manipulation to get people who can't afford to give to the church do it anyway. It amazes me that such an obvious scam is accepted by so many people. I really don't understand why people throw out their critical thinking when it comes to Jesus.