Welfare is a sensitive topic both for the people who are on “welfare” or social assistance, and for the people who feel they are paying for it. What we find interesting is that while the media and others sling around words like “abusing the system” we have never discovered a statistic that actually puts a figure to the number of individuals who may be abusing the system. We find this particularly interesting when we are inundated with all kinds of statistics, from polls taken for who will vote what to how many people will die of cancer in a single minute. And yet for something which seems to be so much on every one’s mind there is not a single statistic mentioned about how many people are abusing the system. Could it be because if we knew there were 12,000 people out of 36 million plus people we would realize that in proportion there are relatively few actually misusing the welfare system?
You see our point.
Welfare, or social assistance, was implemented to help people in need. The latest complete information is this: In 2005 there was a total of 1,679,800 on social assistance of which 500,000 were children. Therefore taking 1.1 million people out of a population of 32,359,000 is about 2.9% of the population that were getting assistance (excluding the children, for this purpose). Out of that 2.9% of the population what percent would be abusing the system? Even if we said it was 50% (which is extremely high and very unlikely) we would be looking at 1.4% of the population. Is that anything to get distraught about when good is being accomplished? Families are being cared for to some extent.
If we embraced the Scandinavian model we could eliminate poverty in this country in less than 20 years. We encourage readers to view the link below.
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