This whole post could be summed up as "I make up stories from people that don't exist to justify my selfish world view", and frankly these "people are saying" a

This whole post could be summed up as "I make up stories from people that don't exist to justify my selfish world view", and frankly these "people are saying" anecdotes with no facts backing them up don't work well on a site where people research things instead of taking them at face value. If you want that kind of echo chamber, may I recommend Facebook or something similar? 70% (approximately) of people on welfare already have a job. That's strange isn't it? Not going fishing. Not living the life working under the table. No, doing the hard jobs you expect to be done for next to nothing, for your comfort and convenience. They clean your hotel rooms, wait on you at restaurants and check you out at your local Walmart that destroyed all the other work in their town, and then paid them so little they had to apply for help to feed their children. These vital jobs that people expected to be done even in the middle of a pandemic, well they don't pay enough to live off of anymore. Because the wealth only moves in one direction and has for decades. Welfare the majority of the time is a hand up not a hand out, 50% of recipients are able to get off of it inside of a year, 70% inside of 2 years and if we should have a few people who game the system, oh well. It's a necessary evil to make sure women and children are not on the streets, to ensure that once you are down you are not out, because we are the most prosperous nation on earth and we can EASILY afford it, and part of the social contact entailed in being an American is you care for your fellow Americans. Unless you are someone who sits around ruminating about what an injustice it is that a portion of your income is used to keep children from being hungry and how very unfair that is to you. I pay more than what I am asked in taxes, I contribute to charities at a rate that most people would be surprised by, and I can tell you this. Every charity in our country is a failure of our government. Every church that proselytizes via helping the poor does so because the system we built is not working for it's constituents, and myopic people want to spend a bunch of time fighting about who gets what of the very, very thin slice of the pie, instead of actually doing the hard work of reforming the bakery. If there is any truth to your anecdotes at all consider this; it might be more telling of you and the moral fibre of those you surround yourself with than people at large.