Peeps1: "are you saying people should be kept on welfare rolls, in perpetuity, to keep wages up?"

Deathkit responds: You ask, should people be kept on welfare forever to drive wages up.

First of all, welfare doesn't drive wages up it keeps it from further lowering them. Unemployment benefits aren't exactly high--for a reason. Wages would have to be a lot more, to make being employed worthwhile; hence why such benefits are never raised, trapping people in poverty. The higher the benefits are, the higher wages must be. So, instead they're kept lower so wages can be low too (And you wonder why many programs don't work! They're not meant to). The way wealthy elites try to get around it is by making it harder for people to qualify for benefits. Or by spreading propaganda about the evils of "dependency", although they know full well that it's the meagreness of the benefits being doled out that prevents the poor from being able to go further; or else they rail against "handouts" (except when they're going to bankers and the rich). Or they promulgate the falsehood that they're on welfare because they're too lazy to work (which of course many believe the way plain girls like to believe beautiful blonds are dumb). What wealthy elites really want, of course, is to abolish welfare altogether since the less they can pay a worker, the more profits they can accrue (but as long as those pesky benefits are around, they can't do that. Poor dears)...

Secondly, this question is usually asked by bigots who attribute the ills of society to "the dole". So I imagine if you're similarly convinced you'll continue to hold onto the illusion that it's welfare that's the problem and not neoliberal policy which is.

It is, because it creates a vast underclass that then must rely on welfare.

You mix up cause and effect. It's neoliberalism which widened the gap between rich and poor, and in so doing spawned a big underclass, not welfare policies. Also, welfare under neoliberalism isn't what welfare was under keynesianism. It's been pruned and cut back so drastically that it can't but be a poverty trap. Those who can't even get welfare turn to crime, hence requiring governments to spend exorbitant amounts on prisons, police and courts to clean up the mess created by the neoliberal economic model. Others battle in three jobs yet are paupers. A right-wing media then does the dirty work of telling them they're poor through their own fault (or, as you claim, because of "drugs", or being unable to read--which would indicate that your education system is lousy, --being on the dole etc., etc., etc.) Your view (which is in fact the view of the right-wing) is that poverty and a underclass is the product of welfare, and not a 'free market'. If that were the case, then Norway, Sweden, Austria, continental Europe and Canada, which have generous welfare benefits and social services, should be a nation of paupers and a large underclass. As it is, that's what America has. Once Nixon opened the floodgates by taking the Bretton Woods system apart and deregulating capital flows, with further deregulation and privatization occurring from Carter/Reagan onwards, wealthy elites could threaten governments with capital flight if they didn't cut back and roll back social democratic programs, so it's no surprise that Democrats did.

Thirdly, the fact that you know people who've been on welfare, or are on welfare, and will never get off it, no more makes you an expert on it than a bar tender knowing alcoholics, and seeing them get drunk every day, makes him an expert on dipsomania.

Fourthly, after quoting a paragraph of mine, you comment: "the poor were well trapped before Reagan". Where in that paragraph did I mention 'the poor'? I said "people"--meaning people who once made good wages found themselves falling behind and getting stuck there, with their prospects getting worse with Reagan's election (after years of keynesian economics); plus with him in power, neoliberalism had an ally and it became the framework of both parties. I am talking about what happened when the neoliberal economic model was adopted, after all. If you were following my argument you'd realize that.

No one is saying there have never been poor. Just that, after keynesianism managed to close the gap between rich and poor, and create a large middle class, neoliberalism widened it again and made ascent into the middle class no longer possible for a great many more people than was once the case. The middle class, once large, is now contracting and there's a real possibility one can drop out of it. What happened is that neoliberalism benefited the few at the expense of the rest. It opened a gap between the rich and the rest not seen since the gilded age. Hence all those shitty schools, the inner-city poverty, the huge prison population that is the bane of your society.

And finally you say this not the doing of "the Right", or so I take you to imply. Nonsense. Neoliberalism is the baby of the Right wing. The last I looked Che Guevara, Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx, and Rosa Luxembourg weren't waving the flag of the 'free market' (not that there is really any such thing). Deregulation (which caused the current collapse of finance), privatization, cutting the taxes of the rich and thus burdening the middle and working class with them, lowering wages is what Reagan, Thatcher, Republicans, Newt Gingrich, that is, the Right, championed and what do you have to show for it?--massive debt, poverty, violence and a great recession. Those which are ruled by the centre-left, like Norway, on the other hand, aren't up the shits like you.