In this country, like every country in the world, we have the hungry and the homeless and the uninsured. I have lived long enough to understand that my idea of a tough day pales in comparison to those people who lead a life of legitimate hardship. And by my belief system, my faith, we will always have the poor and the hungry with us - Christ himself said so.
Hard to not feel defeated in a situation like that. But the disciples who were there with Christ and heard him say the words still worked to feed the hungry as they worked to spread the Gospel. So even hearing that the problem would always be bigger than them, did not keep them from trying. So, also by my faith, we have to keep trying.
But here is the problem. If you try to help people the way I would prefer, through private institutions that would be able to work locally and set restrictions on how help was given, you work on a small scale and you magnify the chances for mismanagement (perhaps even criminally) of the funds that are entrusted to them. If you try to help people through government programs you establish a mind numbingly huge bureaucracy that consumes large portions of the funds and creates rules and regulations that can be easily manipulated by those willing to play the system for their own benefit.
Let's take the 2nd system first since it is the primary system we have in place now. The advantages of this system is that it is huge. It offers assistance on a grand scale that comes closest to matching the size of the problem. Criteria is spelled out in law and it prevents favoritism in the implementation of help - if you meet the criteria, you are entitled to the help no matter what. And it is constant and consistent - the check hits your mailbox every month like clockwork and funds are pulled in by law to support the program. As a result, the program is not subject to the whims of donors.
Now as to the small, local option to help. The good in it is that the help could be catered to help a specific aspect of the local community. If the primary reason for need is that a local plant has been shut down and drastically increased unemployment, a focus could be shifted to job training and job finding assistance to get as many people back off the rolls of assistance as possible. Local leaders on the ground tend to have a better idea of who among their clients are actually trying to better themselves and who are milking the system and could take quick action to reduce help given based on effort seen. Also under the current system of local help, the funds raised have to come from donors which fosters a need for the local helpers to strive to show results to keep the funds coming in.
The problems with both systems are many. If we were to take the funds currently given out by the government and entrust them to local charities, you would have millions of small programs which would be almost impossible to monitor. We would be swamped with stories of charitable leaders who embezzled funds meant to help their clients. We would inevitably have some charitable organizations choosing only to help those who conformed to a certain belief system instead of helping those who deserve to be helped.
The problem with help on the large scale are numerous as well. There is a cycle of dependency in place in this country where generations of families are on public assistance. I saw one news special where the grandmother, mother, and the pregnant daughter were all on assistance from the government and none of them had held a job in years. Also the very act of spelling out criteria to receive help simply provides a road map for the unscrupulous to make sure they meet the standard to get assistance. And there is not an endless supply of funds.
People who have been critical of the fact that our current system does not do enough have often pointed out that our system pales in comparison to what the governments in Europe do for their citizens. Take a moment and go look at how many European economies are on the verge of collapse right now. They have found that the culture of dependence, once ingrained, will literally lead to riots in the streets when there is an attempt to reduce benefits.
The poor will be with us always and we are not afforded the luxury of simply giving up. My less than perfect solution would be to curtail some of the mandatory support given directly to those who meet the criteria, and to instead fund more local charities to provide help for their communities. I would urge the implementation of good behavior, practical behavior being used to govern who gets funds - this good behavior would include submitting to drug testing, job training, birth control, and mandatory service to the charitable institution from which assistance is received.
The books would have to be open to the public to prevent fraud and this would mean that the neighbor of the one getting assistance would know exactly how much assistance they were getting. This is a huge invasion of privacy, I know, but it is based on the fact that the person getting the help volunteered to get the help. They could maintain their privacy by not asking for help.
There are probably a thousand reasons why this will never work. I understand that. I hope there are people out there smarter than me who can figure this out. The collapses that are threatening Europe have no problem hopping the pond and coming over here. I believe that the economy is going to get a lot worse before it is going to get any better and that means we are going to see a huge increase in the number of people who are going to need help.
The system that we have now will not be able to support that. We will find ourselves having to cut program funding at the exact moment that more people will be making demands on those programs. People are going to be hurting. People who have never known true NEED are going to find themselves standing in lines for food with people they used to look down their noses at. And we are going to have angry people who don't understand that the money was never magical and never just appeared in the mailbox when the people funding those programs all these years suddenly meet the criteria to receive help from the programs.
This honestly worries me. I have spent years not liking the system because of the culture of need that it creates and perpetuates. But I have tolerated the system because I knew that it actually helped those few people that actually needed the help but refused to be made an assistance addict. Now I am literally concerned that this mismanaged system is going to collapse under the weight of its own inborn weaknesses and there is going to be nothing left to help anyone.
Does anybody out there have a solution? Anyone? Anyone?
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