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.

It's like a blind man leading a poor man
He sees the cliff coming but he doesn't mind
Grateful to have company on the way down
Thinks the cloud they'll fall through will be silver lined

It's like the teenager who just gave birth to a still born accident
It hurts real bad inside
But she's grateful that if she returns all the diapers everybody bought her
She might have enough money to buy a prom dress
Thinks the pain she feels will be silver lined

It's like the boyfriend of the young girl who just gave birth to the still born child
Grabs his cleats out the closet
Grateful he still has time to get a college scholarship
Dumped her over the phone
Said he didn't like the way her ***** *** whined
Thinks adding another drop to the bucket of pain he will never feel is silver lined

It's like a young man who works at a gas station
With dreams so big he'd have to run the world to accomplish them
Grows up, gets marrieds, gets settled, and settles
Knows the only way he'll make the TV is by beating his wife
Grateful that strangers know who he is
Thinks the jail time he's serving is silver lined

It's like the grown man who has everything the boy at the gas station ever wanted
Doesn't want it, wishes he could give it back, but can't
So he buys houses, clothes, and Cadillacs
Grateful to have enough
Thinks the silver lining on his silver Cadi is silver lined

It's like the overwhelmed twenty something year old who puts a lock on her own knife drawer
Too proud to get help
Grateful that she has a boyfriend willing to take the brunt
Of all the problems she can't see past
Thinks the inconvenience of the knife drawer is silver lined

It's like the boyfriend of the overwhelmed twenty something year old
Who takes the brunt of all the problems she can't see past
Grateful he has a key to the knife drawer
Thinks the blood on the floor will be enough
To show her there's more to the world than the problems she can't see past
Thinks his mama's heartache will be silver lined

It's like the staunch republican who got laid off last year
Now he's so broke he's on unemployment, food stamps, and TANF
Grateful the democrats were in control during the great depression
Still voted for John McCain
Thinks the bumper sticker on the back of his car is silver lined

It's like the young family started by a couple kids
Who insisted on having a couple of their own
Now they're too poor to afford but too rich for assistance
Begging their government to bail them out of something that nursery rhymes got them into
Grateful their truck didn't break down again this month
Thinking raising hungry babies is silver lined

It's like a poor man leading a blind man
Who knows the cliff is coming
Knows they're going over and doesn't really mind
Grateful to finally be in the company of someone just as blind as he is
Thinking the cloud they'll fall through is silver lined.