The Obama Years- A GOP love story

[tshile]

Originally Posted by Chico23231

As I get older I see peers, co workers, etc who openly talk about taken advantage of the system and I agree its time for change. We need to look closely at long term welfare reciepient and how we define disability payments. We created a culture of fraud and abuse. You should aim for a 5% threashold with fraud and waste within all govern programs...I think disability and welfare, we are dealing around the high teens to possibly 20% or 1 in 5. That's terrible.

I'm glad you brought this up because in my opinion it's the starting point of the conversation and most people skip it.

When you have an entity trying to 'take care of' a group of people there is going to be waste. It's unfortunate, but there are just too many people that are more interested in gaming the system instead of living an 'honest' life; whether that be welfare recipients getting money they shouldn't, or organizations/businesses/'community groups' that seek to keep the system broken so that their role in it is preserved/increased.

So the question is - what is an acceptable level of waste? Once we can agree on that, then we can actually start talking about how we can take the current system and alter it to meet that goal.

Until we, as a country, start discussing it in that way welfare is going to be remain this broken point of contention between the two sides. The arm waving about abuse and anecdotal stories of beach bums from the right lacks the substance needed to actually make a real case for real reform without hurting the people welfare is actually intended to help.

The left is all too happy just leaving things the way they are right now. If you're going to incite change, you have to make compelling arguments. The Right hasn't been very successful lately in doing that. The fact that there's a large group of people on the left looking for any chance to label the Right's ideas as racist, classest, etc shows just how carefully you have to attack the subject if your interest is in actually causing change.