I cannot believe I missed this...about a month and a half ago, William D. Tanner of the Cato Institute put out a report that claimed that in many cases, a person on welfare Would actually benefit more than a person with a job, highlighting that in Rhode Island, a single mother of two can receive $39,000/year in aid, more than the average RI teacher’s salary. For this reason, he thinks we should pare down the welfare system that we have now, that includes housing and food assistance for poor families. This, he and his ilk think, is what will spur people to go to work and earn for themselves. I could get on board with his idea, but for a few things:
- First, F*** you, dude!
- Second, just because a person can get certain benefits doesn’t mean he/she is privy to ALL the benefits.
- Third, most people on assistance right now are on BECAUSE they couldn’t find stable jobs.
- Fourth, F*** you, dude!
All these people who cling to this idea that government is a thorn in our sides need to take a year and live in government assistance. They should put all their money in escrow, lock up their cars in storage, move out of their houses, and just try to live on welfare for 12 months. Then they can see how “easy” it is. After that year, they should spend another year trying to live with no assistance at all. We’ll see how many of them survived or didn’t turn to drugs.
They should do this, but they STILL wouldn’t get the full experience of what it’s like. Imagine waking up every morning wondering when you’d be able to eat a satisfactory meal with fresh ingredients, since the nearest grocer is too far to walk, and you need to save their bus money to get to work. Your kids wouldn’t be made fun of because their clothes are slowly falling apart and you can’t afford to replace much more than just underwear. You experience eventually getting evicted from your home when you miss one too many rent payments after the unemployment ran out. You would get to see what few belongings you have thrown out in an alley, ripe for anyone in the neighbourhood to take. And honestly, who can blame them for vulturing the valuables? They are in as much dire straits as you...but they’re YOURS...but still...you spend spend 2 years homeless, one of which being the last year of your high school career, and the first year of your university career. This is all because you are now on a waiting list for subsidised housing (Section 8), so you have to couch surf until your welcome is worn, and then you have to either go into a homeless shelter, or use what little cash you have to stay in a really cheap hotel with leaky gas pipes. Try filling out financial aid forms with no home, by the way. Most federal agencies don’t accept “wherever I can sleep” as a permanent residence.
People like Tanner and his “libertarian” think tanks are doing nothing but trying to give an excuse to not help people. They claim that they want to help people help themselves, that they are just following the tenets of Christianity. If they really want to claim that, then they should be honest about which version of Christianity they are following: Calvinism.
I’m not saying the government is perfect, but we should not be a country that makes the oldest, weakest, and youngest suffer. This government shutdown is going to literally kill people. It just takes one person who can no longer reside in a shuttered homeless shelter who dies on the street, or a woman who can no longer feed her child, and then the blood will be on the hands of every person who voted for the people who listen to anything these “think” tanks say.
Seriously. F*** that dude.
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