Like the bike you bought after saving lawn-mowing money for a year, welfare reform was the prized trophy of the conservative governing philosophy. We believed that we'd found the vehicle of social mobility for poor Americans, once and for all. No one should live on taxpayer money without doing some work on their own, right? Everyone agrees, right?

Wrong. President Obama ran over our bicycle, issuing illegal waivers to welfare's work requirements and taking the wheels off the program. The fact is, we never won the welfare battle after all. Out of the 80 different federal welfare programs, the '96 welfare reform really only fixed one. A third of the U.S. population received benefits from one or more of these 80 programs in 2011. According to the Department of Agriculture, one program alone – food stamps – gave benefits to a record-breaking 47.7 million in the last month of 2012, benefits those millions didn't have to work to receive.

Rep. Paul Ryan recently said it's time to use the 1996 reform as a model to fix the rest of welfare. He's right, for at least five compelling reasons.

1. America's welfare programs are redundant and inefficient. As The Heritage Foundation's welfare expert Rachel Sheffield noted, there are at least 12 separate programs providing food aid, 12 funding social services, and 12 assisting education. Average benefits from all welfare programs are about $9,000 per recipient. If you converted those programs to cash, it would be more than five times the amount needed to raise every household above the poverty line. We should streamline redundant programs to save money while getting the same or better value.

2. Means-tested welfare programs are fiscally unsustainable. These cost nearly $1 trillion annually. By the end of the decade, welfare spending will rise from five percent to six percent of GDP. This means every taxpaying family would have to make, and then give up, over $100,000 in the next ten years – just to cover the cost of welfare spending.

Imagine this: If government spending were a pie, welfare would be a bigger slice than defense, education, or even social security. This isn't apple pie a la mode. It's poison-the-economy pie with a side of swamp-our-children-in-debt ice cream.

3. The welfare state encourages dependence instead of lifting people out of poverty. Poverty has actually increased with federal spending on anti-poverty programs. Adjusted for inflation, we've spent nearly $20 trillion total on “the war on poverty.” That's more than the combined price tag of all America's wars. Ever. From the American Revolution through Afghanistan, we've spent less than $7 trillion. These days, we spend 13 times what we spent on welfare in the 1960s. Guess what? In 1966, the share of the population living below the poverty threshold was 14.7%; by 2011, that share rose to 15.0%.

This spending gives people significant incentives to stay on welfare. According to the Senate Budget Committee, if you break down welfare spending per household in poverty, recipients are making $30/hour. That's higher than the $25/hour median income – certainly more than what I make per hour.

4. Welfare dependence creates behavioral poverty. Perhaps President Franklin D. Roosevelt said it best: “Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” To become comfortable relying on the work of others instead of your own work will change your character, and the character of the nation. Americans want to give everyone a helping hand, but hand-holding year after year, generation after generation, patronizes, corrodes, entraps. In the words of welfare policy experts Robert Rector and Jennifer Marshall writing in National Affairs:

Material poverty has been replaced by a far deeper “behavioral poverty” — a vicious cycle of ***** childbearing, social dysfunction, and welfare dependency in poor communities. Even as the welfare state has improved the material comfort of low-income Americans by transferring enormous financial resources to them, it has exacerbated these behavioral problems. The result has been the disintegration of the work ethic, family structure, and social fabric of large segments of the American population, which has in turn created a new dependency class.

Is this the America we want? It is not compassionate to leave a whole class of people in perpetual dependence. Behavioral poverty cuts off millions of citizens from a chance at American opportunity, destroying the virtues necessary to sustain oneself. My generation has seen the effects of behavioral poverty – in D.C., Detroit, or my hometown, Cleveland. Whole neighborhoods rot. To many, this cycle of dependence indicts the principles of American society as inherently unfair.

5. Work requirements promote individual responsibility and reduce poverty. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) work requirements slashed welfare caseloads by nearly 60 percent. Poverty among all single mothers fell 30 percent. About 3 million fewer children lived in poverty in 2003 than in 1995.

"Having turned the machinery of the Gov't into
a corrupt process of getting bad press made on
his political opponents, the Bidens, by buying
false investigations on them by multiple Gov'ts,
must be impeached, now", say Dems, the people.

The impeachment investigation has received much
evidence to support it, yet, Rumputin/vlad-
the-impaler, who were illegally installed into
the Blackhouse after the 2016 election, are
stonewalling numerous other subpeonas, requests.

People have seen evidence of Donald's demanding
false investigations of the Bidens be started by
the Ukrainian President in exchange for already
allocated by Congress 1/2 a bill in anti-tank
'javelins', but not the unreturned voicemails

detailing his desires for the same 'quid pro quo'
by him to other nations, here's some.  The Donald,
'Hi President of Ghana, I've heard you have some
hellified kool-aid, if you investigate the Bidens
we'll buy 100's of tons, awaiting your call.'

'Yo, yo, yo, President of Liechtenstein, just
calling to let you know if you liechten the Bidens
and find some dirt on them, we'll buy a hundred gross
of your steins, this is time sensitive, top secret,
so get back to us a.s.a.p., pppppllllleeeeeaaassse?'

''Sup, President of Guyana, must be hot in Africa,
too bad for you, all kidding aside, I hear you guys
have the best kool-aid to die for, if you investigate
the Bidens and find dirt on them we'll buy 1/4 of a
bill worth.  Limited time offer, bro, sooooo holla.'

'President of Hungary, I've heard you guys are always
Hungary, so, if you want a 1000 tons of food 'b' alls you
have to do is investigate the Bidens, find dirt on them
and provide it to the Steve Bannon set-up Hungarian fox
news who'll broadcast it globally over the next year.'

The atrocities of it all is all the people can say.  Does
this feel like a Greek comedy/tragedy to anyone else?  A
quickie impeachment to cover-up the bigger Russiagate one
that indicts the whole of the republican conspiracy, just in
time for vlad, etc., to hack our next presidential election?

My sweetheart our honeymoon is just in the cards
We are not ordinary lovers, extraordinary die-hards
In our own domain of love we are but real lords
Sincerity in love my love brings all good rewards

Let celebrate our love in the midst of colorful lights
Let beauty and love in chain achieve eternal heights
Let make our days wonderful and tasteful nights
Beauty indicts and excites in trance all love insights

Love surpasses beauty and beauty surpasses all
Let me take you on my love and in love let recall
On snowy mountain came to cover lovely hot shawl
Heart and soul gone to dangle and dance in enthrall

Col Muhammad Khalid Khan
Copyright 2016 Golden Glow

Now your fighted lightening brightens defeats
Your off-White Knight thunder frightens me
This hiss from those lips of this person I've missed
Tightens kissing fists of a ****** horizon seen
Mist heightened
I do not wish to be enlightened
I do not hope to hear your throat excitened
Around sounds that expound my stuttering ground
Or surround a thousand profoundly aroused frowns
By all counts by now they hound
My surmounting cloud
My sound impound

Say stray failures are bound round  brain behaviours
Claim they wound down your feigned brave nature
These sharp verses start to form  disturbing curses
Hearts should favour a saviour of more deserving or curbing regalia

Critical, it's **** literal
It's typically, empirically, egotistically pivotal
I pine to hide inside a hurst of worse design
I am not diacritical
I cannot align my mind with a realistic vine
Of my own bemoaned confines
And now this line of finely timely chides

I'm dumb and undone
Numb hums begun
When this thunder does bedizen you,
The lightening does enlighten, true
But the prices are not my vices rightened for you,

I've surmised a prize of a more biting view
It might be right to lose sight
Of the delights of tonight's plights
I slight fights
I blight contrite bending
But this ripe, spiteful spate of trite infights trending
Indicts a tending
Benights, invites, ignites a new intending
A descent now rendered impending; an ending

On black ground Pennsylvania coal miners obey admiralty laws for
hidden within the walls of malls lives a Roman deity of ***** *****
Upon hallowed plots Pennsylvania's ministers praise common laws
but far below the stalls in malls are 666 patron saints of ***** *****
Above ground coal miners obey admiralty laws but underground in
masonical halls mit dolls are U.M.W.'s patriotically-red cruel claws
Parkinson's hypokinetical rigid syndrome pulls Linda Ronstadt free
to fire hospice ovens on diesel fuel, polystyrene & tinder constantly
Since hefty Linda's condition was mildly diagnosed as syndromical
she's maintained a stiff upper lip for farting at crap deemed comical
'cause Hershey Highway-ridin' Jerry Brown ******* hetero-erotical
like the time **** Jerry Brown **** behaved vaguely hetero-erotical
like when queer-praisin' Jerry Brown **** schtupped hetero-erotical
like the night unwiped-*** Jerry Brown **** ****** hetero-erotical
like the time raunchy **** Jerry Brown **** ****** hetero-erotical
like when queer-baiting Jerry Brown **** schtupped hetero-erotical
like the time tricky-**** Jerry Brown **** schtupped hetero-erotical
for ***** enemas made Bill McKinley's state more cryptographical
from a bad case of diarrhea that trotted towards the nympholeptical
in sing-along songs longer than over-done operas overtly operatical
that somehow draw parallels that ain't Manson Family congenerical
I hurled puke as churlish, Polynesical squaws vomited spoken lines
from monkeyhood to manhood via monkeyshines for broken spines
Sue wouldn't mistake my army boot for a tennis shoe nor repeat the
Ted Bundy snafu: I love you & want to bury you, I mean marry you
Bad train derailments are too common where an icy rail jogs whilst
Alaskan searchers can't find Earl Warren Commission's Hale Boggs
whose airplane crashed 'cause he didn't like cereals called Kellogg's
Special K that constipates whales so as to stiffen inner whale clogs,
intestinal obstructions & Nile fever among thoroughbred male dogs
& grade-A Cornish CX meat kings, Wagyū cows & large, pale hogs
that forage like Pinoys through rancid garbage & gnaw on trail logs
in a drunken torpor, stupefied from cheap-skate, Cebu bar ale grogs
served by Turkic, skinny-dipping gals in whom a red-love well sogs
as the aura of heaven brightens & clarifies, the haziness of hell fogs
& toxifies quagmires & streams killin' mountain toads & vale frogs
in a world that forced Joan Crawford to fight tough guy & gal trogs
wainwrights know hubs'll spin freely for folks who do not nail cogs
down while steadily puking egg triumphant nogs over egg fail nogs
My bones are big, metabolism is slow & prostate is retention-proof
on this structurally-sound, adequately-trussed, high-suspension roof
After a busy Sabbath-mistaken Sunday I beheld lunar-dead monday
like would a college student slaughtered by electrocuted Ted Bundy
in the presence of a priest diseased from a Loredo beet-red-nun date
America worships the highest-rankin' Catholic like an unfed prelate
who howls Bud Abbott rabid & acts more dumber than **** Cavett
whose attenuatin' emotions are their strangest in bakers' bun classes
beyond the old-dirt-road remissions of a patsy in fakers' sun glasses
among true adherents & sad congregants poking Quakers' fun *****
while disseminatin' heresy to gun-grabbers at the pope's gun masses
like heretic John Pope had at Bull Run's Second Battle of Manassas

A state indicts you for breaking a statute law to force you into court
to be prosecuted under an inferior judge's opinion of the statute law
that makes me ***** in terror upon a slack judiciary that judges the Christians of holy God's flat plane under eternally-demoniacal error