Harry-
that you feel taking gubment money while you are capable of work is a noble ideal. However as best as I can say is life is rarely noble and scarcely Ideal.
In Oklahoma there are many gubment/civil service people who qualify for reduced price lunches for their kids, food stamps, 'making work pay' tax breaks and earned income credit so the refund is larger than the amount withheld from paychecks.
Are you saying these folks shouldn't ever go out for a nice night's dinner and dancing just because their kids get a reduced price lunch and the miserable pay they earn while safeguarding society qualifies for food stamps?
I am talking about cops and deputies doing what most of us wouldn't for all the tea in china.
Now the poor working to be unpoor. Once again a good and puritan work ethic. Hard work and clean living is the mytical Ideal some hold up as capable of making any citizen a millionaire or at least a Boca Raton retiree.
But many of the working poor work hard long hours for poor pay and high rent/transportation/no benefits. Throw in a sick child and all the hours of the day and night still don't lift one up to even out of poverty. For them, hard working, long hours and plenty of sacrifice still qualifies for food stamps, housing assistance and free school lunches. I don't begrudge them a night out and if a food stamp card gets them a reduced cover charge... ummm why exactly does that bother the rest of us who's work isn't as back breaking and who's lives didn't include some hard knock spells disaster for many working poor?
I choose to thank my good fortune to have missed the hard knocks, and I aint out of the woods yet, it will only take one case of cancer to drain our finances even with the very expensive insurance we pay 100% as we both are self employed, and make us working poor. My wife and I spent 2 decades building a range from scratch, it will only take one positive on a PAP smear, lump, colon screening to take it all away.
I am not about to say there are no lazy folks on Gubment Assistance, just quite willing to say blanket statements like the type you make don't serve to clarify, just make a few feel superior, or justify reducing aid to the working poor because of caricatures held up as false images of the real facts on the ground.
But hey, I have seen quite a few hard working people struggle and don't feel I am immune to life's crotch kicks.