Don’t get me wrong, I agree by and large. It’s just complicated. The woman with 5 children might get a job, but then her children go to day care. Maybe she’s such a bad mother, day care is better. Maybe day care workers will actually care more about them than their mother. Maybe they won’t get abused worse in day care than at home. Then again, maybe not.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to be poor and home taking food stamps, but I’d like it better than poor, taking day care benefits of arguable benefit (which btw also costs us taxpayers), and trusting the government to look after the kids. Same goes for their public schooling.
And don’t forget that many of the poor are former producers, now consuming, but economics is not just what you see, it’s also what you don’t see. Like the taxpaying they did, and the jobs they provided.
I agree, and I understand these people need help to get over a rough patch. On the other hand, I think we go too far. CNBC had a banker on who said people were being interviewed for a job, but asked if they were hired, could they start seven months down the road, because that's when their unemployment benefits ran out. Extending unemployment comp to 99 weeks is just plain stupid.
There are people on public aid who are in the fifth generation of public dependency. The Times Picayune did an interview (it may still be on YouTube?) after Katrina with a 57 year old lady who had always been on public assistance, except for one year when she worked. She commented: "It was the worst year of my life!" She had five kids, all of whom are on welfare and all by different fathers, and has never been married. She was in an nice-looking apartment with a 50"+ HDTV in the background. When the reporter looked at the TV, the lady got really mad and started shaking her finger in the reporter's face, yelling: "Don't you be lookin' at that TV! If things were right, that should be a plasma TV!" This is the kind of attitude that really pisses me off.