Does anyone not understand that "government aid" means my money?

Try something different. Try living by the phrase; there but for good fortune go you or I. There are so many hard working people out there that had bad luck. Natural or man made disasters, devastating health problems, lost jobs as the company moves away, and no jobs available for quite some time, all of these can happen to you.

too true though i still do see the use of government aid. let's say you loose your job and you can't keep up with bills and your about to lose EVERYTHING then it's a good idea to get government help but when you've been on welfare for 5 years and still haven't found a job then something has to give like 4 years ago.

Myth: Most welfare recipients are on benefits a short time.

Let me make that clearer.

At any one time 80% of any given caseload is chronic, repeat for one or more lifetimes.

80% of the money being spent at any one moment in time, is for the chronic, constantly needy, needy by choice, more than circumstances.

The other 20% comes and goes on a regular basis, in one door, out the other, never to be seen again.

At any moment in time, only 20% of the total, but over a long stretch (say five years), most of the ones helped were short timers, came and went, just like the myth says, most of the recipients on a short time,. . . . . . . but they only use 20% of the total funds available.

80% of the financial help available, goes to those ‘few bad apples.’

That does not sound like a good taxpayer investment to me.

It seems to me the lion share of the money should be spent on the temporarily poor, the poor by circumstances, more than choice.

http://www.urban.org/publications/900288.html

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SSI – Supplemental security Income – not social security -for people who didn't work –

$50 Billion a year.

(see page 62 of the report)

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/ssir/SSI11/ssi2011.pdf

See SSI for your county and state:

http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/ssi_sc/

2.6% of the population is on SSI, one of every 38 individuals, most never worked a day, the remainder worked so little, their Social Security is less than $678 per month.

http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.js...

(Per the SSA reference below - SSI and children - "On average, SSI payments accounted for nearly 48 percent of the family income of SSI children,")

For all families with SSI children, SSI is nearly half of ALL income.

SSI and children.

http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v66n2/v66n2p21....

Today’s antipoverty safety net is dramatically different from the one in place two decades ago when welfare reform was enacted. Rather than a safety net primarily dependent on cash assistance programs, as is the common perception, the current system is highly reliant on social service programs funded by government and delivered through community-based nonprofits. Annual public and private expenditures for social service programs today exceed total federal outlays for cash assistance programs like welfare, food stamps, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Yet, little attention has been paid to the implications of this transformation in antipoverty assistance and the challenges a service-based safety net faces in the wake of the Great Recession. Drawing on unique survey data from over 1,500 social service providers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., the author will discuss the new geography of the American safety net and the presence of spatial mismatches that undermine the system’s ability to respond to rising poverty. The author also will discuss implications of shifts in safety net assistance for the study of public policy and the welfare state moving

http://ed.stanford.edu/events/out-reach-place-pove...

And when a tornado picks up your home and moves it into a mountain, refuse to take government aid.

It gets old hearing this garbage.

The thing is that if nothing else, you still had your health, you weren't left scrambling at eighty on six hundred a month from Social Security unable to afford cataract surgery so you could see, and having outlived your savings.

I know because that was my mothers situation. We took her in, paid for her surgery but there was no other help for her. Lazy she wasn't. Neither was my grandmother, before Medicare, she spent her long lifes savings in hospital for stomach cancer, even forty years ago it took three months to go through everything she had. She'd worked since she got here at fourteen.

If a flood hits your home, the insurance company won't pay for it, you need government flood insurance, no private company writes insurance, and I'm sure you realize that people all over the country see their rates go up when the Midwest gets a tornado, or the Northwest gets a mudslide, or an earthquake, or the Northeast gets a hurricaine. Even if you never file a claim in your life, you pay for them.

The process for getting disability is so daunting that many real cases go unpaid.

You need two doctors, one of them theirs to agree, and constant monitoring, and if they think you are scamming them, they use investigators. And as anyone can tell you the government always takes you to court to prove it.

And what is the point about railing on about people who have marginal intelligence making bad decisions, they aren't bright enough to do otherwise, and its not logical to think we can drown them at birth.