So we have read delalluvia's very specific recommendations for fixing the welfare system.
But broketrash, I guess I'm not clear on exactly what you're advocating, aside from instituting a consumption tax. You have complained that the poor should not receive assistance to pay for food, medical care, education, etc. So are you saying those programs should all be eliminated? That the poor and their children should be required to fend for themselves, even if it means starving or dying for lack of medical care? And not only that, but -- via the consumption tax -- to pay A HIGHER PROPORTION of their income than more affluent people do for these basic necessities and other goods and services?
I'm not putting it harshly on purpose. I'm seriously wondering about what you would envision as an ideal world in this respect.
Here's what I think about when this subject comes up. A few years ago, I read "Tobacco Road" by Erskine Caldwell. One of the most depressing books I've ever read, it's a novel about poor people living in the days before Welfare, Medicare and other assistance programs. They scrounge for and squabble over food. Medical problems go untreated. A grandmother is left to die -- one less mouth to feed! -- a daughter with a cleft lip grows to adulthood without that fairly simple surgery. Education is out of the question, and hope of improving their circumstances is all but nonexistent. They live like animals, and accordingly behave like animals. The book is no "pity party" -- at times it's hard to tell whether Caldwell even feels much sympathy for his characters. But in any case, it does not paint an appealing picture, to say the least, of poverty in a society without safety nets.
Of course, throughout most of human history, the poor have had to fend for themselves, at whatever cost. But my impression is that we, as a wealthy developed society, felt a certain responsibility for sharing that wealth with those who can't -- for whatever reason, from physical disability to cultural handicaps -- accumulate their own.
(For anyone not familiar with the aforementioned novel, here's a description from Amazon):
Novel by Erskine Caldwell, published in 1932. A tale of violence and sex among rural poor in the American South, the novel was highly controversial in its time. It is the story of Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his family, who are trapped by the bleak economic conditions of the Depression as well as by their own limited intelligence and destructive sexuality. Its tragic ending is almost foreordained by the characters' inability to change their lives. Caldwell's skillful use of dialect and his plain style made the book one of the best examples of literary naturalism in contemporary American fiction. The novel was adapted as a successful play in 1933.
