Obviously Newt wasn’t talking about your situation. You had a fantastic role model. If this were the norm, no welfare would be needed! so good4you!
Actually, Newt seemed to be talking about all poor children in all poor neighborhoods.
“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich said.
“They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.”
Was this a grossly inaccurate sweeping generalization where Newt stuck his foot in his mouth and quickly backpedaled? Oh, yes. Obviously. However, I think there’s absolutely a reason to take a person to task when they find it so easy to broadly demonize the poor, despite the fact that the majority of the poor in America do work or the fact that a full quarter of the American work force is constituted by people who live below the poverty line.
I’m not really sure what kind of welfare you are talking about, but a lot of working people do receive welfare, because the wages they receive are insufficient to cover basic expenses. Other welfare recipients—like the unemployed or senior citizens—receive benefits precisely because they have worked, even if they aren’t doing so now. Many welfare programs require recipients to be employed as a condition of receiving benefits. In short: a lot of hard working people still have to use welfare, because they aren’t paid a living wage. So you could say that we have welfare not because people are lazy, but because 25% of American jobs are so low paying that they do not provide the ability for families to support themselves.