Is Welfare too Profitable?

Today Chris Wallace featured Andrea Elliott, a New York Times investigative reporter, on Fox News Sunday.  She wrote a five-part series on the plight of an eleven-year old girl living in a homeless shelter in New York City with her parents and siblings.  It was a touching story of her trials and tribulations.

However, the New York Post, a competitor newspaper in New York City, provided a different perspective on the young girl and her family as follows:

"If a five-part opus in The New York Times by Andrea Elliott is to believed, we live in a hard-hearted city. But if you read closely, it suggests just the opposite.

Begin with the family at the center of this story. The mother, father and eight kids aren’t really homeless at all. True, they live in housing meant for “homeless families.” But their 540-square-foot unit gives them a solid roof over their heads, in addition to city-provided meals and services.

“New York City provides families in need, including this one, with subsidized health care, child care, shelter, job-training, counseling and placement services,” as well as cash assistance, a spokesman said.

For this family, shelter, rental assistance and food stamps alone have added up to nearly half a million dollars since 2000. In addition, Medicaid covers health care. Even so, the parents have consistently failed to meet basic eligibility requirements.

Yes, the family’s housing has problems, including mice and reports of sexual assaults and other crimes. But the Times and Elliott, like much of the liberal establishment, seem to think it’s the city’s job to provide comfortable lives to outrageously irresponsible parents. In this case, that’s a couple with a long history of drug problems and difficulty holding jobs.

Something’s wrong with that picture.

If the city is at fault here, it might well be for having been too generous — providing so much that neither the father nor mother seems much inclined to provide for their kids. That would be a story worth reading."

In my opinion, and I believe the opinion of many others, welfare is meant to give temporary assistance to help people over difficult times and to get them back on their feet as productive and contributing citizens.  It is meant to be a safety net, not a hammock of lifetime leisure.  In this case the family has received about half a million dollars in "assistance" over the past 13 years.  That is over $38,000 a year tax-free.  Pity the poor souls working their butts off for salaries far less and having to also pay taxes to support the free-loaders.

The "war on poverty" began in earnest under the Johnson administration.  Several trillion dollars have been spent since on various government run welfare programs, and the level of poverty is about the same today as it was in1960.

So, has welfare become too profitable?  Is it too easy to simply rely on the government to provide your needs, and it is no longer necessary to provide for yourself?

And, before you get bent out of shape about my lack of compassion let me tell you that I grew up dirt poor during The Great Depression of the 1930's.  But, my father and mother were too self reliant, too proud to accept any kind of government welfare.  They struggled and made it on their own like many others of that era.