Yarissa Rodriguez (Edison) Social Priorities: Where our taxpayer dollars are really going!

3. April 2009 by student.

My good friend sent me the following quote from an article in his local paper:
A family of four in England tips the scales at a combined 1,100 pounds. They can’t–don’t want to?–work, so they live off taxpayers, collecting the equivalent to take-home pay of $42,000, on top of the “free” universal health care for assorted ailments linked to their morbid obesity. The family, of course, is grateful for the government’s generosity with other people’s money. Not exactly. “What we get barely covers the bills and puts food on the table,” says the father in demanding bigger government handouts. “It’s not our fault we can’t work. We deserve more.” We wish we could say this isn’t typical of people on the dole everywhere.

They could however have some weird illness or injury through no fault of their own and would probably not receive a penny from the government. Along with probably either not qualifing for or receiving medical insurance to cover needed hospital bill and medications. Real life: I am a nurse and took care of a 19 year old man recently. In his short life he has had open heart surgery, lost most of his renal function and became a dialysis patient. He has a history of lupus which developed into severe systemic lupus after not taking his medications. He did not chose to stop them but rather got dropped from Medicaid which supplied his medication after he turned 18 years old. He is now struggling to stay alive and make it to his 20th birthday. Where are our priorities, there are people that have Medicaid and do not even use it and for life and death situations it is taken away!

Regardless of what that specific family does, there are many people in this world who do simply leech off the working class. That includes families who could work and take care of themselves but instead choose to take advantage of charity and anti-poverty assistance. It also includes rich people who leech off the working class taxpayers from government spending such as the executives and share-holders of bailed out companies and the industries who receive large contracts and favors from the government.

So let’s punish those people who use resources meant for the needy who do not need them. Does this make any sense to you because I still have a bad taste in my mouth after reading this article and sharing my story. Why do people take advantage of poorly administered assistance programs, do they not have a soul? They misdirect funds to themselves that could have helped relieve actual poverty. They are not poor but are people who could live out of poverty without the assistance they lazily choose to take. They leech off of the working class, a form of legalized stealing or sometimes outright fraud. How do people get away with this, but more so why are we as a society allowing this to happen?

These lazy, greedy people and what they do raises some points: We need to find efficient, effective ways to help people help themselves. There is a major poverty problem in our society that needs to be fixed and that we would all benefit from the change. There are many honest, hard-working people who are in poverty, near poverty or at risk of falling in poverty not from laziness or their own bad decisions but because of corruption in society and other external forces that could throw you or I into poverty just as easily and unfairly. Am I the only person that feels this way about this issue?

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