There are enough people out there who have to have two paychecks just to put food on the table and pay the rent.

When I was a kid, an astounding number of people lived comfortable middle-class lives on one income. Of course, when I was a kid the average family paid five times less taxes as a percentage of income than they do now.

Government typically gets into social programs to fill a vacuum that threatens to destabilize the civic structure. That creates an expectation that such programs will continue, and also creates a constituency for the programs. If there's all this free stuff out there, why isn't it taking care of everybody? Government services justify themselves through the number of people served.

You hit the nail right on the head. We have an "entitlement mentality," (and not confined to the poor by any means) which combined with the desire of the government to have ever-more control over the economy and the citizen, and the desire of the politicians for power, makes for a very bad combination. People will tend to elect representatives that will throw the most coins from their limousines. And to make it worse, it isn't even their own coins.

The minute it became not only possible, but a virtue, to vote money out of other people's pockets and into your own, we started down a slope that may not have a pleasant end.

If government actually restricted itself to "filling the gaps," only aiding people who really needed it (preferably on the most local level of government possible), people who couldn't get help from any private source, it wouldn't be so bad. Means-tested aid programs. Means-tested medical assistance. But only universal programs give the statists the voter control they need. You see, there just aren't that many poor and needy to make a decent political voting bloc.

If private groups are doing it cheaper and better, government-served stats should drop.

Theoretically, yes. But try and imagine any government bureaucracy phasing itself out in favor of a private solution. Not in this reality. The actual results--cheaper and better or not--have very little to do with it. How many government programs grow year after year, even though the problem they are addressing not only doesn't get better, but is measurably worse the more they work on it?