It's not a matter of sociability, it's a matter of economics. Most apartments are too much dwelling for just one person. I was thinking of my cousin's apartment when I said this -- one bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room.

One person in a studio apartment should be possible on a minimum wage, yes. I think that is one of the measuring sticks that should be considered in deciding minimum wage.

It will come to no surprise when I say no to the state-provided child benefit payment. Sounds harsh, but I can't work out a way to separate people who have children by genuine accident and those who have children on purpose just to milk the system. Frankly, people have no business having children they can't afford to support, and taxpayers have no need to pay into any system that is easy to abuse.

It does come as a suprise, it seems cold and uncaring. Isn't denying help to these people depriving the most vunerable in society, the children with only one poor parent? Are you suggesting taking children away from ''the genuine accidents''? What the rest of them? Take a generation of children into care? (I assume I don't need to tell you about the Australia's stolen generation). The choice is that or leave these children with a parent that can't afford to feed and clothe them, unless you have another way.

There aren't Welfare Queens, Beef. There was a nationwide search in the 80s - not one was found. The number of people "milking the system" is statistically insignificant.

I suppose it depends on how you define "milking the system" - many of the kids around here have babies for any number of reasons, mostly relating to a need for affection, stupidity about sex and birth control, and just general teenager-related poor judgement. I don't see too many large families around here, either - 1-3 seems to be about average. It may be that there are some (adult or teen) who have babies as a calculated method of drawing government support, but I doubt that there are very many. For most, the costs vastly outweigh the benefits. It's more a matter of, once you have the babies, what do you do? How do you live? The most thoughtless and irresponsible mothers, who might be expected to abuse the system, seem to hand the babies off to the grandmother to raise.
I think a better discussion, rather than child support Vs no child support, would be "should the government be in the business of supporting child-rearing teaching centers?" That's where a huge problem lies - every day I see kids being appallingly mistreated (not abused, necessarily, but put in dangerous situations) by parents, mostly young, who obviously have little idea about how to take care of young children. I realize that everyone's standards are different, and I personally resent being told how to raise my kids, but I'm talking about some basic stuff here - like not covering a baby with a plastic garbage bag to keep the rain off (suffocation), or wheeling a baby in a stroller through a spray of water in windy 40 degree (F) weather, when the baby has no coat or hat on (hypothermia). These are the kids who wind up in the ER here later, with the mother completely unaware of how she could have avoided it.
Also, beef - it seems to me that the farm subsidy system is remarkably easy to abuse; along with pretty much every other government program - look at the horror stories about the Pentagon over the years. And yet the cry routinely goes out to cut the "welfare entitlement programs", while pork gets increased every year. What's the relative expenditure here? I suppose I should cite sources instead of depending on folks like Weremensch - I'll try to find out and edit in links..

The current welfare system already _has_ caps on child support. If you have children while on welfare, you don't get more money. What more do you want?

The rhetoric about the unemployed being lazy has been around since Victorian times, and that's before they had welfare. You get it here in Hong Kong, even though less that 20% of the unemployed are on welfare. It persists in the US even though Clinton took 60% of the people off the rolls, and it will persist if the system is cut down even more.

Yes, there are people who are irresponsible, unmotivated, lazy, depressed, flaky, clueless, immature or just plain stupid. That's just people being people. People are just average. When bad things happen to them, they can, as a group, really only respond in average ways. Why do the unemployed need to be more virtuous than everyone else?

He's my opinion of welfare:

Arguments against welfare based on a denial of entitlement and the assumption that salary is proportional to effort make the assumption that there is no such thing as 'luck'.

You could be a very good worker in a bad company which has to downsize at an inopportune time. You could be very skilled at a type of job which is obsoletized by technology. And thus, you could lose your job. Should these people, who are perfectly good workers and lose their jobs because of bad luck have to mortgage their homes and sell their posessions to feed their family, or should they get a minimum of a sustenance income so they have time to find another job?

There is a problem with the welfare system in that it's too easy to exploit and a lot of people can make more money on welfare than they could in a job. So I say, the amount of welfare you get should gradually scale back over time until it hits a floor where you're just barely getting enough to feed your family, and the money saved on that should be used to create a federal employment agency to help get unemployed people jobs.

If we have a problem with people not working and yet getting money, then why not simply impose capital exchange taxes? That way, the people who make millions without ever working through speculative transfers will be hampered, and you have more than enough money to cover the theoretical welfare abusers. After all; who's the greater threat, someone who gets a bit more government money in child support than you think they're entitled to, or someone who can make billions while plummeting Thailand into depression with a speculative attack on the baht?

I don't think I phrased that very well. People don't have children to milk the system most of the time, but people will have children on purpose knowing that the government will pay for them if the parents can't. Yes, that's more compassionate, but it sounds like it promotes irresponsibility.

Personal responsibility is better than socialism.

That is garbage. My father works as a financial educator, and regularly helps single parents with difficulties with money. In every case the parent left holding the baby (be it man or woman) the single parent thought their partner would be there when they had the child. They were not. If you want to punish irresponsibility punish those absent parents, not the ones trying to raise the kids as best they can, and not the kids.

There are, in fact, people who take advantage of the American welfare system to have kids they otherwise can't afford. Besides the oft discussed inner city minority women (who's numbers don't seem to justify their press); there are some religious communities who take the whole `go forth, be fruitful, and multiply' thing as marching orders. We've got a few here in New York that happen to be ultra-orthodox Jews; and I imagine they have some Christian counterparts out there.

Ok, it's a relatively trivial number of people; but they do exist.