You probably don't know the half of it. One of the things about public services in the US is that they are punitive in nature. They are designed to make you fe

You probably don't know the half of it. One of the things about public services in the US is that they are punitive in nature. They are designed to make you feel terrible about yourself and give you as big a hassle as possible. If you're a low wage employee, you might need food stamps, cash assistance, housing assistance, child care assistance, and medical assistance. Every single one of those is a different government agency with a 9-5 schedule that doesn't do weekends or federal holidays. Did your day care for your 2 kids forget to give you a form to fill out? Well then, when your child care has lapsed, have fun waiting 3-6 months for slots to open up. No, we don't care that you have a job which is why they're in daycare to begin with. Have fun with our antiquated automated service in which you wait 2 hours to talk to someone for 5 minutes in order to get a code to call back every week to check on the status of your case. Rinse and repeat that for every state agency and program. Keeping up with state benefits is a 10 hour a week job if you have kids, and that's if everything is going okay. On top of everything else, one of the reasons poor kids tend to have worse outcomes is because their parents are consistently stressed out from virtually every direction. If it's not the crappy job, it's the social services people. If it isn't the social services people, it's the stress of parenting adults.