ANSWERS: 8
  • Yes. And Welfare makes it damned difficult to wean yourself off of it too. A friend of mine, made an additional twenty dollars on his job. Welfare cut his food stamps by forty dollars.
  • It does in a way but WIC is available to even working middle class as is free lunch to kids and housing. People assume that if you are on "assistance" you don't work and that is not true. With food stamps you either work, actively look for a job (and prove it) or you don't get stamps. Cash benefits are 2 year lifetime maximum and then at the most you get $300. That is not a lot to live on. It's not as simple as it sounds and not everyone who applies or wants assistance gets it. They put a person thru Hel* to get the few benefits they have. Then they Punish them for working. They make $10 and their rent goes up, food stamps down, etc. They end up worse off working.
  • Something is WAY off here. In my state (Georgia), you won't even be considered for medicaid or food stamps unless you can prove through bank statements, which you MUST provide, along with W-2's and recent pay stubs, that you make less than $11,200 per year. For most people, that barely covers the rent/mortgage. You still have basic utilities, food, auto and auto insurance, and any medical bills that need to be paid, to deal with as best you can. As to the $40,000, well....that's would be a dream here in Georgia! Even if you qualify for public housing (called section 8), you have to have some outstanding medical condition, be unable to work, and a plethora of other issues before they'll even consider you as a candidate. If you qualify to have your bills paid (highly unlikely, since almost no one qualifies for it), it is only temporary. And, in order to keep any and all of those benefits rolling in, you have to show proof that you are actively seeking employment, or they cut you off immediately. What state are you in??? I feel the sudden urge to move coming on. +5
  • I think you have gotten the figures wrong,an no way would it be nearly that high.It would be closer to $12 thousand a year,below the poverty line.
  • I don't know where you live, but if you get one of those programs, it is deducted from the others, not added onto it. My child has a pretty catastrophic disease, and when she got sick, the health insurance company kept raising the rates to try to force my husband's company to dump us. The company didn't dump us, and that is a rarity among kids with cancer, but they had to switch to a different policy with extremely high copays, so we got a medical card to pay the copays. We get a little Social Security with it. If we were to get food stamps, that would be deducted from the Social Security and we would get less, not more. What does discourage the poor from working is that once you get on one of those programs, it is extremely hard to get off. If I started working, my child would no longer be able to have follow-up care for her cancer, which would be extremely irresponsible for me to do as a parent. There is no gray area with government programs that says "this child is uninsurable and needs to continue on Medicare so that she can continue to get care." All they look at is my income, and if it rises, she gets dumped. Most of the other parents of kids with cancer that I know from the clinic are in precisely the same position. Every time they find a job, no matter how little it pays, their child loses their medical care and the parents are forced to leave their job. The programs put you into a position where there is almost no way to be responsible. Whichever option you choose is a bad option.
  • Your numbers are WAY off. The average family of 4 gets less than 20K in California where the cost of living is one of the highest in the US.
  • Boy, they're living it up, huh? And just to see the generosity of our government, you should take a ride to Harlem or the Bronx sometime. Now, that's luxury living at the expense of the taxpayers, a paradise on Earth, the best that money can buy!
  • $40,000? Respectfully, you're vastly overstating the level of benefits. . If you look at that litany of programs you list, most of them have one thing in common -- they're mostly about the well-being of children. . All of these programs start with a baseline purpose -- making sure that kids have a foundation for success in life whether or not their parents can personally provide it. . I don't begrudge that. I went to a public high school (paid for by your tax dollars). I got my bachelor's degree from an Ivy League university (paid for with loans that I could only get because you -- as the taxpayers of the country -- cosigned the loan. I did pay it all back, but I wouldn't have gotten the money in the first place if you hadn't helped.). . My Georgetown law degree I paid for out of pocket because all of you had pushed me up to the point where I could afford to do that. . At no point have I felt coddled -- and that's fine. I have felt helped, though, just enough to make the difference between success and failure. And I have an ethical problem with, at this point, begrudging anyone else a similar degree of help. . Food, housing, medical care, and education. I think all of us owe every kid all of those. Maybe that makes me a socialist or something, but I don't think so. I prefer to think of myself as a good neighbor.

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