What kind of Welfare system is ideal for the United States?

I'm on government support SSI after being determined I'm permanently disabled and unable to be employable to being "productive" this the standard ability to earn $10,700 a year [2014] or do appropriate levels of activity. The Office of Vocational Rehabilitation said they deemed me after a review by testing my abilities to be unable to be employed in the economy in any area. So get support plus Medicaid and SUNCAP (a SNAP benefit for those on SSI application is automatic). So you know my standing in the discussion.

Now I feel Welfare is ideal if it:

1. Provides for those unable to work to a modest level those things needed to exist and take a basic enjoyment in life, that is a citizen should be provided for but be expected to also have dignity of self.

2. Provides for those in need long enough to get on their feet and survive modestly but be under what could be gotten working full time so as to not be desirable and must encourage sensible living and punish overly poor choices.

3. Discourages abuse by making non-cash aid that aid that benefits the person in a healthy manner and has rules so as to minimize waste. (SNAP shouldn't offer access expensive quality meats and junk food, and be considered to be used with cost saving classes how to use coupons and sales to best use them perhaps even have a web site to optimize this and work with industry to get them coupons and special deals.)

I think this is a good basis for consideration to start and I'm not considering corporate welfare just aid to individual and families.

 

I have no problem with helping American's who need help .... In cases of Disability it may be forever but in cases of just not finding a job it has to short and be just a helping hand

 

If anything were actually free, it would solve something. Unfortunately, there are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.

I only write this because there is no mention, there's no awareness, of the costs in the OP.

There can be no net increase in good between equals by force, not even force of law.

The best form of welfare is charity. Charity has a voluntary nature. There can be a net increase in good between equals voluntarily.

 

what we have is fine, we just need better fraud tracking, verification of disibilities, and more time limitations.

 

If you are unable to be employed in the local economy, the only added welfare you should get is moving assistance to a community you can be employed in.

 

The best kind of welfare system would be based off of the idea of universalism.

In Scandinavian countries, everyone having access to basic services (health care, universities, housing, and more) is considered essential across all wealth brackets. From lower income to higher income. Perhaps if we were to adopt this type of system, our traditional concept of welfare would change.

 

Personally, I think disabled people should be strongly encouraged to find a productive occupation (short of complete devastating disability) within a certain amount of time.

 

When talking solely about obtaining employment, we have too many Americans who are unskilled, uneducated, low self esteem, unpresentable, lethargic, and these workers will struggle their entire lives. As the population continues to climb...now 316 million...the group mentioned above also continues to increase. In parallel, the workplace is changing, with tens of millions of manual labor jobs being lost to outsourcing, imports, automation, technology, etc. Obama and the government feel they can 'force' the economy to grow but this is really BS since all they can do is spend taxpayer money in the economy, and the government has done this to the tune of $17 trillion in national debt. All of this spending yet every day we have more and more people demanding government welfare.

When talking about Americans with physical and/or mental disabilities which prevent them from obtaining employment, IMO the first line of support must come from the families of these people, secondly from non-profits, and third from government programs. One major problem in this area is preventing fraud, from doctors to people to government officials and this is basically impossible. A simple thing like handicapped parking permits is grossly abused IMO only 50% of people should have them...if we assume 50% of the total welfare programming is based on fraud, this is a huge waste of taxpayer money...and the creation of do-nothing culture.

Back to the OP, seems to me the question should be asked to determine the basic needs of people? Housing, medical care, nutrition, transportation, education, ?? Why can't the government build millions of very low cost affordable housing units? Why can't we move forward to universal health care? Why don't we have efficient and effective public transit in all areas of the USA? Why is our public education system a drop-out factory to so many Americans? We already have Medicaid and Medicare and the VA so it was stupid to add Obamacare. Lastly, for everyone accepting disability, or unemployment, or food stamps, etc., what is preventing them from providing some form of production in return? If we have 8-10 million receiving unemployment, why aren't all of them volunteering as teacher's assistants? The person who wrote the OP, why can't you volunteer to work in government offices?

 

Later in this century, when automation has taken all of the jobs, we might have to consider a basic income guarantee.

Otherwise without income there won't be any customers for the automats to service, leading to the collapse of the system.

 

A form of minimum wage that can be applied for, simply by being able to claim to be unemployed; we could even call it, unemployment compensation due to socialism bailing out capitalism's, natural rate of unemployment, through a public policy which constitutes public Use, via recourse to eminent domain.

 

I think we have an obligation to help those who are disabled and unable to work. For those without a job and can work, President Roosevelt had the right idea, the WPA, where the government, local, gives you work for your welfare. But we would have to make sure the work they do doesn't take work away from those already working. Construction that the city and state pays for in roads, bridges etc. is an example I am talking about. There are many jobs people could do that government doesn't have the money to keep up. Picking up trash along roads. Cleaning up alleys. Painting over graffiti, fixing up or tearing down abandon homes. Picking crops that farmers pay illegals to do, clean up trash for the elderly and handicap etc, etc. I also think many who are free loading on the welfare system would be willing to get a job rather than have to work for welfare. It would also go a long way of fixing up the city and neighborhoods.

 

And of course there will be even less money available by then for a basic income guarantee since there will be fewer in the middle class actually paying taxes.

 

There won't be a middle class. It's going to be the unemployed, and the capitalists who own robots. That's the future I see.

 

Just more government programs that don't solve our problems; some on the left, get it.

Why not lower our Tax burden through simplification of our public policies (which Constitute public Use) and solve simple poverty on an at-will basis in our at-will employment States. Only true communists and the right, in the US, believe in the collective action of enforcing a work ethic instead of the moral goodness of bearing True witness to our own at-will employment laws in our own at-will employment States.

 

I can answer these two.

We don't have efficient public transit in the U.S. because virtually all of our cities have far lower population densities than most cities that have effective mass transit systems.

You've got to have cities that are large enough in population to justify public mass transit but small enough in geography that most of the transit systems are within walking distance. This is pretty rare in the U.S.

American public education focuses heavily on the bottom 10% of students and elevating them rather than the upper 90%. This results in schools that are unchallenging and uninteresting for most students with extremely heavy focus on students that school doesn't work for anyway.

 

Then where does the money come from to pay a basic income guarantee?

 

Our wars on crime, drugs, poverty, and terror since we have a Commerce Clause.

 

It beats me, but they call if fiat money for a reason...

 

Actually, nothing says the capitalists don't have money. They could buy from each other. So there could be a basic economy still in operation.

Which would make if vitally important to have an imagination in order to be one of the people who can put their force of robots to work, and thus can compete in the new economy.

 

But the reality is that private charity has never even come close to being sufficient to meet the actual need especially with the rise of industrialism. When most families lived on farms, they for the most part could take care of their disabled. But children were often sent to live in orphanages which were for the most part horribly run. One must also remember, that the average person is living more than 30 years longer than the average life expectancy at the beginning of the 20th century. Only a very small % of people even lived to 65. Most working class people were dead by the time they were 50. Yet by 1900 our cities were filled with orphaned children living on the streets, factories hiring 6 & 7 year olds to run dangerous machinery at pennies a day (depriving adult workers of those jobs). I don't know if you have seen the movie, "Gangs of New York" but it gives a very accurate account of life for the urban poor during the early industrial age in this country, and the failure of private charity to meet the needs. To think that the charitable needs of a modern state could be met with private charity is pure fantasy and delusional.

 

There are a number of health conditions which make it impossible for many to work in any community to a sufficient degree to be able to support one's self. Kidney dialysis, advanced crone's disease, Quadriplegic's (though we have one disability judge here in DE who insists there are plenty of jobs that a quadriplegic can do, citing Stephen Hawkings), cystic fibrosis, and others.

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Who is going to pay for their training, if such is even available?

 

I figured the govt. could subsidize training. Probably make more sense in the long run.

 

During the American experiment, we have solved poverty every forty years. If at any time during the American experiment the standard for poverty was as is was forty years prior, it would have been all but solved.

As to your swarms of orphans, do not assume that what can be observed in concentrated of populations to be greater than what cannot be observed in dispersed populations.

 

If they are unable to work period, I understand. But if say you had a disability that prevented you from working in the local economy but not in say a larger city with more differentiated industries and greater accessability for a disable person, the only additional welfare you should receive is moving assistance to move to that community where you can work.

 

I am not unsympathetic or uncharitable; however,
my degree of need is no measure of your liability, and your degree of liberty is no measure of my need.

I do not dispute the benevolence of your intentions. I do dispute the arrogance it takes to want to have even one's very best intentions for others imposed upon them by force, even force of law.