There is a big difference between helping someone out when they fall on hard times and doing everything for them, or in the case of Baltimore, allowing them live like folks who WORK for /all/ of their $70k+ in expenses a year.
I'm trying to see the other side here, but I can't help but see the flaws when I compare to my own very comfortable life.
My husband, 16 year old, and myself live quite well off around $3.5k a month or $42k a year in monthly expenses (I am excluding the cabin bills, property taxes, and all the registration fees for the toys here.) Our $3.5k/m includes like $40 worth of steak a week, 4-5 cases of soda a week, and 3-4 gallons of milk a week. Somewhere around $60/week in gas. It's $500/m for our cable and internet alone - our cellphone package is $100/m.
Now I'll admit that I don't think we could shave down to the $24-$27/k a year thresholds for Baltimore assistance if we stayed in the house here, but we could just about halve our $24k/y mortgage just by renting closer to my husband's work. Alaska thresholds for assistance are quite a bit higher cause of the COL, Food Stamp threshold is $32.1k for a family of 3. I /know/ we could do fine on $32k a year, hell we could almost keep our house on that... I'm more than confident we could "survive" on under $30k a year if we stripped down to minimums and moved though, especially since we'd be qualified for almost $700/m in food stamps - which is a bit more than we currently spend on food AND gas combined.
The point of assistance should not be "living comfortably" on the public dole like it seems to be every time I do up the math...
