A Gentleman's Guide to Welfare

"Give a beggar a dime and he'll bless you. Give him a dollar and he'll curse you for withholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom."
- Anzia Yezierska -

"In bestowing charity, the main consideration: should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to rise the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all. Neither the individual nor the race is improved by almsgiving. Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do, except in case of accident or sudden change. Every one has, of course, cases of individuals brought to his own knowledge where temporary assistance can do genuine good, and these he will not overlook. But the amount which can be wisely given by the individual for individuals is necessarily limited by his lack of knowledge of the circumstances connected with each. He is the only true reformer who is as care ful and as anxious not to aid the unworthy as he is to aid the worthy, and, perhaps, even more so, for in almsgiving more injury is probably done by rewarding vice than by relieving virtue. The rich man is thus almost restricted to following the examples of...others, who know that the best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise: free libraries, parks, and means of recreation, by which men are helped in body and mind; works of art, certain to give pleasure and improve the public taste; and public institutions of various kinds, which will improve the general condition of the people; in this manner returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good."
- Andrew Carnegie -


How to apply for Welfare

You may think since you paid more than your fair share of taxes (didn't you?), you are actually more welcome to welfare money than those who have not worked for it. This is not so. The intake worker at your nearest social agency will not care about your past finances, only your present predicament, and you will be not be doing yourself a bit of good by explaining how rich you used to be. You did your bit to gather the necessary government resources in order to provide for the lower end of the socio-economic ladder, little knowing it would soon include you. The social safety net applies equally to everybody, the only criteria being current destitution. It's now your turn to join the lower stratum of helpless citizens dependent upon those members of society who are currently productive and used to be you.

You need a place to sleep and it's no longer a choice between Hilton or Days Inn. Both won't accept your plastic. Your family is either dead or won't help and all your friends turned out to be fair weather. This is the time when the weak go crazy and stockbrokers jump out of windows because they're ruined.

Calm down. Hopefully you've held on to your prescriptions by dumping everything from your medicine chest into your Louis Vuitton vanity case and there's a Valium handy. You're not ruined. Repeat the mantra. You're not ruined. You're just off on an adventure, an adventure you will not only survive but come out the better for. You are only ruined if you care what other people think of you. Get over it. You're going to be hearing that a lot. One of your primary occupations for the next several days, weeks, months, even years, is getting over it. You had a lot. Now you don't. Big deal. Happens every day without mass suicides. People survive and they don't have to become beggars, thieves, or drug addicts to do it. 99% of humanity start at the bottom and work their way up. Some don't get very far, but those that make it the hard way start out with basic knowledge of survival.

But if you started out at the top, if you're the product of inherited wealth, if you've spent a childhood without a single worry about money, chances are your perspective is so skewed away from reality that you find yourself without a clue as to how to deal with a world where what you've got isn't half as important as what you are.

Accepting poverty is exactly the same as accepting death. Using the Kübler-Ross model described in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, the five stages of accepting poverty are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, which go something like this...

1 DENIAL: This can't be happening to me. My whole life was laid out, prearranged, I had plans to spend next summer in Cannes, there's only one payment left on my plasma TV, I should be able to keep it. There's been some sort of mistake.
2 ANGER: Why me? This isn't fair. I didn't do anything wrong. I invested where I was supposed to. Those bastards lied to me. Who put the economy in the crapper? The people I voted for? I hate myself.
3 BARGAINING: Just give me a little bit of slack and you'll be paid back in full, I promise. Why exactly did you lower your credit limit to precisely what I already owe you? Come on, can't you break the rules just this once?
4 DEPRESSION: I can't live without my possessions. I paid $2,000 for that mattress and now someone else gets to sleep in it? It's lost, all lost, and I'll never get it back. Where will I find another 19th century Damascus steel letter opener for less than $500?
5 ACCEPTANCE: I can make do with what I have and be thankful for whatever that might be. Wandering the earth, like Caine in Kung-Fu, nothing but the knapsack on my back, righting wrongs, fighting injustice, accepting advice from grasshoppers.

Whereas in your previous life, you might have focused your every waking hour on making money, you must now focus your every waking hour on NOT SPENDING money. Every hour you spend not spending any money is an hour well spent.

"Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all. Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance. Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich; social aid levels up social inequalities. Charity separates the rich from the poor; aid raises the needy and sets him on the same level with the rich."
-Eva Peron -

Why is there so much month left at the end of the money?"
- John Barrymore -

PRACTICAL ADVICE

When applying for state aid, a term you're sure to prefer to "welfare," which of the following items can you admit to possessing?
1. A bank account with any money in it.
2. A car.
3. Real estate.
4. An insurance policy.
5. Cash in your pocket.
6. 100 shares of something you bought at $250 a share but which now sell at 25 cents a share but which you're hoping will go up to a least a buck a share before you sell.
7. Money stashed in the Caymans if only you could get to the Caymans.

You may not answer yes to any of these questions. You may think that simply admitting you've got $20 in your pocket can't possibly mean anything, but if someone else applying for aid doesn't even have that, they have now moved ahead of you in line. There are limited funds available and those in the most need move to the front of the line. You will only get aid if you are at the front of the line. To get in front of everyone else in line, you must have nothing. Absolutely nothing. Still got gramma's silver candlesticks? Hock 'em and spend the money before applying for aid. Welfare, sorry, state aid, is the final back-up plan, the ultimate safety-net, and however much you may have previously thought it was a bleeding heart drain on the economy, you will be very happy it is there.

"Mystical references to 'society' and its programs to 'help' may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats."
- Thomas Sowell -