Most people who need assistance need it on a temporary basis, and they too eventually "pay back" more than they used. So why do you have the right to call them thieves and yet not number yourself in that category?
However, a vast constituency of the welfare state has been created that did not exist before the last third of the 20th century, the intergenerational welfare underclass, which does not work, and will likely never work in the private economy. Secondly, a substantial portion of those who you claim need "assistance" on a temporary basis are actually on "assistance" for much of their working lives due to the reach of a number of welfare programs that reach well into the middle class. Thirdly, a critical mass of citizens now receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes, creating a permanent constituency for larger and more expansive government (greater and ever greater "benefits") over time.
Further, Medicare is a welfare program, Beastie, as is Social Security. The sub-prime mortgage lending practices that initiated initial economic collapse was a
welfare program, Beastie, and it reached well beyond the working poor and into the middle classes. The entire scheme was grounded in indemnifying American taxpayers and their children and children's children for any defaults that would occur in such a program. And they are. Then there is the truely astounding amount of corporate welfare, Beastie - the corporatism and rent seeking that is always a key aspect of a socialistic, interventionist state. All of that is "welfare" as surely as is TARP, the Obama stimulus, TANF or food stamps.
If you truly were a person of integrity, you would actually PAY BACK the money you now believe was unjustly taken by others to support you in your time of need, instead of just claiming that, as a taxpayer, you "paid back" the money through taxes.
So what you are here saying is that now, after having paid back into the federal treasury through my own hard work far beyond what I ever used in benefits, I should, as someone who has never made more than $24,000 in my life, write personal checks to the federal government to feed a morally and economically indefensible monstrosity that has destroyed the inner city black family, helped bring the nation to the brink of financial ruin, created a raging entitlement mentality, slowed economic growth and job creation, and incentivized values, habits, mentalities, and cultural attributes that are incompatible and hostile to gainful employment, let alone something that could be called a career. You want me to pay more taxes to support this system rather than leaving it in my hands to support myself and my own family as I see fit?
That's a very interesting mentality, Beastie. Very.
But you're not really a person of integrity, in my opinion. You just play one on the internet. You accuse others of being thieves when all they do is the exact same thing you did - use a system out of a last ditch need and out of circumstances in which that need arose. You're a hypocrite, an extremist, and a crank.
The problem with all this is that you don't know what you're talking about, which makes rational debate, of course, impossible. A very large minority of welfare recipents do not use welfare as a "last ditch" but as their primary means of support. Long term unemployment benefits, then extended for ever longer terms, is one case in point, as is the state of our inner cities in which an entire culture predicated on lifelong permenant or partial welfare dependency has been genrated.
Partial welfare dependency in various forms is now a standard feature of middle class life (as all-time record highs of EBT card use attests) and includes Medicare entitlement after retirement and Social Security checks, a substantial portion of which does not represent what one paid into the system (and there is no such thing as a Social Security trust fund in any normative private sector financial sense anyway) but represents a transfer payment out of the general treasury.
This system needs to be dismantled, for economic, constitutional, and moral reasons; it needs to be sunseted over a reasonable amount of time and an entirely new and re-imagined system put in place to deal with the problem of poverty and unemployment, whether intermittent or long-term.