Federal Welfare. Should we keep it the way it is, severely reform it or end it completely?
It definitely needs reform. No question about that.
But at the end of the day, it is what it is: it's a system of living without working. There is no way to completely eradicate abuse.
And I think that while we could certainly make it
less vulnerable to abuse, we also need to be looking at the cultural mindset that leads people to abuse it as much as they do.
We've had welfare for nearly a century, and it wasn't always like this. We didn't always have an entitlement culture. But it isn't just entitlement that leads people to sit on the dole: working also used to be better-paid, and less abusive towards the employee.
What motivation does someone have to take a job if all they can get is part-time minimum wage, and they won't be able to live on that? Working used to give people a sense of self-sufficiency, because by working, they really COULD afford to live decently. Wages have been stagnant for 30 years, and that is no longer true at the lower-paying end of the spectrum, especially since most new jobs are part-time with no benefits.
If your choices are working 35 hours a week because your employer wants to keep you under the full-time benefits threshold thus getting no health care or sick leave and STILL not being able to pay your rent, or going on welfare and getting health care and being able to pay your rent, what will you choose? It doesn't take an entitled person to decide the former is more beneficial.
Add to that the fact that college has become increasingly unaffordable, whereas formerly it used to be heavily subsidized or even free, and it's harder for people to ever get out of the lower-paying work bracket.
America has the least social mobility of any Western developed nation. Almost half of those born into poverty will never escape. And you have to admit that our society makes it rather hard for them to do so.
Is there an entitlement culture? In some social milieus, yes, there is. There are absolutely segments of society that feel entitled to all the benefits with none of the work.
But there are also a lot of people who feel genuinely empowered by making their own way, and simply can't, or wind up in a situation where they are temporarily disabled from doing so. That's even happened to me. I sustained an injury in the middle of moving cross-country, and since I obviously changed jobs and hadn't yet been there long enough to get medical, I had no insurance. I had to go on state medical assistance for a few months, and if I hadn't had a place to stay while I mended, I would have been on welfare too. And I'm very thankful it exists, and I didn't wind up in thousands of dollars of debt over something I had no control over, but why didn't I have any non-welfare access to medical care to begin with, even with a job? It's the 21st century.
Workers no longer feel as empowered, because working is not rewarding anymore. Workers get paid less, work more hours, get fewer benefits, and have increasingly little bargaining power (say what you like about union abuse -- which does exist and should be addressed -- but unions are directly correlated with worker pay, and were highest during our most prosperous years as a country).
We have had welfare for a long time, but we have not had this problem with abuse for a long time. Something has changed culturally. We can't simply ignore that, in our effort to get people working again.