My brother was listening to his iPod recently and the Bone Thugs song "First of the Month" came on. The general timbre of the song comes from the refrain which repeats the line (paraphrasing) "Get up. Wake up, 'cause its the first of the month. So cash your checks and get up". Something to that effect anyway. He explained to his confused and horrified wife, who is Japanese, that the song is about running to the mailbox to get your welfare check so you can go buy weed and beer. She insists that such a song would never be written in Japan, because to take welfare is inherently shameful--and no one would ever admit to abusing it (although as we've seen from the dead people receiving pensions, Japanese will also abuse the system, so long as they can do it on the sly).

So I guess my general question is why isn't it shameful to accept welfare here? What is it that makes receiving a paycheck for nothing totally acceptable to some people. Clinton, Gingrich et al. tried to solve this problem in the 90s with the welfare work requirement, but it seems to have failed (based on the fact that poverty has grown recently).

So what else can we do? Cutting people off is what a lot of politicians would prescribe, but then kids are just going to starve, so we'll get no where with that strategy. There has to be a way, but what? In a country with so much goddam money, there's no reason why anyone should be in poverty. But short of forced labor, how can we dictate that this or that person work? Gingrich was widely ridiculed for suggesting that elementary school aged urban youth work in the cafeteria or doing janitorial chores, but maybe he had a point. If we can teach kids to earn a paycheck early in life, maybe they will actually learn to value hard work and the freedom it represents (not in the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sense, but in the I-can-buy-gas-for-my-car-and-go-where-I-want sense).