Thank you for making my point so well for me. You just posted a link to a google search for "multi generational welfare statistics" (thank you, I had no idea how to use Google). When I click the very first link on the search results, an article in the right leaning National Review magazine, the first two sentences of the resulting article are:
"Does parents’ depending on welfare create welfare dependency in their children? It’s an important question, but there is very little evidence out there on it."!!! It goes on to confirm exactly what I've been saying here. There's very little evidence and the best evidence of they could come up with was the results of a Norwegian study. And this is William F. Buckley's National Review!
Seriously, why do you believe what you do? I used to think along lines that were very similar to yours. My family and those around me just passed on as fact to me that we'd all be fine in this country except for those lazy welfare people who spent their whole life living off our hard work. Then I actually got to know some of those allegedly lazy welfare people. And started looking at the actual laws and statistics. And came to realize that what I had believed wasn't based on any objective facts, I'd just always believed it and never been forced to confront the basis for my belief. When I realized that there was no basis for my prior belief, and both anecdotal and data based evidence in fact showed the contrary, I changed my view on the subject. You know, kind of the scientific method, basis of pretty much all knowledge over the last couple hundred years.
Have you thought about why you believe what you do? Do you know why you are so sure that there are all these people out there? Have you ever even stopped to really think about the basis for your belief, or do you just believe it and when challenged you try to go find evidence to support that prior belief even though you only fell into it originally? Is that really the best way to view the world?
