Welfare Reform
A Brighter Future
Written Feb 07; Updated 3-20-07
First and foremost, Capitalism itself is the best alternative to welfare (a.k.a. "entitlement" programs).
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE and WELFARE
The "Unemployment Insurance" - that comes out of everyone's paycheck - and "Welfare" come from the same program. But the two have different meanings. A person becomes a "welfare case" when they stay on unemployment indefinitely.
Unemployment Insurance exists to help provide a safety net for those times when we all get a little "down on our luck." Unemployment Insurance is your money...taken out of your paycheck. BY ALL MEANS, USE IT IF YOU EVER NEED TO. The problem is that our current policy on unemployment insurance makes the payout benefits virtually unlimited...leading it to morph into what we call "Welfare." That flawed policy has provided millions of people with an opportunity for dependency on the rest of us.
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
--Herbert Spencer (1891)
Why go back to working if you can suck on the government teat and watch Oprah in the middle of the day? Many people in our society do just that once they get on welfare. It's an abuse of the system, and it's costing our society big time. It is exactly the same as when any other insurance company experiences too many claims. The burden of payout becomes too costly for the company and it
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Becomes more expensive
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Or fails completely
By the way, such an increase in claims is also The Reason Our Health Care System is Getting So Costly
WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT WELFARE?
1. LIMIT PAYOUTS: Welfare Reform should center around placing limitations on the benefits from unemployment insurance. Limit it perhaps to six months - or at the most one year. That money IS yours, after all. It came from deductions from your paycheck. Those deductions are essentially insurance premiums. So use it - but for the limited amount of time that should be set by the policy. The way it is now - unlimited - it has the potential to become welfare. When you become a welfare recipient, the system supports you indefinitely. And that system is supported by all the people who keep paying in and remain productive. If you become perpetually unproductive, then you are a drain on that system, and the cause of the crises we see there when we look.
2. CURTAIL VOTING RIGHTS: If you are perpetually benefiting from the system, you should not get a vote in that system. If you are receiving welfare, your voting rights should be curtailed. After all, when you lived at your parent's house, you didn't get a say in how the household was run because you were living off of it - rather than contributing to it. Welfare recipients choose to live like such an adolescent if they choose to live off the system perpetually.
What's more, if you can benefit directly from the result of a vote in business, then you are not included in the vote. If you were included, there would be people filing "conflict of interest" lawsuits...and rightly so. In another example, if you don't pay membership dues to a club, you forfeit your membership and/or voting rights in that club. When you choose to live off of the government, rather than contribute to the revenues, you should similarly forfeit your membership rights. Those rights should be restored when you become productive again...that should be one incentive to getting back in the game.
If that sounds harsh, consider that our original voting system limited voting rights to people who owned property. The Founding Fathers made it necessary to be invested in the system in order to vote within it. I agree. The reason that system was changed is that including the dependent in our voting system made it possible for politicians to promise your money to the dependent among us...thus buying votes for themselves with tax money...your money. That is an age old cycle that has led to the breakdown of many great societies. Simply put, that system cannot self-sustain and eventually goes bankrupt once the public realizes that it can vote itself money from the treasury.
3. MONITOR PURCHASES: If you are receiving food stamps, there should be limits on what you can buy with them. Frozen pizzas, cigarettes and ice cream are not good uses of that money, but they are not currently prohibited. If you want to live on other people's money, you should be limited to staple food stuffs - and to generic brands whenever they are available. The ability to have better than that should be another incentive to get back in the game.
4. STOP PROVIDING INCENTIVES to BREAK UP FAMILIES: Lastly, the way the system is set up now, a welfare recipient gets more money if the father is absent or when another child joins the family. Thus, welfare recipients see having a baby as an opportunity to "get a raise." Of course, this just strains the system that much more. So it is easy to see why the current welfare system has been looked at as blame-worthy for the destruction of the family unit among the poor. Rather than stick together through the tough times, it becomes a viable option to let the family disintegrate in order to get more welfare. Of course, a broken family is statistically much more likely to lead to poverty in the first place...thus perpetuating the whole destructive dependency cycle.
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