Anybody who has read me for a while know that when I say redistribution of wealth for no value returned is not something that applies just to the poor.

The idea of creating a safety net for people without making it into a hammock is a difficult concept. It is made more difficult because there are many in government that have a vested interest in it being a hammock, in having a class of people dependent forever on the state for their sustenance. Guaranteed votes.

Ideally, a welfare program would be considered successful if the number of clients went down every year. Is this how current programs behave? Or do they consider themselves successful the more people use them? The larger they become?

Do the socialists in our government really want people to outgrow the dole, become self-sufficient, maybe even well-off? What hold does a leftist politician have on someone who doesn't need the state to live? Who would such people tend to vote for then?

Private charity has been systematically undercut in this country. When someone down the road is having trouble, do people pitch in like they used to, or do they just say, "I'm paying taxes for this. Why don't they go to the welfare offices?"

When Hillary said it takes a village, she didn't mean volunteers, private charities, and neighbors who help neighbors. Her village is Washington D.C., and her help for the poor is money funneled from anonymous taxpayers to anonymous recipients, with credit and political power going to people...well...like Hillary. A paragon of virtue and generosity, who needs not a nickel of her own money or effort to be lauded endlessly as a wellspring of human kindness. For a politician, what's not to like?

Think about this very hard when listening to people who are pushing a government monopoly on health care. There are not just strings attached, but chains. The idea is one thing, the execution of it, as it has been with all social programs, will be another.

If you want answers, I suspect that the first answer is reducing the government programs, or at the very least, returning the responsibility to states and local programs. The more you deal with social problems locally, the better. There should never have been Federal welfare in the first place. The Feds won't like this answer because it reduces their power. The states won't like it because they like being able to farm off their responsibilities to the Feds.