Welfare in Maine

[K-Luv]

Originally Posted by forest beekeeper

I do find it interesting how many Mainers wish to focus on such a tiny minority and insist that this minority is a majority.

I have seen it repeatedly in person as well as on forums [this one included].

With the state of Maine's economy, it is easy to blame welfare recipients as the drain to which it is all spiraling down.

My opinion of the welfare system in Maine is that it is too liberal. I am not suggesting that it shouldn't exist, but that there needs to be some sort of enforcement on helping people to get off of it.

[CreditWitch]

This is a subject deep to my heart. Even though I am well off now, my mother raised my brother and me in Capehart in Bangor. Section 8 until I was 16...got our first home. My mother was single and refused to send her children to the store with a food stamp to buy a candy bar. She worked and struggled not to be on the system. We saw her eat cereal so we could eat the meat at dinner. She died at 47 from her hard life.

What was her legacy? My brother and I are very hard working, productive members of society. I am proud of my financial accomplishments and was the first in my family to get my degree. YES Mom could of went on the system and been one of the Welfare Queen in the 80's THEY WERE there! Maybe things have changed. It was all or nothing system. There was no little bit of help, it was, you make too much, no help for you!

This country was founded on "limited government" and forced people to carve out lives or starve. Since FDR we now have welfare. This is how we are loosing our world wide edge of being trend setters and hard business people. We now have a system to suck people down.

I am just and qualified to say. ANY woman in welfare needs and has the tools to get into school and better her opportunities and chances. If a woman is collecting a check and does NOTHING to get out of her situation and better herself and her family, then she is failing her country and children. Do not even bring up...cant do it as she has domestic issues as well. I saw my mother at the age of 5 raped and beaten by my stepfather. She never ever lost her guts and PRIDE to live a life for her children.

I am now 33 capital ventures, business credit manager, two children, huge house and new cars. Now I am faced with the other side of the coin. How in God's name do I get my kids unspoiled! How do they learn the lesson's my mother evidently died to give us children. She is my angel, my hero, my hope, and an inspiration.

In closing. If one is on the system and does nothing to get off the system and be a role model for work ethics, they are welfare royalty!!

[Submariner]

CreditWitch -

You have said a mouth full.

My grandparents were farmers, walking behind implements pulled by horse, mule or oxen. And were raising their children, when the dust-bowl hit them.

And then the depression.

They moved, they worked, they climbed. My parents grew up working. I was born in the fifties, well clear of the depression, but they never left any doubt among my siblings and I, of what they had gotten through and the value of a dollar. I grew up working our farm, share-cropping other farms and working people's fields [picking berries, grapes, peaches, etc]. I attended a small country school system and I held my first full time job at 15. I was a teen in the 70's though I was largely out of touch with what was 'happening' elsewhere in our nation. I was not exposed to rock music or hippies until I went into the Navy.

Looking back, for the most part our nation's youth of the 60's and 70's, appear to have been products of luxury. They appear to have been acting as if they had no work ethic and very little morals. From their legacy of protests, acid tests, and the 'summer of love'; they do appear to have been very spoiled.

How does one generation work so hard and struggle, and yet their children be so spoiled?

Teaching a work ethic in our children is a big problem.

Handing our children over to government institutions to raise for us, does not appear to be the correct answer.

[Zymer]

" How does one generation work so hard and struggle, and yet their children be so spoiled?"

Because too many parents, not realizing that in the natural world struggle makes strength, wanted to "save" their children from hardship and "give" them all the things that they did not have when *they* were growing up. In doing so, they took from them the very thing they needed *most*.