@Kitty – I appreciate your point. From my experience, I would say that there is far more oversight of welfare distributions than, say, farm subsidies or corporate tax subsidy programs (both of which account for far more government spending than welfare). This probably makes sense: in those cases, the recipients are rich, and thus have the resources to gradually twist government policy further and further towards what benefits them the most. Welfare recipients, on the other hand, have nothing like the farm or oil and gas lobby.

Growing up, more of my friends’ families were on welfare than not. I don’t know the statistics on how many color tv’s your average welfare recipient has etc, but I do remember pretty vividly how incredibly lucky and almost guilty I felt each fall at value village with my parents getting new (“new”) school cloths for the year – why did I get pants that fit (whether they came from the bargain bin at a second hand store or not) when so many of my friends didn’t have any cloths that fit, a warm enough coat, or even necessarily a meal besides lunch every day?

I sure didn’t see anyone living the high life on government dollars. I just saw my grade school aged friends making it by, marginally, rather than living in shelters. I don’t begrudge them that. I wish I had known how to do more.

Overall, this thread reminds me of what I worry about the most when I read these PF blogs: that spending so much time thinking about maximizing $ in the bank as an end goal will warp my thinking and I will forget the things I value most. For all the talk here of it being private charity that should play the role of welfare, I don’t see “charitable donation” very high on very many budgets on these blogrolls.

Tithing comes up occasionally, but the way I remember my own church’s finances running when I was growing up, very little of the money tithed goes to charity – most of it was always poured back into the church itself, and spent back on church members. Perhaps a great idea, but a form of collective saving and spending, not charity.

On this blog, going back as far as 2005, I can find a grand total of 3 posts on the topic of charitable giving – and none within the last year.

At the same time, I don’t think welfare is such a huge part of government spending, but as most government programs it could’ve been run a whole lot more efficiently. What bugs me most is that there are doesn’t seem to be any oversight to make sure that nothing is wasted. Every year we hear about how some billions just “got lost” or how there was no competitive bidding for government contracts or how they hired a contractor to build something, paid exhorbitant price, and then the product was bad, or how they built airport in the middle of nowhere and nobody is using it, or build a 200K outhouse in a state park. If this happened in a company, we might’ve seen some convictions. They should have independent audits, also some of their employees who aren’t too busy should occupy themselves by figuring out how to save money – with incentive pay a percentage of money saved (a cousin of mine in Germany does this type of work for a company – she is excellent at it, maybe they should hire her).
So I mightn’t entirely agree with the picture, but it is funny.

Fact of the matter is: if we eliminated a lot of the wasteful social programs, then there would be more money left in people’s pockets… and there would be less need for welfare. I paid several thousand dollars in taxes this year, and I could have used those dollars to get myself over the hump when I was downsized rather than turn to the government. How about that!

It is just one of the many programs that has continued to run amok after beginning with good intentions. Name your federal social program of choice, and it probably isn’t efficiently doing what it was intended to do, and it is disproportionately taking money out of someone’s pocket to fund someone else’s pocket without addressing the real issue.

It isn’t a conservative or liberal issue, it is simply pointing out how disgustingly wasteful our government is. It just throws money at problems in hopes to win votes or make people feel good about where their tax dollars go.

You’re entitled to your opinion. I do try to limit my narrow views but I have to wonder who’s the one with the narrow view if you are the one who was offended by my post.

And although this blog is about personal finance, there are a lot of personal finance issues that are political. Take the subprime crisis for instance. When I wrote about that, the conversation went all over the place in terms of placing the blame.

I’m sorry to lose you as a reader but if my posts anger you that much, then you should probably go elsewhere.