Safety Net?

There is a view of America that restricts Government involvement to a small number of limited areas, like defense, foreign relations, interstate commerce and a small number of other areas enumerated in the Constitution.

They don't believe that the expansion of the Government into areas such as retirement, social assistance, education, housing, or health is appropriate and they would like to see it reversed.

Individual initiative with a merit based society where everyone on the whole does better because the people with talent are allowed to use those talents and grow the country.

It actually has a certain appeal, except what about those who don't have the skills are resources to enable them to compete?

To have winners you also have to have losers, and while there are many instances of people starting with next to nothing who manage to succeed greatly, those are still generally the exceptions.

In this view those who don't lead have to follow and they need to accept their lot.

Charity isn't the business of Government and it should stay out of it, leaving it to the churches and other organizations.

This will force everyone to work and take the Government out of the income redistribution business which destroys initiative and leads to socialism.

In this country socialism is a bad word, at least to many.  It has gotten mixed up with communism in many minds but it isn't communism.

Socialism is simply the idea that the society as a group should share in the prosperity as opposed to individualism (a winner take all approach).

We are not a socialist country, but we do have some social welfare programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, Food Stamps, Education Assistance, the Affordable Care Act and a few others that are in fact socialistic in nature since they are designed to benefit society as a whole.

Some feel that Social Security doesn't belong on this list, since we pay into it, but it does redistribute those contributions based on a formula and we don't just have an account we draw from.

The question is do we want to dismantle these programs and reduce taxes or continue to provide a safety net to those who need it?

Each of us has to decide.