Australia's Doing Rather Then Saying

This is the kind of program I can get behind. Australia has now said that almost 80,000 people who are on long term welfare (2 years out of work or longer), must now work for their benefits. Although I don't agree with the terms of the work program, 25 hours per week for 10 months out of the year, I can get behind the general idea of the program.

Why should hard working Australians tax money go towards able bodied people who haven't worked in more than 2 years? Sure, if someone's disabled they can't do a lot of jobs, but there's tons of work that can be done even if you have a disability.

There's no reason why people should be able to sponge off of the government. No one wakes up with me at 6 in the morning and drags their ass into my office and deal with the level of complexity I have to deal with in my job. So why should I pay for someone who sleeps in until noon and plays xbox all day? That's the common theme throughout the world, Australia included. People work for a living and it's not fair for them to pay towards someone who isn't pulling their own weight.

Now Bill Clinton did something similar in the 90's, but I think we can take it a step further here. Take a page from the Australian playbook and make it mandatory that ALL able bodied people must work for their benefits. There's literally a million things that need to be done that the government needs help with, so why not take the massive pool of people you have and put them to work doing what you need done?

I'm even willing to take it a step further and allow prison inmates to work for private companies. The companies get a break on minimum wage laws, they have an almost unlimited pool of workers, and the prisons can tax their wages to help offset the cost of housing these dangerous people. The additional benefit is that jobs aren't shipped off to a foreign land and inmates learn a job skill that will help them in the real world. It's win-win-win all the way around.

Travis
travis@rightwinglunatic.com