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 Originally Posted by oskar
If the only purpose of welfare is to keep people from not starving to death, I guess that makes sense.
This may help clear some of it up for you: Food stamps aren't the only form of welfare here. It's just one particular form designed specifically to keep people fed. It uses a debit card system now but can only be used to purchase food items that have not been prepared (except for work-arounds like the Hunt Brothers Pizza example I gave above).
The issue that myself, BananaStand and a whole lot of other people have is that there are no real restrictions on what someone can buy with it, so it effectively subsidizes companies like Pepsi (in BananaStand's example). It'll effectively subsidize some companies purely because someone is going to have to turn a profit on something bought at a store, but one argument is that it would be a benefit to the person receiving food stamps if there were more restrictions on what could be purchased so that nine (or ten) figures of it isn't going to something like soda.
Originally Posted by oskar
If your goal is to give them the best possible chance of getting a job, then making it easier to social network seems important. So I think the latter makes more economical sense, but I really have no idea and I am not emotionally invested in this issue. I think if you want to get people to stop abusing welfare you should probably start by looking at income tax. If a 40h minimum wage job barely keeps you from starving while the government takes 50+% of your income all things considered, I don't blame anyone for gaming the system.
A primary complaint a lot of Americans have is that we're taxed pretty high in exchange for the relatively low level of benefit we get for it in aggregate. However, if you're working 40 hours/week at minimum wage, you most likely have a very, very small net amount of tax you pay each year.
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