TheRealMafoo said:
When government was not feeding and housing people, people in this country were not dying in the streets. They were being well fed, well houses, and in much safer environments. A larger portion of this group of people also contributed in some fashion. It was a much better system. I hate it when people think because I don't want government doing something, that it means I don't want it done (I know that's not you Kasz). |
Just an example:
I can’t remember the exact statistics, but because my local food bank partners with large producers, has a warehouse that was donated to them, and all the labour is volunteers the cost of feeding an individual through this charity is (roughly) the cost to produce the food. In a large part because there is only a small gain from scamming a system like this, fraud is very minimal and the food bank doesn’t have to expend any effort to preventing fraud. Since few people are ever turned away, people don't need to meet some arbitrary guidelines to receive help and few people fall through the cracks.
In contrast, systems like food stamps or welfare feed people at the full retail cost of the food and have large bureaucratic organizations to prevent fraud because defrauding these systems is easy and widespread; this means that the cost of delivering aid can be nearly an order of magnitude more expensive through the government than through charity. Because these systems are full of arbitrary guidelines needy people are often turned away; consider whether an individual who earned $80,000 a year would receive food stamps if they had 4 children in college and a spouse who had cancer.
