Quote:
Originally posted by Vick@May 26 2004, 03:29 PM
Turning a negative into a positive ........ (excuse the oversimplifications to follow)
.... ending welfare
I read the other day that welfare payments are around the 3,000,000,000 (yes 3 BILLION) a year mark
How does that happen? Why? How does anyone get paid for not doing anything, much less how can anyone ACCEPT money for not doing anything? - That has got to be the craziest thing I've ever heard
Let's put the questions and my fingerpointing aside for a few minutes and focus on solutions
I'd end welfare today, tomorrow every former welfare recipient has the options of either going to school (I believe education is the answer to a lot of problems) which the government will fund and provide the same support the welfare recipient was receiving
It doesn't have to be college, it can be a trade school
or going to work (part of the plan is to teach welfare recipients to be daycare providers in supervised controlled conditions)
If we can change the dynamic of a welfare recipient from being a burden to the taxpayer to being an asset to the country we're all better off
Even if it costs more in the short term
I'm still shaking my head, who ever came up with the idea, here's $ for doing nothing ....
Edit - for spelling
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see there are some non-wrestling and non-music things we agree on ;-)
I agree that all the money going for welfare is better spent on educational programs. In a Utopian society, everyone would have a wonderful education and make a lot of money, but bottom line, some people missed their first chance at an education or bought into that whole "work for one company for life" mentality.
A lot of people on welfare get trapped in a vicious cycle of being kept poor. I'm all for extending uemployment benefits, etc. because people have paid into that system while working, and I can see helping out in an area where the main iundustry may have left and now the town is full of 40 and 50 year olds that have only known one job/company and have no other experience.
This is what welfare should be, a hand up and not a hand out. It's easy to point fingers and say soeone made a bad decision in life, but shouldn't they get a second chance?
Maybe my perspective in life is different because of where I grew up. When they closed down the iron ore mine in Atlantic City, Wyoming, it not only left a lot of people jobless (including the retail merchants who relied on the income from the miners to support them) it devastated the local economy. I saw a lot of people who only knew working in the mine. They often were very hard workers who did their job well, but it's the only job they knew. Here's where a "second chance" education program could have come in handy. By spending money on something like that instead of people having to seek welfare to keep a roof over their heads (and believe me, a lot of those good old boys kept their pride and only did that as a last resort) it might and grown the community in a new direction. Maybe it could have become an early high tech haven (low costs, low land values, etc.).
The one good thing I did see come of that was this community thing I rail about so often. People were willing to help out those who were more seriously affected.