The food stamp program, medicaid and ADC are a necessity... we have a very large country here. My parents worked hard when I was growing up but there were times when my father lost his job and we were dead broke... I remember a particular time when we ate nothing but potatoes and lentils for a week straight because it was all we had. My father was a farm hand and my mother was going to school to become a nurse while working as a nurses aid in a nursing home. They had 4 children to take care of and occasionally needed a hand up that welfare provided. My father was a Vietnam Vet with some serious mental health issues that the VA never addressed or assisted with. He eventually died from agent orange exposure related problems.
Libertine is right... the majority of people who receive assistance are not drug addicts... The problem that you people have is that either you are spoiled rotten bitches who haven't had to struggle much in your life OR you have a sense of elitism because you think your better than someone who is poor.
There is a serious problem in our society... I agree that people need to help themselves... I did it. I have been homeless twice after being released from prison because I was trying to work to support myself while also trying to attend community college... I got laid off and lost my apartment twice... one of those times I slept in my car (which had a busted transmission and wouldn't move) in November in Michigan. I just kept getting up and dusting myself off and moving forward... only to be knocked down again and again due to layoffs/cut hours at the jobs I got... I worked my ass off and went from being a dish washer in 1994 to kitchen manager in 1996 in multiple jobs. In 1995 I got involved in Amway... a fucking scam that was... but you have to learn lessons from everything you do in life... and Amway taught me to look for opportunity and believe in myself.
This brings me to the basic issue we have in our society among low income people. The majority of them come generations of low income and are told that the only way that they can succeed in life is to get a college degree or learn a skilled trade. Especially low income people who live in the country. I wish I had a dollar for everyone that ever told me that I would never be able to "do that"... or similar.
In early 1996, I had stopped doing Amway because I realized it was a scam... but one of the waitresses that I worked with kept talking about AOL all of the time... I realized that this was an opportunity for me... so my wife and I took out a $3000 personal loan at a local bank and bought a Packard Bell PC with Windows 95 on it.
Over the next year I spent every non-working waking hour teaching myself how to use a PC, build web pages and some programming in a warez version of Visual Basic 4. I bought books and used Lycos and sites like that to find out everything I could. I was telling people that I was going to get out of the restaurant business and start working in computers. They all told me that it would never happen... I need to have a college degree they said... they would make cracks about me spending time playing on the internet and yada yada. I was living in Houghton Lake, MI.
In June of 1997 I got my first computer job that paid $30K to start... I thought I was in the money. I eventually worked my way up to a $50k developer job through Robert Half International by the end of 1998. During the next 2 1/2 years I would be laid off 8 times due to "globalization" or the company selling out...
In december of 2000 I started my own consulting firm because I got a few different jobs via contacts I had made. The biggest of which were building uknowit.com for Herman Miller (it was their online university to teach salespeople and vendors about their office furniture products and sales techniques). It was a site with a Flash frontend and ASP backend. The second job was building a site for a company that insured freight for Steelcase (another furniture manufacturer). This site was Java server pages with a SQL Server backend. I was doing very well... I had made alot of contacts because I joined the local Chamber of Commerce... so I also started hiring employees (only 2) and started doing on-site PC and network support... removing viruses, installing windows, setting up small networks, etc. Life was good.
After Sept 11... my whole world came apart. The companies I was doing business with killed their outsourcing contracts and my business was done. I couldn't afford to pay 2 employees (who were part time before anyway) because I needed that work to feed my family... and even that dried up alot. I ended up having to go back to work as a cook because I couldn't find any work.
In early 2002 I saw a report on CNN where this young guy in Denmark was making tons of money running porn sites... so I got into the porn business that day and it's been uphill ever since. BTW... I want to mention that the first php job I did was for baddog (via someone else who scammed us both). That was
http://www.contentshopper.com and I was paid $200 total.
The moral to my story is that while it is entirely possible to raise yourself up by your own bootstraps... it is a real struggle... lots of things happened that I haven't even mentioned above that could have been the end of my entrepreneurship... the biggest of which were people that felt I couldn't do it... or had some moral or political objection to what I was doing. Others were purely haters...
To be continued...