People always complain about having to pay for the poor, but what is the alternative? If people in a society do not have their basic needs met, they can become unruly and even violent.
In my city, for instance, crime rose significantly during the summer because of the economy. And this was on top of the normal rise of crime that happens during the summer. I frequented the courthouse for my job, and the head DA's secretary was shocked at how many people were being booked in.
So here are your options, spend some money to keep the poor from revolting (happens in China more often than the government would like to admit), or live in a less safe society where you have to pay police more to protect other citizens from all these suppressed poor people.
And, for better or worse, we sometimes have to give welfare to families if they have children and those children's needs aren't being met. Do we just let the children starve? I am not saying the parents should be able to have kids if they are poor (we should have court-ordered vasectomies!), but you can't just let a kid suffer for their parents mistake. Ironically, pro-life people rarely take this stance. They care about a kid before his born, but fuck him once he's here.
The children are far more likely to turn into a criminal too if they are excessively poor, which ends up costing society both money and safety in the long run. It is expensive to prosecute criminals and to arrest them.
Its easy to badmouth the government for taking care of the poor too much, but would you really want the alternative? I would rather spend a little bit more to live in a safe country. And people also drastically overestimate how much welfare, CHIP, and foodstamp programs actually cost us and how difficult they are to get on.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
