PureX
Well-known member
That's just not true. The people in the jumpsuits are criminals. The people receiving welfare are not. They are two very different systems: one is the criminal justice system, and the other is the welfare system. And given the work you want to put them to, you're talking about more agencies, still: streets and sanitation, parks department, department of transportation. There would be an enormous tangle of inter-agency red tape, and oversight required. It would take a whole new agency of it's own just to administer it all. And this would cost a huge amount of money, considering the many millions of people that are on public aid.
The state can't force mothers to put their children under the care of faith-based child care. And there are no state operated child-care facilities at the moment. So you're talking about a massive new agency just to take in and watch children while their mothers are working for peanuts cleaning the streets. This will cost a lot of money, above what we are already paying the mothers, and I would be very skeptical of allowing state agencies to take care of millions of children. The possibilities of horrific abuse and neglect are easy to imagine.
Also, what you are describing is a kind of enslavement, in which women who cannot feed themselves or their children are being forced to "work" according to the will of some low paid state employee. I can very easily foresee the opportunity for horrific abuse, and especially sexual abuse. Boss man says; you do what I want or you don't get your welfare check, and your baby don't eat.
You keep wanting to ignore the fact that controlling other people costs a lot of money, and invites all kinds of abuse.
What they can steal is peanuts compared to what the health care industry steals every year via medicaid and medicare. But all you want to see are those evil do-nothings sitting around and getting high on your tax dollars. I don't know why.
You're overlooking that fact that every time a name comes up on that attendance sheet, it has to be checked out. How do we know they weren't legitimately sick? Or that their child was sick? Now we need a trained health inspector to determine this, and who's paying them? Are they driving around to all those welfare mother's homes to check on them, or are the welfare mothers going to have to take their sick selves or their sick child to some health inspector agency for the examination? Who's paying for that? Money, money and more money. And with each successive layer of control you want to impose, we create more and more chances for fraud, and abuse.
Please understand, now, and for all time; that myself, and no other liberal living on Planet Earth, believes that people should not be held accountable for their poor decisions, or their self-destructive actions. This is NOT the point upon which we differ. The point of our differing is on what "accountable" means, and the degree to which we have the right, or even have the ability, to hold someone else "accountable". Life is already holding them accountable.
You don't seem to understand that there are all sorts of human illness that cause a person to become self-destructive. And once the illness takes hold of them, they no longer possess the will to forcibly release themselves. You are trying to punish cancer victims for having cancer, under the delusion that this will somehow "teach them" not to be sick. It just doesn't work that way.
Before there was any welfare, there were still all these sick people: girls who got pregnant. Men out of work for no fault of their own. There were alcoholics, and drug addicts, and prostitutes, and crazy people who just weren't crazy enough to be locked away. And those people suffered and died from their various afflictions. So when you imagine that you can punish that sickness and misfortune out of them by refusing to give them any help, of any kind, if they won't "act right", you are fooling yourself.
The truth is that we CAN'T FIX most of these people. They are damaged beyond repair, already. The best we can do is try to fix those who can be fixed, and to be humane enough to ease the suffering of the rest, and try and learn how we can stop creating so many of them in the first place.
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