Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Is Welfare Too Cushy?


Are generous welfare benefits keeping Americans from working for a living? The argument that welfare displaces work isn’t new, of course. It was a favorite of President Ronald Reagan. Cato itself did a major study in 1995 making essentially the same point. “Welfare benefits continue to outpace the income that most recipients can expect to earn from an entry-level job, and the balance between welfare and work may actually have grown worse in recent years,” they write. The authors compare a nonworking family that gets a full suite of benefits to a working family that gets no benefits and conclude, not surprisingly, that the nonworking family would be better off. 

Obviously, welfare is keeping people from working. Why would someone want to work at an entry-level job when they could simply register for welfare and collect more money from the government than they would actually working? Cuts have to be made on these programs because it's not right for a working person to make less money than a welfare recipient. Like I said before, welfare programs were created to help people, not to live off of them. Clearly, this is an incentive to not work for a living.

Taxing hard-up Americans at 95%


Ms. Devilma says that many of the welfare recipients she knows are reluctant to seek work or an education. Life in the system is comfortable enough that people can easily live off of welfare. Ms. Devilma admits that if it were not for her son and the recent expiry of her cash aid, she would rather live on welfare than take an entry-level job at McDonald’s. She considers it unsuited for her level of education. Some worry that welfare is encouraging idleness. Paul Ryan, the Republicans’ congressional budget guru, frets that America’s safety net could become “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency”

I have to agree with Paul Ryan, right here is the biggest problem we have in America. The welfare programs are giving so much money to people that they can live off of it. This is not the point of welfare programs. They are suppose to HELP people who struggle to come up with money to pay for necessities. These programs weren't created for people to sit around, do nothing, and collect money from the government. Some hard working Americans have salaries that pay them about $30,000 a year and if people on welfare are collecting almost as much as working people, this has to come to an end. To sum it all up, welfare is discouraging work and people are becoming lazier with no ambition to work.