So just how long should someone be able to receive welfare? Until they are confidently in a position of self-sufficiency. Welfare-to-work was an interesting approach to welfare reform that suggested that the state could work alongside employers in bringing welfare recipients back to some level of autonomy by employing them in jobs that required a skill set that the state would also underwrite through community colleges and trade schools, which would create workers that could compete with the rest of the workforce for jobs. But the ongoing discrimination and indifference shown to welfare recipients in the first place in the workforce made entering the work place difficult.

Recipients of welfare and other social service programs face discrimination because the same systems that try to help them do them a disservice by taking away their autonomy and thrusting them into a ready made solution of programs that suggest that taxpayers can effectively underwrite every single need. Yet the food, housing, shelter and employment training that welfare recipients is minimal, at best, and fails to prepare them psychologically for moving forward in the workplace, whereas the streets suggest that they can hustle and con their way through life.

Government programs often do most of the thinking and hard work for recipients, and creates an atmosphere where the recipient is more focused on following a bunch of rules and regulations to stay in the system than to try to break away from it. Codependency was never part of the program for social services, but has become part of the reality of what it has become for many on welfare. It is easy to judge, but if you have been on welfare for 3 years, even though the system is suggesting that you can just go out in the workplace and work with the skills they have prepared you with, it is easier said than done. Anyone can look at the tax records of a welfare recipient and deduct that they have been in the system, living in Section 8 housing, and so on and so forth, without their any disclosure on their own part. Any background check can pull up such information, which shouldn’t necessarily be held away from potential employers, but shouldn’t weigh so heavily in the decision making process either.

Recipients may have come out of programs that suggested they get an associates degree, or certificate training that is only of use in certain fields that may earn them an extra 20 to 50% over what the next guy with a high school education is expected to have. That may work to an extent with computer skills or someone in the medical profession, chronically underemployed and under filled professions where there are no shortage of judge, but that is of no real hope to someone who wants to truly get away from the system. In fact this just helps them to be part of the working poor, where they have to carry all costs themselves in a pay as you go system where the government is no longer intervening in their day to day affairs.

The burden of living just above the system may encourage some to try to get back onto welfare to live what seemed to be an easier life where Section 8 paid for 70% of the rent, and a benefit card bought enough groceries to live off of without going hungry when budgeted correctly. The reality is that those programs have a lot of restrictions and loopholes that make it easier to be taken off of the program than it is to stay on it, and welfare recipients will find themselves living right back under the watchful eyes of the Big Brother that libertarians complain about on a daily basis.

I tried welfare for a time being in college; not being accustomed to the program I balanced just earning enough to stay on the program and trying to make due with a set amount of money for the entire month for groceries. I never did take advantage of Section 8, though I tried, each time suggesting that I could sit in classes and learn the merits of living in housing projects throughout the city not to pay anything in rent. If I took a job making a dollar more it would cut back my benefits; if I took a job making 2 dollars more I would be down to mere lunch money and what I considered to be a “real job” would take me off of the rolls entirely. I felt cheap living on the program, as though I could be doing more with myself but didn’t have to experience the full brunt of it as I could always go back to school next semester and just “finish up”; I couldn’t imagine how someone who wasn’t in school with no hope of anything trying to stay on that system.

I tried going back to it a number of times, but then looked at the long lines, contemplated spending my entire day talking to the case workers and often being told that I earned too much to get back on it the few times I did try to go through the process often walked away. The idea of doing so and going through the process was rather depressing, humiliating and downright suicidal, and I’d rather make a go of it myself than to talk to another self-righteous case worker. But there was something in me that suggested that I could do something with myself if I applied myself, and I often did.

What about that individual who never had the jobs I’d had, whose only other option would be work as a cashier somewhere or to work in stock room over there? Would they keep working away, not to be able to afford the rent and shack up with 4 other people or would they just go back to what they’ve known? Welfare isn’t anything to be taken lightly, and while I am indifferent about the system unless a recipient is in the position to go out there and work, and has the skills and the confidence to not have to look back, kicking them off of the program does about as good as releasing a prisoner into a society that will never employ them and force them to work for themselves; putting them in a position to learn about business without the advantages that a lot of the rest of us take for granted.