A Welfare Story

So on this Thanksgiving I'm kinda going places on the net I don't usually visit.

And I come across this:

...studying [the]Statistical Abstract of the United States in 1995 for evidence to refute the conventional but false wisdom that out-of-control welfare costs were due to an exploding number of “welfare queens” ever more deftly defrauding the system, I discovered another kind of ripoff that – had I still been working as an investigative reporter – I would have labeled “the greatest welfare fraud of all time.” From 1970 through 1990, the welfare bureaucracy had increased its own administrative costs by 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as it slashed the value of stipends and services to recipients by nearly two thirds. The administrative cost hikes of course included substantial salary increases and workforce expansions: there were “welfare queens” aplenty, but they were all members of the bureaucracy.

He goes on a tear. And from a humanists point of view it gets worse as he describes his own experience and that of others in the welfare system.

It is quite a story. Not a pretty one.