Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Letter to the editor:

Welfare system abuse is rampant

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I often find myself questioning Paul Krugman’s intellectual honesty, but his column “Monetary views rooted in fiction” simply ignores reality.

In my former neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., welfare fraud was so common that it seemed that everyone was partaking in some sort of program or another. Wealthy businessmen who operated “off the books” could afford luxury sports cars but lived in Section 8 apartments. My able-bodied roommates regularly turned down jobs for fear of losing their coveted food stamps. Drug dealers and junkies supported their habits thanks to the welfare checks they received.

I cannot describe the feeling of utter disgust seeing nearly half of my paycheck going to abusers of the system. Here I was working all day to pay my way through night school, only to see my hard-earned money distributed to people in Escalades. The morally and financially bankrupt state of our current entitlement system make Ayn Rand less of a novelist and more of a prophetess.

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