As reported by the Weeklystandard.com the US federal government has spent $3.7 trillion of your money on welfare over the past five fiscal years (2009-2013). That number itself should give you pause, because it's simply enormous and this welfare state in America has continued to grow year by year. What irks me the most is that the government gets the bulk of its operating revenue from taxpayers and it is to those taxpayers that it should answer to but it seldom gives us the courtesy of doing so. The first question that should be asked, is whether our government has been a good steward of our money? That answer is clearly a negative.
The welfare system is primarily setup to make recipients dependent upon government aid. This dependency clearly creates an ongoing tendency to make those recipients not only loyal but extremely protective of "their" benefits. That isn’t good stewardship of other people's money that is in the most basic sense, taking the taxpayer's money in order to control and manipulate a significant portion of our population. The federal government by its actions clearly wants people to be dependent on them. That isn't the history of the United States, it is very poor policy, and a slap in the face of what charity truly represents.
I don't believe that it is any stretch of the imagination to say that government welfare is a form of charity. It is a very bad form of charity as currently presented, but it’s a form. The most significant problem with government welfare is that its primary purpose appears to be to feed itself and thereby to ensure its growth. It has little or no interest in seeing programs reduced in size, reduced in their influence, or reduced in employment, and neither does it appear to care as to whether the program(s) is effective in accomplishing its objectives. A charity is on the other hand, created by people who donate voluntarily and if they are unsatisfied, the charity will be materially impacted. Therefore, a charity has a vested interest in seeing that its monies are wisely spent on the programs that it is setup for, so as to demonstrate not only to its Board of Directors that they have used their monies and people's labor in a prudent manner, but that they have succeeded or are succeeding in their mission. If a charity is unable to demonstrate this on a consistent basis, or unable to manage its money prudently, they will cease to stay in business or their model will effectively change. This is simply known as accountability. It is also a reckoning.
The federal government on the other hand consistently behaves in a manner in which their primary goal is to have you "game" their own system. That's a real sickness of the government welfare program as currently structured. It isn't really about helping people; it's about getting your "fair" share. The one thing that we do know, for a certainty, is that when you offer people money or goods or services for little or nothing, the more the programs will find an avenue to accommodate this and to increase. Everyone loves a bargain, a free bargain is even better, and to top it all off, if you don't have to even work for it, you won't.