Increased Welfare and Food Stamps

It's amazing to me how few in this country seem to be able to connect dots, they've gotten so good at separating things and ignoring cause and effect.

I can't count the number of times people have pointed to the increase in number of people on some sort of government support under Obama's first term as "proof" of the culture of dependency and of wanting more things from the government.

Now let's consider the facts.  The fact is that our economy completely collapsed, was in the process of free fall when Obama was first elected.

The fact is that this was largely due to Republican-led deregulation of the banking industry, Republican-led wars on two fronts (at least one of which was completely frivolous and unnecessary), Republican-led tax cuts which they assured us would pay for themselves via trickle down and the Laffer curve, both of which have been thoroughly debunked.

In that process, a lot of good people lost jobs.  I had a lot of friends in that group.  People who wanted to earn a living, but no longer could.  Low skill jobs would not hire them because they were "overqualified", on the risk that the moment they finished training they'd leave for something that better suited their qualifications.  But the higher skilled jobs simply weren't there.

And so, in order to survive, a lot of these people went on unemployment, welfare, food stamps, whatever they could in order to not lose everything, in order to survive.

This is not an indictment of the welfare society, this is a celebration of it.  In much the same way that pulling the ripcord after falling out of a plane isn't a condemnation of parachutes, but a celebration of that parachute doing exactly what we needed it to do:  Provide a measure of safety between you, gravity and the ground.

Why are there more people on food stamps and other government assistance?  Because our economy collapsed.  It is not that most of these people wanted to be lazy, or looked down at the meager safety net and said "Y'know what?  I think a hardscrabble existence on the government teat sounds better than this comfortable life I have now earning my own living."  It's that the tightrope wire upon which they were walking was suddenly severed, and the choice was between landing on the safety net, or not having it and crashing to pain, severe injury, an possible death.

Let us stop complaining about the increase in public assistance and celebrate that the safety net performed exactly as designed and saved a lot of people from fates not of their own making.