O.K.....Before I read about Ben Franklin to you, I’ll find a nice big box for you and your family to live in and take you to the nearest under pass. Don’t ask me for food...but I will leave a magic marker so you and yours can make “I’m hungry” signs.
Being serious for a moment...I don’t think the provision of food and shelter should be a lifelong experience. I have experience with Section 8 rental properties. I know what happens. A “step up” with certain limitations and criteria should be available.
I also have experience with charitible organizations. They are severely overloaded and underfunded. Most have no living accomodations available. Those that do are packed. So good luck if you want to “enlist the aid of actual (voluntary) charities”.
I do understand what you are saying, but charities cannot support these things exclusively. Furthermore if you give your cash as a donation, much goes to administration.
I think there should be changes. The government is a poor administrator.
Help should be provided, but only in such fashion that people would rather do just about anything else than accept it; the penalty for accepting it, though, should be short-term rather misery rather than long-term harm or indebtedness, such that accepting the help will give people the impetus to ensure that won't need it again, rather than crippling them so they will.
So charities have poor administration and government has poor administration, in both cases your talking about a large sum of money going to “administration”.
I’m sorry you have so little faith in your fellow man both poor(To find ways to provide for themselves) and wealthy(to be charitable when necessary).
That being said I admit the poverty problem is greatly increased by the fact that Government by law denies anyone the opportunity to work unless they can be productive enough to merit minimum wage & benefits. That is where our real unemployment problem began.
That does not however mean we can afford to give way the hard earned fruits of other people’s labor to folks who have labored not. Nor does it mean that we can afford to allow politicians to pick and choose who “is in need of money”. That is the root of the political patronage system.(voting yourself other people’s money.)