Of course there is some abuse; there is in every program. Like FreelyH, I was a caseworker for years, and I worked in the Food Stamp program for a year while waiting for the caseworker position to open up, which meant lots of home visits. We caught some minor league fraud, though mostly what we saw was just poor use of the stamps for the wrong foods. NO one, NO one was living like royalty. That's garbage. Most are just staying alive. And the fraud ran toward having a lazy boyfriend in the house who might bring in a few bucks, or some off the books work mowing lawns. Woooo.
I could easily talk about the cheats and make it sound important, and I could also write stories about some really inspirational cases, but none of that addresses the grueling poverty that welfare attempts to alleviate.
We are humans, and we want. Heck, we just watched avarice and a total lack of ethics take down the housing market. And the people who caused that don't have the excuse of poverty or hunger or ignorance to claim. They just wanted a very big slice of the pie and they didn't care who suffered to get it. These are individuals who abused the system. Condemn them, but not the system itself. WOrk toward controlling abuse and toward offering ways to move out of the system.
It's no solution to focus on the relatively low percentage of cheating, while ignoring the fact that some families survive only because of the programs. I hate the system personally and would love to see changes in the direction Clinton started, but right now it's what we have, and when it is damned and distorted in such an exaggerated fashion, it bothers me a lot, since it fails to offer solutions, but only a sort of righteous indignation. |
